The way it is now, it is a huge financial cost to the host country. Yeah, yeah – supposedly they make it back in tourism and all the new structures remain and can be reused.
But, seriously, it pretty much means only the largest/richest countries can handle the investment. And all those new building and facilities end up concentrated in one area which is unlikely be the best/fairest way to go about it.
Why not split the Olympics over a handful of regions? There are some obvious ‘clusters’ of events. Give the track & field to one country, the swimming/diving events to another. Perhaps boxing/judo/weightlifting. And so on.
If a host country had to build/provide the venues for a handful of different events and housing for only the members of the teams involved in it, it would be much less of a financial challenge.
Why not give Ecuador and Siam and Portugal a reasonable chance to be Olympic Hosts some time?
I had the thought several years ago that they should have a Spring Olympics. They could split off about half the Summer events into a separate Spring Games a year before the Summer Games. Have them in May and it’ll be about 15 months after the Winter Games and 15 months before the Summer Games. And then if they get too big again, obviously we add the Autumn Games in November, a year after the Summer Games.
Lather, rinse, repeat a few dozen times and we’ll have near continuous Olympic games with thousands of different sports.
I’ve seen the proposal of just keeping the Summer Olympics in, say, Athens: you don’t have to build some new facilities in a first-time host city that may never use 'em again; you just maintain the ones that were all there four years ago, and four years before that, and you’ve got local law-enforcement personnel with relevant experience just like you’ve got hotels and restaurants that have been through all of this before.
I like the idea of the location of the Olympics being static, but I’m resistant to having it always be in Athens, even if there is some sort of historical significance. What I would do? Man-made Olympic Island. IOC awards stewardship of the island to a different “host” nation every four years, and the “hosts” come in and fill the island with some of their cultural and historical artifacts. Have, like, two separate museums, one for the host nation’s stuff, and one for the actual Olympics: essentially relocate the Olympic Hall of Fame Museum, presuming that they already have one of those.
When the island is not in use for the Olympics, have it be a tourist resort; they can even arrange to host big events there, like concerts, major sporting events, etc. Who wouldn’t rather go to Olympic Island for the World Cup than Qatar? Put the Superbowl there one year: who’s not going? I can just see it now: WrestleMania XL, on Olympic Island!
The whole point of the Olympics is to bring as many athletes from different countries as possible together to one place. You might as well ask every sport to conduct its world championship at the same time if you’re going to hold them in different places.
Not that change is necessarily a bad thing; letting non-British/Irish golfers from Europe play in the Ryder Cup pretty much saved the competition.
I never really understood why it was so expensive. There’s something like 40 sports and 10k competitors, which is a lot of people in raw terms, but not really alot in comparison to the size of a major city like Rio, Athens or Beijing. And presumably a large city will already have facilities for most popular sporting activities.
Rather than split the games over multiple locations (which seems to me like it would kind of kill part of the point), I’d think they could just not insist on having a bunch of specialized housing and stadiums built. It’d be a little less grand, and they’d presumably have to cut back on the number of live-spectators that could be accommodated, but I don’t think that would really take that much away from the event.
Most of the cities that get selected to host the Olympics either have sub-standard housing and sporting facilities, or an insufficient number of adequate ones. There’s roughly a zero percent chance that Rio de Janeiro could have hosted a modern Olympics with the facilities that they already had in existence in 2010.
Right, and this was the big advantage Los Angeles had in 1984. They actually did have almost all the sporting facilities necessary for the Olympics already built.
As has been stated before, sometimes they pick a country or area of a country that has no business hosting a worldwide party - because they lack everyday necessities like clean water, sewage, electricity, trash collection, etc. for their citizens. Additionally, the IOC requires facilities that meet a specific standard, so in most cases, the venues need to be built new. Add to that transportation needs, and it is easy to see how hosting the games can become a costly nightmare.
There is also the issue of the legacy of the venues. Sure, they advertise that they can be re-used by the locals after the games, but how often does that pan-out. One can google photos of the empty, disused, and dilapidated structures from past Olympics (ex. Sochi, already) - they turn out to be giant white elephants to the host city, or worse, slums and eyesores.
I, too, like the idea of a stable host city or region, or selection from a short list of places capable of hosting without massive new investment (e.g. Los Angeles, Beijing, London, British Columbia), and where the local population already enjoys the benefits of modern infrastructure day-to-day.
The earth is flat now. We don’t need all the athletes from disparate sports in one place anymore. Have international championships move around through the countries, they don’t even have to be all at the same time. It is pointless to spend vast sums of money on temporary facilities. I don’t know why the IOC is doing this, they’re missing an opportunity to collect a lot more bribe money.
It seems like half the events take place in what are basically gymnasiums or outdoor fields with bleacher seating. I’d think even third world cities have a few of those kicking around. And if they do have to throw up a few structures for events with more exotic requirements, I have trouble seeing why its that expensive. Googling, the costs for a competiton aquatic center in the states seem to run at something like 10 million. So even if you had to build a bunch of equivalent structures, I don’t why the price tag needs to spiral into the billions.
Looking at a price breakdown for Rio, it looks like the expense mainly comes from two things. The first is insisting that many of the venues be in one large park complex that has to be specially built. So I think the high cost comes not so much from not being willing to spread the events around to different cities, but insisting on having them at one location in that city.
The second reason seems to be that a bunch of only tangentially related infrastructure projects are built as part of the “olympics”. Rio seems to have spent most of its cash improving public transport (sort of ironically given that they’re also insisting on having most of the events take place in the same location). This seems to be the real reason the Olympics is more expensive, it gets used to motivate a bunch of city infrastructure projects, which may or may not be a good idea, but presumably people got themselves around Rio beforehand, so adding them to the Olympic costs seems like a bit of slight of hand.
You could do that, but as been pointed out above, that goes against the whole point of the Olympics. The whole idea is that athletes from all over the world, from all different sports, are gathered together for a short period.
[ol]
[li]I think you’d be surprised at how many “basic” gymnasiums and outdoor fields most of these countries don’t got.[/li][li]Even the ones that do have some rarely have enough that are deemed adequate to host Olympic competition. In fact, they pretty much never have enough.[/li][li]You can’t compare the costs for constructing facilities in the US to the costs in other countries. The US has multiple qualified contractors who can make competitive bids, that may not necessarily be available in other countries.[/li][li]Most of your suggestions seem to rely on the central thesis of the IOC agreeing to fundamentally reorganize the way that they have chosen to have the Olympics be structured, in terms of the venues being as centralized as possible, minimum material requirements, etc. Good luck with that.[/li][/ol]
… To say nothing of the fact that a staggering amount of these expenses can be attributed to grift. As far as the money that has to be spent to improve the public works, such that it satisfies the IOC, if I’m following your train of thought, you seem to be suggesting that the host city should not be required to do that. If that’s what you’re saying, I absolutely can’t go there with you.
It’s not just athletes and officials that have to get to the games. Spectators do too and they don’t have a convenient village set up for them. I believe one requirement for being host city is to have enough hotel space. But the spectators have to get from the hotels to the venues and that requires good public transportation.
Yea, that’s the stated reason. But providing a way for people to move around a major city seems like a pretty good idea even if there isn’t any olympics. If such a thing doesn’t exist in Rio, it would’ve probably been a good idea to build it even if they didn’t get the games. So I’m not really convinced its an intrinsic cost of the olympics.
There’s almost 100 universities and colleges in Rio, I think they must have a few sizable gyms and outdoor spaces. And again, if they need to build a few, I don’t think it costs billions of dollars to throw up a few gymnasiums and archery fields.
I suspect cheaper labour would make construction costs less in Rio. But it doesn’t really make a difference to my argument either way if its 20 or 30 million. The point is that its much less then the 4 billion figure cited as the cost of the games.
It’d be a much less fundemental change than the one proposed by the OP.
Of course it’s a good idea to have that stuff, whether you’re bidding on the Olympics or not, and it’s a good idea to build that stuff, even if they didn’t get the games. But, it didn’t exist in Rio before the Olympics, and they weren’t gonna build it if they didn’t get the Olympics. which is why those public works improvements get folded into the Olympic costs.
I like the idea of having Olympic events distributed around the host city. Integrate the whole experience of athletes and visitors with the life of the city.