The most watched and the most expensive events on Earth, the Olympic Games have been uniting the best athletes from across the world to push human boundaries since 1896.
Anything as grand surely has a lasting impact and comes with consequences; many of which are damaging to our society. Are the Olympic Games worth it?
The cost
With ten years of planning required to host the Olympics and the Games´ extreme costs, today, hardly any city in the world is willing to be the host. Gamesbid revealed that there were only two bids to host the Olympics in 2022 and three in 2024.
Back in the 1990s, the Olympics host cities could profit from the Games by collecting revenue in TV rights. In 1990, only four per cent of revenue was taken by the Olympic Committee. Today, such a small amount is unimaginable as for the 2016 Games, the Committee collected an entire 70 per cent of revenue.
According to the Council of Foreign Relations, every Olympic event went over budget except one. The amounts spent on the Games are surreal to regular citizens. The Professor of Economics, Andrew Zimbalist shared; “The Olympic village alone requires approximately up to €3 billion.”
In preparing to host the Olympics, an entire village has to be built. In times of crisis and wars across the world, should such large amounts of money be spent on sporting events?
The 2014 Sochi Olympics cost €47 billion; putting on a bid alone costs 10s of millions of euros. The vast amount of facilities built are often left abandoned and decaying after the competition, as seen by Rio´s 2016 Games, where the facilities were not even designed to last longer than the Games cycle.
The waste
As climate change continues to show itself in rising weather anomalies across the globe, so does the public´s concern for the environment; in times like these, do the Olympics contribute to the crisis?
The 2018 Pyeong Chang Olympics were an example of human destruction of nature for the sake of entertainment. The sacred Japanese forest was demolished to build a ski path for the Games. After 500 years, all the trees and animals on the mountainside were entirely gone.
Yet, seeing the environmental impact of the Olympics, changes were considered. A study from 2021 in Nature Sustainability disclosed that the 2021 Tokyo Olympics were “medium” in the category of sustainability.
Being carbon-negative, the report was marked as an Olympic milestone and the International Olympic Committee has since announced that all Olympic Games must be certified as carbon-negative or carbon-neutral from 2030.
The current 2024 Paris Games are claimed to be the “greenest Games ever,” limiting emissions to approximately 1,75 million tonnes of CO2. Moreover, 95 per cent of the Summer Games will be held in existing buildings; most are hosted in the Stade de France, built in 1998.
Paris only built one new facility, the Aquatics Centre in Saint-Denis, which is solar-powered and uses natural bio-based materials. The 2,800 Olympic apartments will also be converted into homes after the games; clearly, there´s been a huge development in the competition´s sustainability but how many cities have this much infrastructure already in place?
Dr Nicole Forrester, a former Olympian athlete said; “The Olympics is like the pinnacle or the Everest of the sporting experience, both for the athlete and for the viewers.” In today´s context, does the Olympic heritage make us stronger or has it lost its value?
