As he follows the Paris 2024 Olympics from afar, Eric Sheehan is trying to prevent the Olympic flame from coming to his home city in four years’ time.
Sheehan is a leading member of NOlympics LA, a group striving to get Los Angeles to pull out of hosting the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. NOlympics LA embodies the increasing grass-roots opposition to hosting the Olympics.
On Friday, the 2024 Games will begin with the opening ceremony on the Seine. To Sheehan and other campaigners around him, the more spectacular the spectacle, the more grotesque the waste. Since April 2023, over 12,000 homeless people have been removed from Paris, according to campaign group Le Revers de la Médaille. The Games have caused months of transport chaos and road closures as the city prepares; bus and metro fares will double for the six weeks until the end of the Paralympics. Tickets for locals to attend events have been far more expensive than hoped.
The greatest complaint is that the Paris Games will cost far too much: over £7.5 billion, it is now estimated. The government’s auditors say that, because of money from private companies, ticket sales and sales of broadcasting rights, the total cost to taxpayers will still be a cool £2.5 to four billion. A poll last year found that 44 per cent of Parisians thought of hosting the Games as a “bad thing”.
To Sheehan, Paris’s experience illustrates why Los Angeles should not spend an estimated $7 billion [£5.5 billion] to host the 2028 Games.
“It could be going to things like public housing, permanent supportive housing, services for homeless folks,” Sheehan says. “These Games should be cancelled.”
Cities that are awarded hosting rights by the International Olympic Committee are not permitted to withdraw from their contract. But Sheehan believes that a motion by the city council would have the power to pull out of the Games. This action would incur a significant fee, he believes, but it could still be far less than Los Angeles would otherwise pay to host the Olympics.
Sheehan’s mission will probably fail. But, the world over, the public are falling out of love with staging the Olympic Games. Paris is hosting this year, and Los Angeles in 2028, because no one else was left. After three other cities withdrew from bidding to host the 2024 Games, Los Angeles then agreed to bid for 2028 instead — so the Californian city and Paris were both left unopposed.
It is not only the Olympic Games that are embattled. The 2026 Commonwealth Games currently have no host. These were awarded to the Australian state of Victoria, but the state government withdrew last year. Now, the Commonwealth Games are at risk of being postponed by a year — or even cancelled, if no alternative host can be found.
The case against the Olympics has strengthened as public awareness of the costs involved has increased. There is an iron law of Olympic spending: whatever the estimated costs, they will end up many times more.
The London 2012 Games were meant to cost £2.4 billion but actually cost £13.5 billion; the 2016 Rio Games overshot their budget even more egregiously. On average, Summer Olympic Games since 1960 overspent their initial budget by 195 per cent, and the cheaper Winter Games still by 132 per cent, the academics Alexander Budzier and Bent Flyvbjerg calculated in a recent study at Oxford University. Every single summer Games for which there was data suffered cost overruns.
Such overspending is explained by what psychologists call the planning fallacy. Again and again, in sport and beyond, infrastructure projects — like HS2, the Scottish Parliament or the Sydney Opera House — follow the same template. Expected construction costs are disingenuously kept down, before surging once the project begins; meanwhile, the economic benefits are exaggerated. The lessons of previous similar projects are ignored.
But, in the case of the Olympic Games, perhaps no longer. Even the most basic claim made about hosting the Games — that it invariably increases tourism — is a myth. When London hosted the Games in 2012, six per cent fewer tourists visited than at the same time a year before. Paris, already the most visited city in the world, has no need for extra tourists. But reports of empty hotel rooms and restaurants suggest that hosting the Olympics could lead Paris’s tourist numbers to decline this summer.
“There came a point where most people who thought about it felt that the IOC was just taking them for a ride,” says the sports economist Stefan Szymanski. He likens hosting the Games to “a great party — for two weeks your city becomes the centre of the world’s attention. Why would hosting a party make money?”
Like many of the best parties, there has often been no one left to clean up. When bidding to host the Games, “legacy” is a classic politicians’ platitude, swiftly forgotten.
It was originally promised that, of the homes built on the Olympic Park site used for London 2012, half of them would be affordable; instead, barely 10 per cent are classed as affordable housing. For over a decade after Athens hosted the 2004 Games, the swimming pool was left derelict; today, the beach volleyball arena is among the venues still left unused. Staging the Games cost Greece about €8.5 billion; the debts exacerbated the nation’s subsequent financial crisis.
As potential hosts become more alert to the costs, the Olympics have been forced to adapt. A decade ago the IOC launched Olympic Agenda 2020, pledging to reduce the costs of staging the Games through measures like encouraging bidders to focus upon renovating existing venues and allowing hosts to stage certain events in a partner city. Wealthy cities have the pre-existing infrastructure to mitigate costs. Staging the games in such venues should be less disruptive than taking it to less economically developed cities, like Rio in 2016, or smaller hosts, like Athens in 2004. Yet the Oxford study still estimated that the Paris Games will overrun its budget by 115 per cent.
“While Paris promised to be different, it’s actually quite similar to previous installations,” says the political scientist Jules Boykoff, author of What Are the Olympics For? “These Olympics have conformed to the negative trends of overspending, displacement, militarisation of public space, greenwashing, and corruption.”
The Games will leave a tangible legacy: the Olympic Village, in the deprived northern banlieue Seine-Saint-Denis, will house 6,000 people, and provide office space for another 6,000, after the Paralympics finishes. Cleaning up the Seine, and an improved cycle network, should also be enduring improvements. Boykoff believes that such benefits could have been achieved at a fraction of the cost without the Games. “Did the city need to host the biggest, most complex sporting event on the planet to achieve these gains?”
The example of New York suggests not. When New York bid to host the 2012 Games, it devised plans to use the Olympics as the catalyst to regenerate the city. After missing out to London, New York stuck with much of the planned regeneration. New York got the legacy it was hoped for when bidding for the Olympics — but at far less cost than if it had actually hosted the Games.
Wider reforms from the IOC could alleviate the socio-economic problems caused by the Games. A co-hosting model, as has become common in international tournaments — splitting sports between two or three different cities, which do not require any new infrastructure to be built for those events — could reduce hosts’ burden. These measures could also reduce the environmental damage associated with building new infrastructure; at the 2020 Tokyo Games, the marathon was moved 800km north to Sapporo.
Far from being the most-coveted event on earth, the Olympics are increasingly putting off wealthy democracies: the countries who, in theory, should be able to host the event with the least cost and disruption. As angst about the Olympics grows, the IOC risks having only one set of reliable bidders left: authoritarian regimes, who want to use the Games for their own ends.
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