Tag Archives: olympics

The Fight To Tame The Olympic Budget Beast

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Source: Statista

The honour of hosting the most illustrious of sporting events – the Olympic Games – in your country not only requires an incredible amount of time and effort during the application process but also a huge sum of money once you’ve been given the go-ahead by the IOC.

Japan is the latest in line to encounter this phenomenon and is also running into the problem of a year-long postponement of the games due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is costing the country even more. The AP reported on Sunday that the postponement would cost close to $2 billion, after initial speculation that the cost could be as high as $6 billion. In August, the International Olympic Committee and the Japanese government already picked a fight about who would foot the additional bill. The IOC removed a comment from its website at the time, stating it was Japan’s turn to pay, according to AP.

Without postponement costs, the overspend for the Toyko Games is currently at more than $5 billion. The current estimates would make the 2021 Games the second most expensive in recent history behind the 2012 London Games, but with final price tags almost always more pricey than estimates, the Games would still end up being the most expensive. They are already the most over budget for for absolute dollar values at around $7.2 billion.

This soaring price tag of the prestige event has made the games increasingly unpopular in Japan, with a third of Japanese saying they should be canceled altogether.

Up until now, the dubious honor of being the most over budget goes to the 1992 Barcelona Games. After an initial estimate of $2.6 billion, the final bill came to $9.69 billion – 266 percent or more than $7 billion over budget. The Rio 2016 Olympics also made headlines for being much more expensive than expected, but the budget problems that transpired in Brazil were mostly tied to sports-unrelated infrastructure projects not included in this calculation.

(Do Not) Let the Games Begin!

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Source: Statista

As conferences, trade shows and other mass gatherings are getting cancelled left and right due to the coronavirus epidemic, it’s only natural that one of the biggest events of the year is also becoming a subject of discussion. That is of course the 32nd Summer Olympic Games, scheduled to be held in Tokyo from July 24 to August 9.

When Dick Pound, a senior member of the International Olympic Committee, floated the idea of cancelling the games in an interview with the Associated Press last week, sports fans around the world were put on red alert. While Pound stressed that “all indications are at this stage that it will be business as usual,” he also reassured athletes “that the IOC is not going to send you into a pandemic situation.” As for a possible postponement of the games until the situation has improved, Pound considers this option unlikely: “You just don’t postpone something on the size and scale of the Olympics. There’s so many moving parts, so many countries and different seasons, and competitive seasons, and television seasons. You can’t just say, `We’ll do it in October.’”

While Pound estimated that there is a two to three-month window to decide whether the virus is “under sufficient control” for the Olympics to go ahead as planned, the IOC didn’t want to wait that long to put any doubts to rest. “We made a decision, and the decision is the games go ahead,” IOC spokesperson Mark Adams said in a press conference on Tuesday. In an official statement on the matter, the IOC expressed “its full commitment to the success of the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020,” encouraging athletes to continue their preparations. The IOC also stated that it will “continue to follow the advice of the WHO,” however, leaving a backdoor open for an eventual cancellation in case the crisis worsens.

As the following chart shows, the Summer Olympics have only been cancelled three times in the modern era dating back to 1896. The 1916 games in Berlin fell victim to World War I and the 1940 and 1944 games, scheduled to be held in Helsinki and London, respectively, were cancelled due to World War II. Interestingly, the 2016 Rio games were also clouded by a health crisis, as many athletes refused to participate due to the ongoing outbreak of the Zika virus.