Hosting the games is too expensive!
On October 1, Oslo withdrew its bid for the 2022 Winter
Olympics, making it the fourth city—after Stockholm, Lviv, and Krakow—to have
second thoughts about hosting the games. With only Beijing and the Kazakhstan
city of Almaty left in the running, the International Olympic Committee now
faces the difficult task of choosing between two undemocratic nations with
less-than-stellar human rights’ records. But Norway’s decision suggests that if
the IOC hopes to stem the tide of unwilling hosts, it faces an even more
difficult task: reforming itself.
Why doesn’t anyone want the Olympics? Price is a good place
to start. The $448,000 cost of the first modern games, held in Athens in 1896,
wouldn’t cover a single Danny Boyle-choreographed opening ceremony these days.
The total bill for Vancouver’s 2010 winter games came to $6.4 billion, while
London’s summertime turn in 2012 cost over $14 billion. Sochi, whose venues and
infrastructure had to be built pretty much from scratch, rang in at an
anomalous but no less heart-stopping $51 billion.
Those kinds of numbers help explain why even a wealthy
nation like Norway would reconsider its candidacy. Although Oslo budgeted a
comparatively sober $5.4 billion, and even though the ruling Conservative party
initially backed Oslo’s bid, concerns over ballooning costs grew strong enough
to chip away at government’s support. Speaking to the press on Wednesday, Prime
Minister Erna Solberg confirmed that her government would not continue to
pursue the games.
“We’ve received clear advice and there is no reason not to
follow the advice,” Solberg told the press. “A big project like this, which is
so expensive, requires broad popular support and there isn’t enough support for
it.”
Those same concerns were echoed in Sweden earlier this year.
“The city of Stockholm needed time to investigate whether the estimated costs
were realistic,” says Markus Jonsson, press officer for the Moderate party in
Stockholm’s city hall. “But there wasn’t enough time.
Lviv dropped out because of the unstable conditions in
Ukraine. But for the other wavering contenders, including St. Moritz and
Munich, which as late as November 2013 was still weighing a 2022 bid, a growing
awareness of the true costs of hosting the games played an important role in
their decisions not to compete. And on top of concerns over cost, there were
fears over benefits, too.
