Hosting Olympics Financially Untenable: Economists

The City of Lights will be in the spotlight for the next few weeks as Paris serves as center stage to incredible performances and achievements of the human body, mind, and spirit, Alicia Wallace and Alex Leeds Matthews reported for CNN.

Including Paris, five of the past six Olympics (summer and winter) had inflation-adjusted cost overruns of well more than 100%. I Photo: Paris 2024 Facebook

In jockeying for the Olympics, some cities spent upward of $100 million on the bidding process alone, said Victor Matheson, a College of the Holy Cross professor of economics who has researched the financial costs of the Olympics.

And once they did land those bids, the costs often soared well beyond what was initially estimated and budgeted.

Including Paris, five of the past six Olympics (summer and winter) had inflation-adjusted cost overruns of well more than 100%, according to an Oxford University study released in May 2024.

Hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games has become an extraordinary feat in and of itself — and a financially untenable one at that.

The summer and winter events come at a cost. The spectacle has been blemished by budget overruns, long-term debts, wasteful infrastructure, displacement and gentrification, political strife, and environmental harm.

The International Olympic Committee hopes to right the ship, starting with the Paris Games:

The nongovernmental sports organization is aiming to take a more frugal and greener approach than in years past.

“This will be the first Olympics, since Sydney, where the total costs are coming in under $10 billion,” Matheson said.

“That’s because the IOC was running out of cities willing to host this thing,” he added.

“It’s become pretty clear to cities that — under the old regime — these were real financial debacles for the cities involved, and wildly expensive with little hope to make money back in the long run.”

Still, economists and researchers argue that a truly sustainable Olympics will need to look a lot different than the Games we know today.