Sara Khan (9) | STAFF REPORTER
The Olympics are the most famous, most extravagant sporting event in the world. It is hosted every two years, alternating between summer and winter. It has always been considered a massive honour, but recently some have been considering them more trouble than they’re worth. The Olympics rake in money from ticket sales, sponsorships, tourism, broadcasting, licensing, and more. However, the revenue is nowhere near the amount of money it costs to host the Olympics. The Tokyo Olympics cost around 2.5 times more than the revenue of the event. While hosting the Olympics is still considered a great source of pride, people wonder whether it’s worth the immense cost.
Hosting the Olympics costs a lot of money for a variety of reasons. Simply bidding to host the Olympics costs tens of millions of dollars, and there is always the possibility that you don’t win the bid. Whichever city wins the bid receives money from the IOC (International Olympic Committee) to help fund the games. However, the money doesn’t cover all expenses – far from it. The IOC usually provides around $1.5-2 billion USD, but the rest is taken from taxpayers’ dollars. The money is spent on a variety of things, such as the Olympic Village, Olympic-size stadiums and arenas for every sport, and other non sport-related things like the city’s transportation, security, or cleanup. Tokyo’s summer Olympics had an estimated cost of $15.4 billion USD, which is more than twice than what its budgeted cost was.
$15.4 billion USD is such a vast amount of money, we have difficulty processing how much it truly is. $15.4 billion USD is equivalent to over $19.6 billion CAD. With that much money, they could’ve established roughly 1,200 elementary schools, 300 decently sized hospitals, or 38 jumbo jets. Refugees could have been given shelter, homeless people could have been fed, and ill people could have been given medication. Is this truly the best way to spend so much money?
Of course, money is not the only reason cities want to host the Olympics. It is believed that hosting encourages a great amount of economic growth, especially in less developed areas. It also increases the amount of tourism in the area, and generally brings a lot of publicity. The Olympics are an important part of our society and culture, because it gives all the people of the world something to unite over that isn’t influenced by politics or language: sports. In such a vast, divided world this is incredibly important. However, less and less cities are applying to host the Olympics due to the sheer cost of it. It is clear that some policy changes are needed for the Olympic torch to remain alight.
