Nacre

The irony is that all of the important lessons for the Olympics were also true for the six world's fairs/expositions universelle that Paris hosted back in 1855-1900. The events that were very large and massively overbuilt lost tons of money. The events that were modest and built on existing infrastructure did well. The most important benefit was the infrastructure that got built for the future: le Tour Eiffel, Paris Metro, Grand Palais, etc. The important legacy of Barcelona 1992 is the reconstruction of Barcelona's beaches and tourist infrastructure, the legacy of London 2012 is the gentrification of the east end around the Olympic Park, etc. Of course, those have downsides too, just as the Haussman era redevelopment of Paris in the late 1800's also caused an increase in cost of living in Paris.

Baseball makes a lot of revenue for the organizing committee in a city that already has large stadiums for it. ($50/ticket * 40,000 tickets/match * 16 matches = $32 million) It also lets the host spread some competition across their country and gives more people a chance to see a small part of the Olympics in person. These are the same reasons that football is in the Olympics despite the fact that nobody really cares about Olympic football. Similarly, if India were to host the Olympics then cricket should absolutely take part. The key difference is that football, baseball and cricket are legitimate competitive sports in their own right, whereas breakdancing is not. If they want to keep it in the Olympics, it should stay as an artistic feature rather than as a sport.

FWIW the heat index for Orlando in the summer is not too much worse than Beijing or Tokyo, but I think those places are themselves on the edge of acceptable heat-related problems for athletes and spectators. They would have to host most events at night to reduce the risk of heat stroke, and given that there are numerous other cities in the USA that don't have heat as high it would be crazy to choose Orlando. If we (the USA) really want another city to host the games again after LA then my choice would be Philadelphia. They already have the skeleton of an Olympic Park. https://scssd.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/bg-info.jpg 1) Build some parking garages to replace the sea of parking stalls around the stadiums, 2) build two new subway/metro lines to access the area, and 3) build a new convertible stadium for the Philadelphia Union (MLS) to replace their suburban stadium, and 4) build apartment buildings to serve as the Olympic village and then affordable housing after the Olympics. This plan would be "expensive but worth it" ala London 2012 or Barcelona 1996.

For Canada I think it is not only the vestiges of colonialism that are problematic, but also the sports themselves. Canada at this point is fully integrated into the North American sports system. Australia should be fairly easy to fit in Asian sport if it really wants to. It would easily be grouped with the other "Zone 5" countries in Southeast Asia like Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. And, after all, it's not entirely culturally separated from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and even to a lesser extent the Philippines (55% of Filipinos speak English).

I think le basket is popular in France, and the best stars show up for the Olympics unlike in mens football, so Olympic basketball is a relatively big draw. And the French have some amazing players too (Victor Wembanyama!), albeit none of them guards. How much do people in France care about the mens football tournament given that so few of the star players are competing?

Stockholms Olympiastadion from 1912 is my favorite, has seen more athletics world records than any other stadium in the world, and it is still appropriately sized for athletics meets (hosting the annual DN Galan) more than a century later. Meanwhile many of the large Olympic stadiums are rarely used for athletics meets; for example Munich's stadium is an architectural triumph but AFAIK it only hosts an athletics event once every couple of decades.

I agree that a big part of this is the internet. It has changed culture by creating echo chambers for subgroups; so now it's easier for like-minded people to parrot their shared ideas and easily ignore any annoying facts that don't fit their views. The reality is that the economics of the Olympics are very complicated, and host cities can actually earn a good return on their investment through long term development. (Of course gentrification also has negatives too, as Barcelones and East Londoners can attest to.) Foolish host cities that have overspent on competition venues and underspent on infrastructure are as much to blame as the IOC. But it's hard for the media to blame the cities for getting themselves into trouble. But I don't know that terrorist attacks and protests can be blamed on the Olympics. There are plenty of them around the world even without the games. It's more likely that they simply attract people who would be doing this stuff anyway somewhere else.

It's important to note that the "displacement effect" hits all major events. The Super Bowl and World Cup also scare away people from the host city if they aren't going to the events themselves. The problem is that the Summer Games happen during the high season for tourism so the displacement effect has a massively negative net effect. I think that Sydney and Rio are the only Olympic host cities to actually gain any tourists in the last four decades - because they are southern hemisphere cities.

Agreed. Other issues in addition to venues: Money. The economics of the winter games are a LOT better for northern hemisphere cities with the existing infrastructure to support them. Hotel room occupancy rate in Vancouver is at capacity during the summer, so there's no benefit in adding tourist during the summer, whereas there would be a benefit in February. Medals. Canada is much stronger in winter sports than summer sports, so the winter games would provide a much stronger patriotic pull. Host the winter games and your fans get to see Canada win lots of golds and very possibly "own the podium" at first overall like it did in Vancouver 2010. Host the summer games and your fans get to see Canada finish in the 20's: Canada won 0 gold and 5 silver at Montreal 1976. More athletes. ~12,000 athletes for the summer games vs ~3,000 for the winter games. More people = more expense and effort housing and caring for them all. And in a city with scarce land for a new athletes village, no less.

Very few. It has almost everything (except the speed skating oval, which has been converted into a community center) for the winter games and perhaps 1/3rd of what it would need for the summer games. "Perplexing" is the best word to describe this.

Because 1) it does not have the existing sporting facilities to host, 2) the USA is a Common Law country making new infrastructure projects very expensive (for example it is 10 times more expensive to build new subway/metro tunnels in New York than in Berlin or Paris) and 3) it's extremely difficult for politicians to force through unpopular projects in built-up cities in Western countries.

To clarify, massive amounts of public money are spent on stadiums in the US. https://www.insidehook.com/sports/cheap-champs-chiefs-exec-leave-kc-stadium-tax Full private funding of stadiums only really happens in global cities like New York or Los Angeles. Cities the size of Brisbane in America (like Pittsburgh or Kansas City) invariably end up paying to build stadiums - sometimes with all of the money coming from governments.

Local politicians can still change the plans after winning a bidding process. Just look at the main stadium for London.

This isn't entirely wrong but it absolves local politicians of blame, when they are often the biggest source of problems. The IOC didn't force Russia to spend $51 billion on Sochi (which in reality was probably a good investment to turn Sochi into the Russian version of Orlando), it didn't make Jean Drapeau choose a grossly over-engineered design for the Stade Olympique in Montreal, and it isn't behind the current malaise over the stadium in Brisbane.

I don't think that the people proposing "regional events" fully understand this. Just consider what happened to the organization and budget of Melbourne's Commonwealth Games when they decided to go for events all over the state of Victoria. I think that this is the fundamental economic issue. High cost of housing is increasingly the major concern of people in the developed world, and a megaproject that will lead to gentrification and rising housing prices in the host city even if it the project is a success is simply not a rational choice for the 99% who aren't profiting from property development. In contrast, back in the 1980's to early 1990's when hosting the games the public was much less pinched by housing costs. https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/5568/housing/uk-house-price-affordability/

Well, don't I feel silly.

The Commonwealth Games has required large venues in the past. For example 40,000 seats at the athletics stadium. I would guess that hurts a lot of potentially viable bids from countries like Malaysia.

It should come close to covering the operational costs. And to be honest, the Commonwealth Games hosts shouldn't really be taking on massive capital costs anyway - with the notable exception of the athletes village, which can serve as social housing after the games. Since Guilga has already compared the Commonwealth Games to the Pan-American Games, it's worth noting that the Pan-Ams work perfectly fine with a temporary athletics stadium seating only 13,000. An 18,000 seat Kuala Lumpur Stadium should be acceptable. Kuala Lumpur also has a decent aquatics center, a velodrome, a cricket stadium, and so on. They shouldn't really need to build any new venues.

That would only delay the inevitable. A Commonwealth Games that alternates between being hosted in Australia and the UK would keep the games on life support, but it would not make them healthy.

The Maginot Line worked perfectly. It was the decision to put all of their frontline forces in Belgium and fail to maintain a strategic reserve (somehow forgetting everything Napoleon taught them) which was the cause of the disaster. Yes, it's hard to imagine how the French could be so chauvinist and impolite . . .

The Commonwealth is simply less important today than it was ten years ago, let alone fifty. An underrated part of why Russia's "operation" in Ukraine went sideways is that the portion of the population in Ukraine that grew up in the Soviet Union is continually declining, and the generation that grew up in post-Soviet era wants to integrate with the EU and not Russia - meanwhile the decision makers in Moscow are all old men who grew up in the USSR. A similar effect has already taken place in the Commonwealth with increasing numbers of Canadians, South Africans, and generally everyone but Little Englanders identifying less and less with the British Empire. Durban dropping out is probably more an effect of this change than it is a cause of it.

They should easily be able to put up temporary grandstands for a cricket stadium anywhere. That's not to say that they can't or won't use Angel Stadium, just that they don't need to. If I were in charge of selecting a site, I would be very tempted to use the Woodley Park Cricket Complex (near the Sepulveda Dam) to show off the support the city gives to the sport outside of the Olympics.

I think it's important to point out that the ancient games happened every year with a rotation of four cities (Athens, Corinth, Delphi and Olympia). A cycle of four events with one of them held each year would let the IOC continue or even increase its revenues while also meeting the needs of athletes, fans and the host cities . . . and return to the one games every year model of the ancient Panhellenic games.

There are roughly equal numbers of athletes for team sports vs individual sports in the games, so separating them would result in two games of roughly similar sizes. Although the athletics venue would remain a problem, overall capital costs would actually be dramatically reduced by cutting the Olympics into two parts: on average by about 2/3rds. Moreover there are many cities like Vienna, Buenos Aires, Casablanca, Phnom Penh, et al that have the athletics stadium but would be ruined by the costs of the metastasized modern Olympics. Cutting the size of the games in half would give these cities a realistic chance of hosting without serious financial losses beyond the security costs which are dead money for any city.

I still think that it makes the most sense to cut the Olympic games in half (thus games for individual sports, team sports, mountain winter and ice/city winter) rather than a regional or dual hosting model, as many officials have to be shuttled between the two sites. The dual host model is already the de-facto norm for the winter games with Vancouver-Whistler in 2010, Sochi-Krasnaya Polyana, Gangneung-Pyeongchang, Beijing-Zhangjiakhou, and now Milan-Cortina. And it clearly isn't ideal.