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An Olympian Budget Fiasco

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The original conception of the modern Olympics was flawed. Its bedrock notion of an “international” contest unduly accented the “national.” This directed attention away from individual achievement and towards “national” competition, especially to the “national teams” and how many medals countries win.

The Olympics became a venue for Big Government in action. And so of course, that means: waste of money. The current events in London are way over-budget. CBS takes a look at this:

It seems there’s a trick to putting together a winning Olympic bid: You have to have a flexible relationship with reality.

The London bid that beat out New York and Paris won, at least in part, because it promised value for money.

And after the extravagance of the Beijing Games, London promised, in 2005, to deliver a more measured approach, games that would cost under $4 billion — a bargain.

But that figure turned out to be an underestimate. A whopping underestimate, if $15 billion meets your definition of a whopper.

No surprise, of course, as Katherine Mangu-Ward explains at Reason.com: “Hosting the Olympics is virtually always a big fat money suck, despite what you may have heard.” Nick Gillespie, at the same site, opines, “Mega-activities such as staging the Olympics are often sold as economic development programs for dreary local economies, but they almost never deliver anything other than big bills and useless infrastructure.”

This applies to sports stadiums and league franchises, too. It’s time to separate sports and state.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags London, nationalism, olympics

7 replies on “An Olympian Budget Fiasco”

Think of the Modern Olympics this way: countries and cities ask, nay impose massive debt upon their citizenry in order to provide a stage for unbridled nationalism and subsidies for global corporate brands to showcase their products and entertain their customers.
Something tells me that the taxpayers of Athens and Barcelona today, wished they’d never seen the Olympics, let alone subsidize them.

There is little, if anything, that can cause a segment of the economy unaffordable faster than governmental subsidy.

The Olympics are but one example. Look also to college education, medical care or any of the other more mundane and common government “benefits” now “requiring” subsidy because they are totally “unaffordable” by the individual (but can somehow be paid for by the collective which is nothing more than the sum of the individuals forced to pay at the point of a bayonet).

With a population of 60MM and your cost figures, each man, woman and child for Great Britain has contributed $250 for this spectacle, and they didn’t even get a ticket to an event.

It there is to be a world competition it should be for the individual competitors, and they should get the glory and honor due them for their individual achievement. Turning an athletic competition into a nationalistic competition is an abomination.

The Tour de France, various golf and tennis “opens”, and other free and market based competitions might provide a better, as well as a more economical and sustainable model.

It is good that recently no US venue has had the misfortune of “winning” the right of host the summer games, although we can count of the fact that the the fact that the US organizing committee will continue its efforts to spend someone else’s money.

This is a rerun of the Roman Circus, and will have the same long term efficacy.

I propose the if it cannot be done without subsidy, don’t bother. Left alone the competitors will determine a fair and economical to test their skills against each other.

Atlanta may have been the last Olympics to have had a reasonable cost ($2 B with near $10 M profit). The venues were scattered all over the southeast U.S. in many cases using existing facilities. The venues still serve today as dorms and stadiums for colleges. Wikipedia give the whole story.

Have to wonder if Greece would now be threatening the financial stability of the world if they hadn’t put on the Olympics.

“[T]he games…would cost under $4 billion — a bargain.

But that figure turned out to be an underestimate. A whopping underestimate, if $15 billion meets your definition of a whopper.”

They missed it by a factor of 3. That is interesting, because these same politicians in Britain have gotten into the business of counting carbon dioxide molecules from power production, methane molecules from cattle, and nitrous oxide from crops. The MPs have signed into law a reckless ghg reductions bill (The Climate Change Act) which commits the country to get 80% of its power from expensive, intermittent, worthless wind turbines.

The cost of the bill was never actually calculated, and neither was the degrees/decade this economically destructive legislation is supposed to reduce global averages.

Their miscalculations should be a warning to anyone who thinks the gov’t can regulate molecules, or miles per gallon, or lifetimes of lightbulbs. After that, its manipulated and faked reports on the results all the way down. The Low Carbon Economy debacle is like a page straight out of China’s Great Leap; the gov’t mandated destructive farming policies, exported rice based on fake numbers proving the success of the mandates, and millions of Chinese people starved to death because the mandates had destroyed the food supply.

Miscalculations by a factor of 3 can, and will, turn deadly. History shows this.