By Scott Salmon
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Olympic Games have always been much more than a sporting event – especially for their hosts. However, since Rio de Janeiro hosted the 2016 Summer Games, non-sporting concerns are threatening the Olympic movement as never before.
In the modern era, hosting the Summer Olympics was often an exercise in “soft power”, a spectacle of nationalist propaganda mounted to announce unequivocally a country’s arrival on the world stage.
However, following 1992, when the Olympics appeared to be the catalyst for the renaissance of Barcelona, they have increasingly become an urban project.
For subsequent hosts, the Olympic juggernaut simultaneously represented a vehicle to leverage existing urban agendas and an unrivaled way to focus the gaze of the global media on their chosen city.
As a testament to the lure of the Olympic brand, there was no shortage of cities vying to host the Summer Games – despite growing public skepticism in many places. Now, in the wake of Rio 2016, dramatic change seems to be underway.
Traditionally, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) bestows hosting rights on a local organizing committee after a highly competitive – and secretive – bidding process.
Since the Barcelona Games, four or five finalist cities have qualified for each bid cycle until Rome unexpectedly withdrew from the 2020 competition, leaving only three viable candidates.
Then, just a year after Rio’s Olympics, the contest for the 2024 Games descended into chaos as three candidate cities withdrew. In an extraordinary session, hastily convened to salvage the credibility of the Olympic movement, the IOC abandoned all protocol, awarding the 2024 and 2028 Olympics to both remaining cities, Paris and Los Angeles.
Why did the Olympics so suddenly lose their luster? Potential bid cities, or their taxpayers, have determined that the increasingly exorbitant Olympic price-tag is simply not a good investment. The costs – social, economic and political – almost always outweigh the benefits.
For aspiring hosts, a brief examination of Rio’s experience reveals issues common to the Olympic elsewhere:
- Promoters of the Olympics – whether cynical or optimistic – overpromised their benefits: in job creation, tourism, the economy, infrastructural improvements, potential for facility reuse, remediation of Guanabara Bay, and so on.
- Olympic planning in Rio, as elsewhere, employed woefully unrealistic cost estimation techniques. The Olympic Games have only generated a profit twice and since 1960 the average cost overrun is 179 percent. By most estimates, Rio 2016 came in R$14.5 (US$4.4) billion over the original R$28.8 (US$ 8.8) billion budget.
- Mega-events like the Olympics inevitably displace existing urban priorities. The exigencies of the Olympic task take precedence, diverting resources and attention from established agendas, such as the enforcement of building-safety codes or flood preparedness, for example.
- The nature of the Olympic process required local organizing committees take huge risks in costs and deadlines on behalf of the host city. Likewise, the hard deadline of the opening ceremony creates opportunities for profiteering, cost over-runs and, of course, graft.
- In order to meet those hard deadlines, local authorities succumbed to the temptation of invoking the “exception” – fast-tracking (or completely by-passing) normal planning procedures – sometimes overlooking civil rights convention in the process. The consequences range from no-bid contracting, tax exemption schemes, property rights violations, to community displacement and removals.
- The Olympics were consistently sold to the public on their potential for city-wide benefits. In reality, a select group of business and real estate interests, Odebrecht or Carvalho-Hosken, for example, reaped the greatest rewards.
- A massive undertaking like the Olympics provides an opportunity for a city to realize projects – a public transit service, or cable car systems, for example – that may have been on the shelf for some time. That can be a good thing unless that project was poorly planned, only partially completed, or subsequently unmaintained.
Cities considering a bid for the Summer Games have looked at the Olympic legacy in Rio (and elsewhere) and concluded they are no longer worth the outlay. Unless the IOC dramatically restructures Olympic hosting arrangements – especially the financial risk entailed – the Summer Olympics could indeed be doomed.