Amid the excitement and heartbreak of the London 2012 Olympic Games, it’s easy to forget that someone has to foot the bill.
Hosting the Olympics can be a source of pride and an opportunity to rejuvenate a lagging city. However, the two-week worldwide party costs billions to build and operate. It’s something Canada knows a little about, having hosted three Olympic Games.
Lessons learned in Calgary?
The Calgary Winter Games in 1988 are seen as a complete turnaround from Montreal, delivering a profit on the operating budget and creating facilities that continue to be used by both professional athletes and the general public.
The Calgary Olympic Development Association (CODA), which bid for the Winter Olympics, never dissolved. Instead, CODA changed itself into WinSport Canada, an organization dedicated to maintaining Calgary’s Olympic Park and developing Olympic athletes.Calgary, through its hosting prestige or its facilities, also may have transformed Canada into a top player in the Winter Games. Since Calgary, Canada’s medal count in the Winter Games has risen every year.
Kidd said Calgary “learned enormously from Montreal’s mistakes.” Calgary also benefitted from the recession going on at the time, which turned investments into economic stimuli.
Barney, however, said that Calgary’s “profit” only happened because the organizers counted “the money they [got] from the various levels of government” as revenue; they did not count the money as expenditure, which it would be from the taxpayers’ perspective.
Once that money is factored in, no Olympic Games has ever made a profit, Barney said.
The Goldman Sachs report agreed with Barney’s assessment. While several Games made profits under their reporting parameters, “if one fully accounts for all of the costs related to hosting a Games, it is questionable whether an Olympics ever truly makes a profit,” the report said.
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