Olympics

Con 1: The Olympics are a financial drain on host cities and lead to “overtourism,” harming local culture.

No Olympic Games since 1960 has come in under budget. [16]

As explained by Bent Flyvbjerg and Allison Stewart of the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, “In the Games the budget is more like a fictitious minimum that is consistently overspent.” Adds professor Jadrian Wooten of Virginia Tech, “while proponents usually just pitch the Olympics as an economic investment, it more closely resembles a really expensive party.”[17] [67]

Planning for the 2028 Summer Games had already financially strapped Los Angeles by May 2025. The city, besieged recently by wildfires and other expensive catastrophes, scrapped plans for a $1 billion Olympic athlete village in favor of existing university dorms, moved volleyball from the picturesque Santa Monica to a serviceable Long Beach, and moved the canoe slalom 1,300 miles away to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where there is an existing venue. While these changes may make the Games more affordable for Los Angeles, is the city, then, really “hosting” the Olympics? Or is this a sign of things to come, where the hosting duties are distributed throughout a country and existing structures are favored over expensive new construction? [66]

The delayed Tokyo 2020 Summer Games (held in July-August 2021 due to the covid pandemic) were already the most expensive Olympics in history, running at 200 percent over budget by September 2020. Tokyo forecast $7.3 billion in their 2013 bid, but the actual cost was estimated to be $15.84 billion in September 2020, with costs continuing to rise. A January 2021 study found that losing foreign spectators because of COVID-19 restrictions might have cost Japan as much as $23 billion. [60] [61]

Each host city is responsible for these cost overruns, in addition to their original budgets. The average cost overrun for host cities from 1968 to 2010 was 252 percent for the Summer Olympics and 135 percent for the Winter, with the 1976 Montreal Summer Games running over the most by 796 percent (which took 30 years to pay off). [17] [18] [19]

The 2014 Sochi Games ran between $39 and $58 billion over the $12 billion budget, an amount that is more than was spent on all previous Winter Olympic Games. The 2004 Athens Summer Games’ 60 percent overrun worsened the 2007–12 Greek financial crisis. [17] [20] [21] [22]

Moreover, the Olympics have produced the problem of “overtourism,” much to the frustration of residents of the host country. Tourism surged in Paris for the 2024 Olympics, and the surge continued post-Olympics; there was a 20 percent rise in tourist bookings in January 2025 over the same month in 2024. Some 11 million tourists visited the charming Paris district of Montmartre alone in 2024, radically affecting the area. As reported one year after the Olympics, local housing prices had risen 19 percent, and the cultural charm of this historic district is quickly vanishing, replaced with a theme-park atmosphere. “We’re down to two or three butchers, two cheese shops. They’re disappearing one after the other,” complained Anne Renaudie, head of the Vivre à Montmartre association. Resident Anthea Quenel added, “Now it’s a lot of ice cream, crepes, taco places.” Essential food shops for residents are quickly being replaced by snack stands and souvenir stalls. Now “it’s like Disneyland.”[49]

Con 2: The Olympics force host cities to create expensive infrastructure and buildings that after the Games fall into disuse.

“Host cities are often left with specialized sports infrastructure that has little use beyond the Games” and that the cities must maintain at great expense, according to economics professors Robert A. Baade and Victor A. Matheson. [9]

Historian Miles Osgood explains,

We’ve got the ruins of ancient Olympia in Greece, but now we’ve got the ruins of modern Olympia … You have all of these single-use stadiums in the suburbs … that saw a little bit of action for the Olympics and then we’re allowed to crumble.[40]

Many Olympic venues worldwide sit empty, rusted, overgrown with weeds, covered with graffiti, and filled with polluted water. The $78 million Olympic Stadium in Pyeongchang for the 2018 Winter Games was set for demolition before the 2018 Games even began. In Rio de Janeiro, the $700 million athletes village for the 2016 Games was turned into luxury apartments that are now “shuttered,” and the Olympic Park is “basically vacant” after failing to attract a buyer. Beijing’s 2008 Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium costs the city $11 million a year to maintain, and the stadium that seats 91,000 mostly sits unused. Sydney’s 2000 Olympic Stadium was demolished in 2019 in favor of a smaller, more useful venue. [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28]

Sofia Sakorafa, Greece member of parliament and former Olympian, says of the 2004 Athens Games venues, “We are left with installations that are rotting away because we don’t even have the money to maintain them. A lot of entrepreneurs and property developers got rich very quickly.” [29]

The stadium built in Montreal for the 1976 Olympics is frequently called the “Big Owe,” because the people of Quebec still pay $17 million a year to maintain their Olympic Stadium that hasn’t been used consistently since 2004. In 2024, the city announced the stadium needed a new roof, to the tune of an estimated $870 million that won’t be completed until 2027.[17] [18] [69]

Con 3: The Olympics displace and burden residents of the host country and city.

Political and urban geographer Sven Daniel Wolfe explains,

Throughout the [economically disadvantaged and majority-minority] nine-three [the neuf-trois suburb of Paris], Olympic-related projects have exacted a heavy toll on the locals. For instance, about 400 migrant workers were evicted to make room for the Olympic Village … Alongside this eviction, at least sixty squats were cleared in areas near Olympic sites as a result of a new law that stiffens fines and simplifies legal proceedings concerning the occupation of public spaces. Some consider this an overdue step towards urban improvement, but others protest the inhumanity of the actions, as affordable housing remains out of reach for many. Squatters were forced out with no alternative housing plan in place for them. This is part of a city-wide process of “hiding the undesirables,” a longstanding tradition among host cities, as they prepare for the global spotlight.[39]

Lee Do-sung, a local restaurant owner, expressed concern about the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games, “What good will a nicely managed global event really do for residents when we are struggling so much to make ends meet? What will the games even leave? Maybe only debt.” [32]

Residents near Rio de Janeiro’s 2016 Olympic Stadium, whose homes were set to be demolished, were forcibly removed in a “bloody confrontation between police and residents” that reportedly involved the use of rubber bullets and percussion grenades.[31]

“To make way for Beijing’s 2008 Olympic infrastructure, an estimated 1.5m[illion] people were forcibly evicted from their homes with minimal compensation. The neighborhoods were destroyed and residents removed to the outskirts of the city far from friends, family and places of work,” according to Bryan C. Clift and Andrew Manley, lecturers at the University of Bath. [30]

Eric Sheehan, a member of a Los Angeles group called NOlympics LA, said, “We don’t believe that any increased economic output justifies putting anyone at risk of displacement, exploitation or criminalization.” [67]