Olympics (part 4)

It looks like Toronto has taken a breather on bidding for the Summer Olympics, but I still see interesting material every now and then that I'm sure you'd also like to know about.

Like this study that looked at the summer and winter Olympics from 1960 through 2014 and found that the summer Olympic Games went over budget by an average of 252% - which means you ADD 2 and a half times the budget cost, so a hypothetical $3B games would actually come in at about $10.5B(!)

As they call out in the article "Unfortunately, Olympics officials and hosts often misinform about the costs and cost overruns of the Games."

This analysis was done based on the estimates as of the time of the bid country being accepted. And on the actual games-related costs excluding infrastructure. As you might guess, in the years after the bid the budgets get adjusted many times so that the project can be 'shown' to come in close to budget. London was a prime example (in case anyone thought that came in anywhere near budget).

Let's go Rio! (As in, let's keep up this trend so it's less likely we'll ever bid on them again)

#NoToTorontoOlympicBid number 3

OK - now I remember why I was against Toronto making an Olympic bid! It will cost me a lot of money and mean less for actually improving the city.

As promised in the last '#NoToTorontoOlympicBid' post, I read a couple more articles on the olympics and recommend you do too.

The first was an article from the Globe & Mail - 'Why Toronto Should Say No to the Olympics'. And it references this article by Richard Florida looking at the book by Andrew Zimbalist that shows why hosting mega-events is a bad deal for the city involved.

Perhaps we can just follow Boston's mayor's lead. And for a few hints on how to influence the result, see this article on How Boston Kicked Out the Olympics.

#NoToTorontoOlympicBid number 2

I did a little reading of some of the more moderate articles on the economics of holding the Olympics, and the results seem to be summed up by the following (from the New York Times article "Does Hosting the Olympics Actually Pay Off?")

1. The Olympics won’t make a country rich.

2. They’re not even good for tourism.

3. But they will make its people happy.

I'd quibble with that last one, but it does seem that it makes a lot of sports fans in the country happy and as long as they're not asked to pay for it directly (like Montreal), they're OK with the false economics, etc.

I personally think it is a major waste of money and perpetuates the old boy's club of the IOC (see my last post) rather than focusing on furthering amateur sport and international cooperation. Hard to say whether it's worse to spend 10's of millions of dollars (or roughly $100M in the case of Chicago for the 2016 games) and lose, or to spend that money and 'win'.

So now I'll read some of the really negative reviews and see what they say!

#NoToTorontoOlympicBid

All I can do is point to this post and ask that the one or two readers of my blog also fight any attempts by various promoters of the Olympics to take our money.

(OK, I *can* do more - and both hope I don't need to and hope it will be useful - if needed)

Here's the image from Jim's blog that none of you probably want to see: