The cost of hosting the famous Games grows more and more each iteration
Every Winter or Summer Olympics, heartwarming sports moments flood our discourse. For the Tokyo 2020 Olympics this past summer, those heartwarming moments came again in full force. Two of my favourite moments were Andre De Grasse from my hometown of Markham, Ontario winning gold in the 200 m, and weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz winning the Philippines their first gold medal. Unfortunately, as with any Olympics, these heartwarming moments are a smokescreen for an event that harms communities it takes place in.
First, there is the obvious harm of hosting the Olympics in a pandemic, where experts point to a surge of COVID cases in Japan caused by the Olympics that shocked their hospital system despite bubble precautions. That harm is circumstantial to COVID-19, and any other pandemic that may come (hopefully, never, ever, ever, ever again). Still, there are structural issues with the Olympics that have persisted for decades. From a Canadian context, the 1976 Montreal Olympics cost $1.5 billion and were self-financed by the city with the greatest hockey team of all time. It took until 2006 for Montreal to pay off their Olympic debt. Why post deficits to house and feed the poor when you can go into debt for a two-week event? A decent amount of that deficit money is spent instead on sports facilities, which can produce community benefits, except when one considers that many Olympic facilities end up being vacant or under-used long after the games have left.
The financial costs of the games are ballooning—with the Rio de Janeiro 2014 Olympics costing $20 billion and the Sochi games costing over $50 billion—leading cities to withdraw their bids. The bids themselves have an obscene cost, with Toronto, home to the most ridiculous hockey team of all time, acknowledging that the price of a $50 to $60 million bill is too much. Toronto is spending that amount instead on housing, or rather, on suing activists who build shelters for those without houses.
Speaking of money, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has quite a bit of it, with more than $5 billion in assets, and average annual revenues exceeding $1.4 billion. Looks like the non-profit sector can pay! Corruption? I’ve never heard of her, but I have seen her bribes on IOC bank statements. It’s important to note that despite the billions of dollars changing hands, those dollars rarely impact any athletes. A study conducted by Global Athlete and the Ted Rogers School of Management at the soon-to-be-renamed Ryerson University found that athletes “only receive 4.1% [of] funding directly from the Olympic Movement revenues.”* The majority of IOC expenditures go to internal and external sports organizations, and to even the playing field, the report recommends Olympic athletes getting the right to collectively bargain. NBA and NHL athletes enjoy the benefits of a union and a revenue-sharing agreement that gives them 50 per cent-ish of revenues: Why don’t Olympians deserve these rights, when they bring in millions of dollars every year for the IOC?
The reality of the Olympics is bleak, but with the right changes, it can live up to its promise of fostering global camaraderie. Numerous reforms are floating around, but the most attractive one, besides the necessity of collective bargaining and greater revenue sharing for athletes, is having the Olympics hosted in one permanent location, or a set rotation of Olympic sites. This way, cities aren’t debasing public money with bids and bribes, and secondly, infrastructure that winds up being unused can go towards affordable housing.
I’ve been a sports fan all my life, and the 2010 Olympic Gold by our Canadian hockey team was some of the best hockey I’ve seen in my life. Hidilyn winning gold this year was uplifting and a demonstration of the strength of the human spirit, despite many of my relatives who might have argued that because of a lack of financial support from their country, we’d never see a Filipino at the top of the podium, Now, imagine all these great memories while also knowing that while they were being made, communities were not being financially crippled, public funds were going to those who need it, and rich executives who don’t give a damn about athletes aren’t being enriched with multi-million dollar bribes. Let’s make the Olympic ideal a reality.
*Ted Rogers School of Management, “The future of Olympic Movement must include the ability for Athletes to collectively bargain” (media release).