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Ten Debt Sentences
| Image: BCBusiness | Published: February 03, 2011
1972 Winter Olympic Games: Sapporo, Japan
These were the first Winter Olympics held outside of Europe and North America, and the Japanese spared no expense in an attempt to impress, spending an astronomical $688 million. The ski runs were scooped out of mountainsides; the men’s slalom course alone required the removal of more than 12,000 cubic metres of rock, most carried out on human backs.
Austrian skiing champion Karl Schranz was banned from the Games by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for accepting money from ski companies. In response, Schranz’s supporters threatened to burn the home and kill the children of Karl-Heinz Klee, president of the Austrian Ski Federation.
The Games raised the profile of Sapporo and its annual Snow Festival and helped establish the city as a major conferencing and sporting destination.
The Winter Games will have undeniable benefits for B.C. now and in the years to come. But as Olympics history shows us, the experience isn’t exactly priceless.
You can count on three things being true with the Winter Olympics: the initial cost estimates for staging the Games will be underestimated, the Games will almost certainly lose money and organizers will claim they made a profit. Yet all this appears to be forgotten every four years when a new city hosts the Winter Games, which on a per capita basis actually cost more to put on than their summer equivalent. With that in mind, we examine the money trail from the past 10 Winter Olympics.
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Comments
The closing sentence of
Comment by Anonymous, April 17, 2010 at 12:30The closing sentence of 'Lessons Learned' (Feb. '10), "Turin would become only the second Winter Olympics in the last 30 years to report a deficit" is totally incongruous with the tone of the rest of the article, which provided a glimpse of the economics surrounding Winter Olympics back to Sapporo, Japan in 1972. According to the piece, Lake Placid and Albertville reported deficits, which would make Turin at least the third Winter Olympics since 1980 to do so, with the finances of the vast majority of the remainder clearly leaving room for debate.
Given the 'sell/con job' that the Olympics (both Winter and Summer) are, I believe the author was correct in the first instance when he/she wrote, "the initial cost estimates for staging the Games will be underestimated" (can everyone say 'Security'?), "the Games will almost certainly lose money and the organizers will claim they made a profit". And given that, I think we really need to consider why the 'paying' public allow ourselves to be used like this - "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice" (or more), "shame on me".
Why does everything have to
Comment by Anonymous, February 21, 2010 at 00:26Why does everything have to be about money? The atmosphere we are currently experiencing in Vancouver is unlike anything I have ever witnessed. Yes, there are the usual party fans, and some protestors that obviously didn't think very much about the reaction to their actions, but all in all, the mood in the entire city is upbeat and even friendlier than I can ever remember. I live about an hour outside the city and visit often, and the Olympics have reminded us all that we are friends and neighbours no matter our address.
Will it make money? Probably not - but the benefit of re-humanizing the city is worth it.
The most telling result for me will be the final disposition of the "affordable housing" built to eventually assist those less fortunate citizens. Let's hope greed doesn't put that promise in the dumpster.
Hi Kerry - interesting
Comment by Anonymous, February 15, 2010 at 15:05Hi Kerry - interesting 'money trail' here. Thanks for this!
Economist Dr. Jeffrey Owen of Indiana State University has written a compelling business case in "Estimating The Cost and Benefit of Hosting Olympic Games" that makes you wonder how any wannabe host city manages to convince anybody that funding this bloated Olympic-sized party is a good thing. It's shocking, for example, when Dr. Owen joins other senior economists in exploding what he calls the myth of Olympic Games and their financial benefits:
“To date, there has not been a single study of an Olympics or other large-scale sporting event that has found empirical evidence of significant economic impacts.”
Dr. Owen also maintains that the prevalence of economic impact studies has led to automatic acceptance of their findings by the public, the media, even among academic circles with little or no critical evaluation - not to mention countless billable hours from all those happy economic impact study consultants.
“Because of the high profile of such events, large (and positive) economic effects are taken as given; the studies confirm what is already believed.”
More on this at: "Why The Olympics Are Bad Business" at The Ethical Nag: Marketing Ethics for the Easily Swayed: http://www.ethicalnag.org/2010/02/14/olympics/
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