A Prestigious Money Pit: The Olympic Games

Charles W. King

Earlier this year the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that it had selected Paris and Los Angeles for the 2024 and 2028 Summer Olympic Games respectively. In recent decades finding cities to host the Olympics has become increasingly difficult. Nations that typically excel at the Winter Games like Norway are balking, forcing the games to be held in locales like Sochi which is more seaside resort than ski slope. The citizens of cities of western democracies like Chicago and Boston raise vociferous objections when their cities are suggested as potential Olympic venues. The cost of the 2016 Rio Olympics and 2014 World Cup continue to cause significant problems for Brazil’s government, both fiscally and politically. While the IOC has avoided it so far, the Olympic bidding process has increasingly become the province of unsavory dictatorships. The 2022 Winter Games were awarded to Beijing over Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan.

The plight of the IOC in the twenty-first century raises the question; why did nations like the United States, Spain, West Germany, and many more compete so hard to host the Olympic Games in the twentieth century? The Olympics have been, since their modern reinvention in 1896 been a prestige event. Like the World’s Fair, the Olympics were an opportunity for nations to showcase themselves to the world. Always an opportunity to lose money, the modern Olympics were something that only a Great Power could afford to host. At the height of their respective empires both Belgium and the Netherlands hosted Olympic Games, in Antwerp in 1920 and Amsterdam in 1928. Neither nation has hosted an Olympics since. In 1936 Adolph Hitler attempted to use the Olympics in Germany to demonstrate to the world the resurgence of Germany under his Nazi regime. After imperialism began to decline after World War Two the Olympics were a chance for rising powers like the Australia, South Korea, and Brazil to make their debut on the world stage, and for declining powers like the United Kingdom to maintain some of their old prestige.

Nations, including the United States, continue to value their international prestige, so why are so many now reluctant to bid for, let alone host, the Olympic Games. One reason is certainly cost. The amount of construction requires for the Olympics is enormous, and many facilities, like velodromes, are useful only during the games. One year after the 2016 Rio Games, many of the facilities constructed for those games look like they’ve been abandoned for decades. This is exacerbated by the fact that in the twentieth century is it easier than ever for nations promote themselves abroad. Indonesian and Korean cinema is booming in popularity in the West. Travel throughout the world is easier and faster with each passing year. The benefit of hosting Olympics in an increasingly connected world has declined, just as hosting the games has skyrocketed in cost.

The Olympic Games is not simply a sporting event. The modern Olympics are an international institution like the United Nations and the World Bank. Hosting the Olympics has been a prestige event for a hundred years, and it will continue to be the hallmark of nations trying to stake a claim to the world stage. The Olympic Games demonstrates that sport is inherently political and the International Olympic Committee and western democracies cannot afford to neglect the legitimacy that hosting an Olympic Games may give to a regime like that of Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan.