By the time Paris was awarded these Olympics, seven years ago, there were only two viable bids left standing.
Boston, Budapest, Hamburg and Rome had fluttered their eyelids at the International Olympic Committee [IOC], but in the end, they balked. Paris’s only remaining rival was Los Angeles.
The IOC were so spooked by the depleted field that they took the unprecedented decision to award the 2028 Games to LA on the spot, without engaging in another bidding process. Around the world there was no outcry from secretly jilted cities who might have harboured a hidden ambitions. The IOC needed to nail down LA before they changed their minds or before they got sense.
For any city with designs to host the Games, the numbers haven’t added up for a long time. According to a study published by Oxford University earlier this year, five of the past six Olympics (summer and winter) had inflation-adjusted cost overruns of more than 100 per cent. These figures did not include indirect capital costs such as improvements to transport infrastructure that every host city must absorb.
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“All Games, without exception, have cost overrun,” the researchers wrote. “For no other type of megaproject is this the case – not even the construction of nuclear power plants or the storage of nuclear waste.”
In his book, Circus Maximus, the sports economist Andrew Zimbalist drilled into the figures: Beijing spent more than $40 billion on the 2008 Summer Games, Sochi spent upward of $50 billion for the 2014 Winter Games and Rio’s costs approached $20 billion for the 2016 Summer Olympics – even though the projected cost for the Rio Games, at the time of their bid, was just over $5 billion. As a trend, it was unsustainable.
So, why do it?
For a while, cities saw it as a potential windfall. LA, in 1984, turned a massive profit at a time when the Olympics, just like now, was light on suitors. The 1968 Games in Mexico and the Munich Olympics four years later were both marked by violence; Montreal in 1976 was hit by massive cost overruns; Moscow in 1980 was boycotted by 65 countries.
For the 1984 Games LA was left alone in the race after Tehran withdrew their bid and the American city seized its chance, spectacularly. It was the first Games to harness the corporate buck on a massive scale and, on top of income from broadcast rights, LA reported a surplus of $215 million, a staggering figure 40 years ago.
“Shown the alluring path to possible profits, cities and countries now lined up for the honour of hosting the games,” wrote Zimbalist. “The competition to host the Games became almost as intense as the athletic competition itself.”
But when the illusion of a pot of gold was stripped away, what other reasons were there to chase the rainbow? Vanity? Reflected glory?
And if not glory, why?
For a variety of reasons, host countries outperform their mean at the Olympics. There is a spike in government funding for the athletes and their national governing bodies, which, given the long lead-in times for every Games, usually starts in the previous Olympic cycle.
The New York Times calculated that “host countries see a surge of about 50 per cent in the share of medals they win, compared with preceding and succeeding Olympics”. Japan, Brazil and Great Britain all finished higher in the medals table at their home Olympics than they had done at the previous three Games.
Part of that is a function of volume. Host countries are automatically granted entry to team sports and face less daunting qualification requirements for many individual sports. As a result, their team swells, often enormously. Research done by the website FiveThirtyEight – which operates now under the data analytics department of ABC News in America – showed that from 1952 to 2012, host nations had an average of 176 more athletes participating than they did in the previous Olympics.
France sent a team of 385 athletes to Tokyo for the last Olympics and finished eighth on the medals table; their team this time is 573 strong, only about 20 fewer than the United States. Their realistic target is a top five place.
The other sweetener for the host country is that, since 2016, the IOC has permitted them to pitch for new sports. In Tokyo, skateboarding, karate, sports climbing and surfing were all added to the schedule after petitioning from the hosts and Japan won more medals in those sports than any other country.
Baseball and softball also returned for the first time since 2008, and Japan won gold in each of those. It’s a bit like the home captain in the Ryder Cup having the license to set up the course to suit his players.
After karate made its debut in Tokyo it disappeared from the schedule immediately. For these games Breaking (effectively competitive break dancing) has made the cut after the hosts argued for its inclusion. France expects medals to follow.
What has become clear to the IOC over time, though, was that the hosting model needed to change. There was no future in cities plunging themselves into enormous debt just to be the centre of the sports universe for a couple of weeks. The emphasis for Paris was on using existing sports venues and turning other municipal sites into temporary venues, rather than leaving behind a trail of new-builds whose best days were over as soon as the Olympic circus left town.
The expectation is that Paris will be the first city since Sydney in 2000 to host the Olympics for less than $10 billion. Of the 40 venues at these Games, only three are new; the rest are existing or temporary. It is not expected that any new venues will be needed for the 2028 Games in LA – which is the same approach they adopted in 1984.
When it’s all over, will Paris think it was worth the cost, and the intrusion, and the security headlock? Now is not a good time to ask. Not in the afterglow of a rapturous opening ceremony, and while endorphins are rushing through the national bloodstream from the first surge of medals. This was the feeling they banked on. The hangover can wait.
