By Jon Willis and Dr. Thomas Orr
PyeongChang 2018's vision for the 2018 Games is to offer the Olympic Movement and the world of winter sports New Horizons - a legacy of new growth and new potential never seen before. Its Winter Games plan is one of the most compact in Olympic history, it offers a unique stage on which the world’s best athletes can achieve superior performances. With PyeongChang’s strategic position in Asia, and its access to a young and fast growing youth market, the 2018 Olympic Winter Games will no doubt expose new generations of potential athletes to the power of winter sport. – olympic.org
After this vision for what the Olympics would want to look like, PyeongChang won the voting, receiving 63 total votes, while the next highest city would only receive 25. It was clear The International Olympic Committee (IOC) wanted them to host the 2018 Olympics.
The three main costs that must be tackled to pull off hosting the Olympics are the overall budget for hosting the games, construction costs for temporary and permanent facilities, and infrastructure and transportation projects important to supporting Olympic events. People who think these expenditures are good for a city say it can lead to creating more jobs and it raises the importance and value of the city that hosts it. It will help develop the economy over the long-term, tourism would increase, more recognition worldwide, partnerships, and more.
Opponents of hosting the Olympics often state the economic benefits attributed to the Games are overstated and that local communities put themselves at financial risk due to the commitments associated with venue, infrastructure, and event production. Opponents also argue that there are better ways to spend public dollars than hosting a short-term mega sporting event and point to recent Olympics (for example, Athens in 2004 and Sochi in 2014) that experienced major cost overruns and elaborate venues with limited or no long-term purpose.
When different countries host the Olympics, they often spend an insane amount of money to build up stadiums and hold the games at these huge venues that have anything and everything a fan and a player could ask for. That can lead to way more money being spent than the IOC probably wanted originally. Negatives of hosting the Olympics would include things like possibly security threats with increased population of people, cost overruns (which we’ve seen a lot), displacement of existing businesses, and transportation and infrastructure for the people that already live there.
Another problem that we can look at especially when we look at the winter Olympics are athletes who play professionally in the USA that can’t/have to choose whether or not to compete in the Olympics. Since the 2014 games, NHL players were not allowed to participate in the Olympics and you can see how that might drop the value of the Olympics especially for American viewers. Especially since these broadcasting companies spend a lot more money to broadcast the Olympics over professional athletics. Now, it was announced that NHL players will be able to compete in the 2022 games which we believe will not only increase the popularity of the Olympics but will also increase the popularity of the players and leagues they go back to, including the NHL in a reciprocal manner that will be a win-win for all parties.
When we look at overruns, it is something that is real and has happened in previous Olympics. According to Muller (2014), total costs for the 2014 Sochi Olympics were 55 Billion dollars, which is a 4.5 times increase over the original 12 billion dollars. This was at a 96.5% public cost. 1.2 billion more will be spent each year on maintenance. Hosting the Olympics can lead to the financial obligation that can hurt a city for years upon years to come.
In 2008, China spent 40 million dollars on the Summer Olympics, but now as we look ahead to 2022, it is projected that the Qatar Olympics will cost 200 billion dollars. Now how in the heck did we get here? The big question a lot of people are now asking is if all that money is worth it. Yes, you do get to host the Olympics and have a ton of publicity to your city, but the amount of money being spent to put this on, could lead to huge financial issues for said city in the future. The cost for putting on the Olympics seems to continue to go up and people are going to continue to ask themselves if all of this is worth it.
China is the biggest and most populated country in the world, with a population of about 1.4 billion. With the projected 3.9 billion dollar cost being reported it has left us confused and concerned with the accuracy of these estimates. Considering the cost of the previous estimates and actual price when considering over runs it seems laughable to expect this event to be cheaper than it was in the past. Security, Covid, Inflation, and a myriad of factors dictate that the price should rise or at best equal the cost of their own 2008 event fourteen years ago. Other than manipulating data or using less than open reporting practices we do not see how this will be possible to put on the 2022 Olympics. It will be interesting to look back and see the actual cost of producing and marketing the 24th Olympic games.
■ Brand Equity is “the added value, or equity, that a certain product has by the virtue of its brand name.” (Mullin, Hardy & Sutton, Sport Marketing, 2014, p.155)
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■ Staff, and The Athletic Staff. “NHL Players to Participate in 2022 Olympics.” The Athletic, The Athletic, 3 Sept. 2021, https://theathletic.com/news/nhl-players-to-participate-in-2022-olympics/yoj11zT3itkM/.
Photo/link ideas; https://olympics.com/en/beijing-2022/ (good link and we like the big picture at the top with the site and stadium in snow?