Tarnished Rings by Stephen Wenn

Author:Stephen Wenn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815655541
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2022-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Epilogue

Ten years ago, referring to Beijing’s mind-blowing $43 billion budget aimed at altering the trajectory of the city’s business model and delivering a message to the global community that China staked its claim as a major world power, we wrote: “We will not see the scale of financial investment witnessed in Beijing in future host cities.” It’s right there on page 161. It provides further evidence why historians do not always make the best predictors of human behavior. Three years later, Olympic observers cringed as the final expense line for Sochi 2014, $51 billion (irrespective whether all of this money needed to be spent to deliver the Games, with much of it dedicated to longer term goals in athlete development in Russia), sunk in. “People are still dealing with the legacy of Sochi,” Michael Payne stated in 2018.1 Vladimir Putin’s spending needed to be placed in context and explained by the IOC.

People in positions of authority within the chambers of municipal councils, as well as taxpayers in large cities that pondered bidding for an Olympic festival, cringed, too, as did those already committed to the bidding process. In 2020, Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier, and Daniel Lunn, colleagues at Oxford University, indicated that available data permitted them to examine nineteen of the thirty Olympic festivals staged between 1960 and 2016 and conclude that they exceeded budgeted costs on average by 172 percent with ten of them posting overruns of 100 percent or more, and Sochi’s registering at an eye-popping 289 percent.2 Four years earlier, Flyvbjerg, Allison Stewart, and Budzier published an earlier version of this data analysis and stated, “For a city and nation to decide to stage the Olympics Games is to decide to take on one of the most costly and financially most risky type of megaproject[s] that exists, something that many cities and nations have learned to their peril.”3

The right to host the Olympic Games emerged as a prized vehicle for promoting a city and country in the post–Los Angeles 1984 years, while delivering needed infrastructure to accommodate a city’s expanding footprint in terms of size and population. Debt was accrued in some Olympic host cities, but the allure of staging the Games remained and the investment was still judged worthwhile despite the damaging headlines wrought by the Salt Lake City bid scandal. However, the expenses in Beijing and Sochi, when combined with the fallout from the global economic downturn of 2008 and 2009, rendered this prize a much less cherished chalice.

Our examination of what we have termed Tarnished Rings is, in many ways, a probe into the critical Olympic mission of preserving image, one of the two pillars (along with global exposure) that underpin the financial health and circumstance of the Olympic Movement worldwide. With that in mind, it is appropriate to visit a largely unnoticed series of events that occurred in the Western United States between 2017 and 2019 which might bear serious consequences for the Olympic Movement if their precedent-setting ramifications extend to prospective host cities across the world in the years ahead.

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