Why (almost) no one wants to host the Olympics anymore

Pyeongchang, South Korea, built a brand new Olympic stadium to host the Winter Games this year. The 35,000-seat stadium cost $109 million to build. And it will be used just four times before it’s demolished.

The cost of the stadium will come out to an astonishing $10 million per hour of use, according to Judith Grant-Long, a scholar of sports at the University of Michigan.

The reason Pyeongchang plans to destroy the arena is pretty straightforward: The county it’s situated in has about 40,000 people; in order to fill the stadium after the Olympics and the Paralympics are over, almost every single person living in the area would have to attend an event there simultaneously to fill it up. The stadium will soon be useless for locals.

Seung-il Ryu/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The spectacular impracticality of Pyeongchang’s Olympic stadium isn’t an outlier among Olympics venues — it’s actually rather typical. And it’s a powerful symbol of why fewer and fewer cities around the world want to host the Olympics.

Rising costs, horror stories of unexpected debt, and the increasing burden of “white elephants” — facilities that are expensive but useless after the games — have made cities more and more wary of hosting the Olympics in recent years.

The drop-off is striking. The 2004 Games garnered bids from 12 cities around the world. For the 2020 Games, the pool shrank to five bidders. Then the 2022 Winter Olympics and 2024 Summer Olympics managed to get only two bidders each.

In fact, for the 2024 Games, the International Olympic Committee decided to do something unprecedented: Instead of choosing between the only two bidders, Paris and Los Angeles, it decided to award Paris the 2024 Summer Olympics and give Los Angeles the 2028 Summer Olympics. Experts say the IOC decided to give them out at the same time for a simple reason — it was afraid no city would want to host the tournament by the time the 2028 bidding started.

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The Olympics is the greatest and oldest sporting competition in the world. Cities have historically looked at playing host to such a prestigious event as an unparalleled opportunity to showcase their offerings and in turn attract new tourism and foreign investment. But skyrocketing costs have made hosting them more of a burden than a privilege, and they increasingly inspire grassroots movements to push back against their cities’ plans to host them.

Now some experts think that bids to host them could vanish altogether.

The Olympics is a party, not an investment

If you’re the mayor of a big, up-and-coming city, attempting to host the Olympics might sound like a good idea. It’s a great opportunity to build some impressive buildings and sell yourself as a truly international hub. It seems to be a surefire way to pull in a ton of tourism and present yourself as open to business and investment both in the runup to the games and afterward.

But the reality of hosting is quite a bit messier.

First, the sports facilities almost always cost more than anticipated. Since 1960, no Olympic Games have come in under budget. In fact, nearly half of them end up costing more than twice as much as expected.

Additionally, cities tend to find that most of the stadiums, fields, courts, and other facilities that they built for the games are simply useless after the Olympics are over. Their enormous size makes them difficult for athletes to use and for fans to fill up.

“No one in the world needs a 10,000-seat swimming arena or 10,000-seat skating oval,” Victor Matheson, a sports economist at the College of the Holy Cross, told me.

And when cities attempt to retrofit Olympics facilities to make them useful for other sports, it can become very expensive very quickly. According to Matheson, London’s attempt to convert its Olympic stadium for a local soccer team after it hosted the games in 2012 ended up costing as much as the stadium itself.

Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images

Okay, but maybe it’s still worth it because of the tourist bump? Well, probably not.

Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist at Smith College, has pointed out that there’s little evidence that cities see a substantial tourism bump beyond the games themselves. Barcelona saw a lasting tourism legacy after hosting in 1992, but most analysts say its experience was exceptional because the Spanish city was a “hidden gem” with vast cultural offerings that weren’t as well-known around the world prior to the games. The reality is that most cities can’t simply become great tourism hubs just by virtue of hosting the Olympics.

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Complicating things further, though, is that hosting the Olympics is becoming an even riskier proposition nowadays. Here’s why.

How 9/11, dictators, and the IOC’s business model explain why hosting is so expensive

Many recent Olympic Games have had some eye-popping price tags. The Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008 cost $40 billion. The Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 cost $51 billion. The 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro cost at least $13 billion, and the Pyeongchang Games are expected to cost around the same.

Back in 2000, the Summer Olympics in Sydney cost just around $5 billion. The cost of Olympic Games can vary based on a lot of variables, but the broad trend is clear: It’s becoming a lot more expensive.

Allen Sanderson, a sports economist at the University of Chicago, says a lot of the modern uptick in costs can be traced to something that has nothing to do with building stadiums or even sports at all: It’s tied to fear of terrorism.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the cost of security at the Olympics skyrocketed. The first Summer Olympics held after the attacks were the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece. Those games cost more than $15 billion, and a big part of that was because the city spent tons of money trying to protect the games from a potential terrorist attack.

Sanderson says that post-9/11 security “adds between $2 and 5 billion to the price tag to start with.”

Another contributing factor for price is what could be called the autocrat effect. The two most expensive Summer Olympics and Winter Olympics in history were hosted by China and Russia respectively — Beijing in 2008, which cost $40 billion, and Sochi in 2014, which cost $51 billion. Analysts say the fact that they are both large, non-democratic countries helps explain why they set records for how much they spent.

Dan Wiklund (left); Antonin Thuiller (right)/Getty Images

For decades, cities’ Olympic bids have been about more than just building sports facilities. Cities also tend to use their bids as an opportunity to invest in and upgrade infrastructure for transit in the city (roads, public transportation) and tourism (hotels, parks). And China and Russia both used the Olympics to invest massively in their cities. They did it to improve the cities themselves and to impress the world — but also because they could.

While democratic leaders have to be mindful of public opinion when making investments in the Olympics, autocrats don’t have to worry about that as much, so they have much more freedom to spend wildly.

It’s hard to imagine having that mindset in, say the US, where local activists were able to successfully petition to pull Boston out of its official 2024 bid because they thought it didn’t make financial sense for the city.

Analysts say that Beijing and Sochi’s runaway spending has had a lasting effect. It created a new benchmark for how grand and expensive hosting can be and ramped up the pressure on other cities to come up with flashier and costlier proposals in order to get the IOC’s attention in their bid. Those big proposals have made many cities think their bids have to be more expensive than ever to have a chance of winning.

Unless the hosting competition model changes, most cities that will continue to see the costs as worthwhile are those in autocratic nations and those with experience hosting the Olympics in the past.

This pattern has already emerged in the most recent bidding rounds. The two final bidders for the 2022 Winter Olympics were Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Beijing — neither of which has to worry much about public opinion of the jaw-dropping costs. Three other bidders for 2022 — Stockholm, Krakow, and Oslo — all dropped out midway through the process because of local political opposition to hosting.

Similarly, the final two bidders for the 2024 Olympics were Paris and Los Angeles — both large cities that have hosted the Olympics before. Granted, Paris hasn’t hosted in about a century, so it’ll have some more heavy lifting to do. But Los Angeles actually turned a profit hosting the Olympics in 1984 and is often singled out by experts as the best Olympics city in the world because of its exceptional sports and tourist infrastructure.

Scholars of the Olympics say the IOC knows it has some serious thinking to do about how to make hosting the Olympics more sustainable. One idea is to have the Olympics rotate among a handful of host cities that have proven they can handle hosting without spending too much money and that will be able to reuse their Olympics facilities every 16 to 20 years. Another idea is to change the bidding process to actually create incentives for cities to come up with more modest and sustainable budgets rather than flashy ones.

The IOC has lots of time — it doesn’t have to make the announcement for the next Olympics Games until 2025. The committee has its work cut out for it.

Koji Sasahara/AP

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