Last week, the City of Boston pulled its bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympic Games and in practically the same breath, Beijing was selected to host the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. The juxtaposition of these two events illustrates the realities that cities face as they bid for and prepare to host the Olympic Games.
One could argue that Beijing was selected as a host city over Almaty, Kazakhstan because the city has already successfully hosted the Olympic Games and remaining infrastructure could be easily converted to accommodate winter sports. Despite this though, Beijing is still missing one of the largest players in any Winter Games; snow.
When it became known that Russia spent over $50 billion on the 2014 Sochi Games, countries that had initially expressed intense interest in hosting the 2022 Games quickly lost it. Of these cities, Oslo, Norway was the final one to officially pull its bid, leaving the International Olympic Committee with two lackluster finalists.
While the IOC has made moves to streamline the bidding process and cut costs for candidate and host cities, the fact of the matter remains that hosting the Olympic Games is an expensive undertaking. Even though broadcast contracts and sponsorship deals do a lot to help offset the costs of actually running the games, huge chunks of change have to be spent to get the city ready for the world stage. The United States Olympic Committee is a registered 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization and is one of the few Olympic committees in the world that receives no government funding. This puts a particular financial burden on individual cities, such as Boston, chosen by the USOC to bid for the Games.
Boston was chosen over other US cities like Washington DC, Los Angeles and San Francisco because of the size of the city and the number of college athletic facilities that could easily be converted into Olympic venues. While using already-existing infrastructure for athletics does reduce expenses, Olympic villages would need to be constructed, public spaces refurbished and transportation systems streamlined. All of which would be funded by Boston taxpayer dollars.
Although support for the Boston Games did exist, city mayor Marty Walsh could not justify spending such a significant sum preparing for something that was not guaranteed to happen. While opposition to the Games has decreased since the initial plans were announced, those against the bid have been very vocal about how the city's funds should be spent in a way that would more immediately benefit residents.
As the USOC scrambles to select another city to bid for the 2024 Games, it seems unlikely that the Olympic Games will return to the United States any time soon. More and more, we're going to find the Olympic Games hosted by cities where the national government is able to pick up a significant portion of the price tag, as is the case in Beijing.
The host city for the 2024 Olympic Games will be announced at the 130th International Olympic Committee Session in Lima, Peru in 2017. Right now, the decision is between Paris, France; Rome, Italy; Hamburg, Germany; Budapest, Hungary and Toronto, Canada.
