Last week, Chicago avoided an enormous headache by not being granted to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. For more reasons than I can count, Chicago simply is not in the financial situation to carry out such an event. The financial burden the Olympics takes on a city is overwhelming, and the city of Chicago, with a high cost of living and taxes, hardly needs any more financial burden.
According to Time magazine, the Games almost always cost more to host than what is originally planned. For example, Athens had budgeted $1.6 billion for the 2004 Games but wound up spending $16 billion. Beijing estimated the same amount for the 2008 Summer Games but ended up spending a whopping $40 billion. Not to mention, London was originally planned to spend $8 billion but current estimates have it around $19 billion plus. Based on these figures alone, Chicago didn’t need to take on any more debt than it has already accumulated.
However, what once could have been Chicago’s problem is now Rio de Janeiro’s. Rio lobbied hard to get the 2016 Games, but it is yet to be seen if they are up to the task. The funny thing about Rio is that it fervently lobbied for the 2007 Pan American Games, which it fumbled around, and Rio is already behind building schedule for the 2014 World Cup.
Moreover, Time magazine reported that when lobbying for the 2007 Pan American Games, Rio officials promised to transform the city by constructing a ringed light railway system, a new state highway and 54 km of new metro lines. Rio officials also promised to clean up the Guanabara Bay, an odorous body of water that can be smelled driving into town from the international airport.
Ultimately, none of those constructions ever took place and even after spending hundreds of millions of dollars to clean Guanabara Bay, the smell still exists.
Rio Congressman Chico Alencar, who called for investigations into the massive overspending at the Pan American Games, said to Time, “I want Rio to win the right to host the games, but we need to learn from our past mistakes and the myth of the Pan American Games and all that they didn’t leave behind. If we get the Olympics, then all sectors of society need to unite to ensure that there is a social legacy and no overspending.”
Rio could go the route of Atlanta in 1996 and have the Olympics privately funded (which would be significantly cheaper) and cut down on government corruption when spending on the Games.
Atlanta was able to transfer its Olympic stadium to the Atlanta Braves and its Olympic village to Georgia State University for dorms. After all, preparing for the Olympics is not the best way to undertake socially responsible urban planning. The purpose of the Games should be the Games in and of themselves, not planning to kill two coincidental birds with one stone.
