EDITORIAL: An Olympian Burden on the World

The views expressed herein represent the views of a majority of the members of the Caravel’s Editorial Board and are not reflective of the position of any individual member, the newsroom staff, or Georgetown University.

The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games officially ended on February 20, drawing to a close the Olympics with the worst-ever television ratings in the U.S. That record had previously been held by the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, but NBC experienced a 42 percent drop in viewers for the 2022 Games.

This Olympics has not been without its share of controversy. Several countries have joined the diplomatic boycott of the Games due to the Chinese government’s handling of the situations in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Tibet. The women’s figure skating competition—one of the most highly anticipated events—ended with a “bizarre,” “heartbreaking,” “horrible” night; a doping scandal; and debate surrounding the immense amount of pressure placed on the children competing. This “grotesque” Olympics has once again brought attention to the questions: Does the world need the Olympics, especially given that there are other international sports competitions? Are the Olympics causing more harm than good?

This Olympics was not the first to raise such concerns. For the past several decades, the same problems have appeared again and again. The Olympics are incredibly expensive, often causing host cities to go into debt. Host cities have to spend millions of dollars building all the necessary infrastructure for the Games, and cities must pay tens of millions of dollars to even be considered a possible host city. Furthermore, the Olympics lack the accountability mechanisms and regulations necessary to protect athletes. And they cause harm to residents of the host city, too—through both excessive law enforcement and the spread of disease. The International Olympic Committee doesn’t directly answer to anyone and profits from the events; host cities, athletes, and residents of host cities all pay immense costs.

Olympic Gold

The cost of hosting the Olympics doesn't start with breaking ground. It begins when cities submit bids to the International Olympic Committee, pledging to spend whatever it takes to host the sporting spectacle. Even submitting bids, however, costs tens of millions of dollars in fees to consultants, lawyers, and event organizers. From the start, cities that want to host the Olympics lose money.

A city that wins its bid to host must then build all the infrastructure that the Olympics involves: sports stadiums and related athletic facilities, new and improved roads, hotels, airport terminals, and parks. This infrastructure, designed to accommodate a huge influx of athletes and tourists, costs billions of dollars, and costs have only risen in recent years. The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics cost around $40 billion; Sochi’s Winter Olympics in 2014 cost a record-breaking $50 billion. Summer Olympics are usually less expensive, but not by much: the most expensive Summer Olympics yet was Beijing’s in 2008, also at $40 billion. These costs might be worth it if the Games create jobs and generate revenue from tourism. However, Salt Lake City’s 2002 Winter Olympics generated only a tenth of the jobs its officials projected it would. And most of London’s major tourist attractions saw a drop in revenue during the 2012 Olympics. Most cities never turn a profit from hosting the Olympics.

When the tourists and athletes leave, cities are saddled with new infrastructure they need to maintain. Olympic sporting facilities cost tens of millions a year in maintenance costs. Debt incurred to fund these facilities takes years, sometimes decades to pay off—and taxpayers foot the bill. The real winners? The IOC, which earns billions in advertisement revenues.

As a free-market capitalist enterprise, the Olympics are failures. But maybe success was never the point. Political scientist Jules Bykoff argues that the Olympics are nothing more than a bonanza for private contractors. Since private contractors help cities submit the bids to host the Olympics, get paid by cities to build new infrastructure, and get paid to maintain facilities, the Olympics represents a gargantuan transfer of wealth from the state and taxpayers to private investors in public infrastructure. This form of “Celebration Capitalism” is, Bykoff maintains, one of the worst versions of a public-private partnership, an economic strategy by which governments let private investors provide public services. Because host cities need the Olympics to succeed, they will pay whatever it takes to backstop the private contractors they rely on to create the spectacle.

“The economic impact of hosting the Olympics tends to be less positive than anticipated,” says Investopedia. Well, that’s a massive understatement.

Displace and Punish

The blatant mistreatment of local residents fundamentally undermines the Olympic Charter’s mission statement, which lists one of the Games’ goals as to “place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” Forceful evictions are common surrounding the Olympics. In 2008, the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions estimated that more than 2 million residents had faced forceful household removal due to the Olympics, with 1.25 million evictees from the 2008 Beijing Olympics alone.

The Olympics’ “celebration capitalism” and anti-poor policies were coincidingly and deliberately engineered at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. The same neoliberal logic that guided the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee’s wish to “demonstrate the validity of the American free enterprise system” also propped up a degree of urban control so overbearing that the biographer of Committee Chairman Peter Ueberroth called the project a “totalitarian utopia.”

However, this “utopia” was a nightmare for Los Angeles’s most marginalized people. Anti-homeless ordinances banned “street habitation,” and a special task force harassed thousands of sex workers in the weeks up to the official launch. In continuation of the decades-long policy of police militarization, federal troops and the Los Angeles Police Department operated the largest and most expensive U.S. “peacetime” security deployment, causing the area to feel, according to one reporter, “almost like a military base.''

Four years later, the 1988 Seoul Olympics witnessed some of the most egregious mistreatment of local residents: “clean-up” operations viciously detained and tortured “vagrants”—mostly children and disabled residents—in dozens of facilities prior to the games. Thousands of victims still await compensation or, at the very least, official recognition of the atrocity.

For the 1996 Atlanta Centennial Olympics, urban policymakers demolished affordable housing projects near the city’s central business district, pushing Black residents out of neighborhoods in favor of Atlanta business interests. The new mixed-income housing projects then excluded the poorest original residents.

The blatant abuse of the poor by police in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas nearly thirty years later, in addition to the mass displacement and gentrification at the 2010 Vancouver and 2012 London Olympics, reaffirmed critics’ beliefs that the romantic fanfare of the Olympic Games continues to cause violence against vulnerable populations. Activist groups such as NOlympicsLA protest against Los Angeles’s current plans to host the games again in 2028, fearing a repeat of the accelerated policing and privatization disruption in 1984.

Abuse and Lack of Accountability

Athletes involved in the Olympics face significant abuse. This is a charge leveled at all types of competitive sports and may not come as a surprise; however, the Olympics in particular lack anything near appropriate accountability measures.

During the 2018 Winter Olympics, the International Skiing Federation was accused of putting athletes at risk. Despite Pyeongchang’s poor weather conditions and heavy winds, the International Skiing Federation gave the women’s slopestyle the final go-ahead; six of the first seven riders crashed immediately. By the conclusion of the competition, only nine of 52 women had clean runs, and many women fell throughout the race. Bronze medal awardee Enni Rukajärvi said that the organizers “should have canceled it, or moved it.” One of the other women competing compared the race to a lottery.

Emotional abuse runs rife during the Olympics as well. A study by World Athletics revealed that during the Tokyo Olympics, women were the target of 87 percent of all online abuse. The study also claimed that 65 percent of the abusive posts “warrant intervention from social media platforms” and show “disturbing levels of abuse of athletes, including sexist, racist, transphobic, and homophobic posts, and unfounded doping accusations.”

And the Olympics does not protect people from harm. The simple fact that Alen Hazdic, a U.S. fencer facing severe sexual assault allegations, was able to compete at the Tokyo Olympics demonstrates this. Six women fencers, including two Olympic athletes, wrote a letter to the Olympic committee to request that Hadzic not be permitted to participate because he is under investigation for at least three accusations of sexual misconduct. Nonetheless, Hazdic was allowed to compete.

A report by Transparency International claims that “international sports organizations have developed in such a way that they have less well-developed mechanisms of governance than many governments, businesses, and civil society organizations” and that increasing financial interests in sports “create a fertile setting for corrupt practices to take hold.”

Regardless of the incentive for harm, the Olympics not only turns a blind eye to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse but sometimes even encourages it so as not to endanger its own profits, such as in the case of women’s slopestyle.

Disease at the Olympics

Last summer, the commencement of the already-postponed Summer Olympics drew the world’s attention—and not just for the spectacular fireworks show. The shadow of COVID-19 and its disastrous impact hung over the spectator-free games, the masked interactions between competitors, and the reports of a dead Olympic Village. At the same time, Japan was experiencing its worst surge of COVID-19 to that date, and Tokyo itself spent the Olympics under a state of emergency.

This isn’t the first time the Olympics has contributed to disease spread. In 2016, as Brazil navigated a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) triggered by birth defects associated with the Zika virus, it concurrently hosted the Summer Olympics, an event that drew tens of thousands of spectators. Fearing the grave economic consequences that were likely to plague the country were the Olympics to be canceled or postponed, however, the WHO recommended business as usual. In the wake of the Olympics, not a single case of Zika-related birth defects was reported among those who attended the games from abroad; however, the disease raged within Rio de Janeiro’s impoverished slums.

In both cases, the Olympics themselves did not become a so-called superspreader event, spreading disease across the globe, as feared in a multilateral event of its attendance and popularity. With media attention and political and economic resources directed at the Games, however, governments essentially ignored their own citizens, focusing instead on the largely wealthy spectators and their ability to navigate the Olympics without fear of infection.

This example is indicative of a larger issue: with the Olympics run by an international body that does not answer to any specific citizenry or include democratic representation, there is no incentive for the IOC to ensure that those living where the Games occur actually benefit. Taxpayers whose dollars go into funding the complex and pricey infrastructure required for Olympics events are the same people whose health and safety are increasingly put at risk by the Games. Top-down decisions regarding the Olympics’ location almost never take on-the-ground perspectives into account, barring intense local mobilization.

As China attempted to maintain its so-called zero-COVID policy amid the rise of the Omicron variant, it was once again locals, not spectators, who were subject to lockdowns in Beijing. With testing revealing more than 100 cases among Olympics arrivals, China placed its own citizenry at risk of the consequences of a jump in cases, whether through directly contracting the disease or by spreading health care and other public goods perilously thin.

To Reform or Not to Reform

So, can we reform the Olympics, or is it time to put an end to the international competition?

The Olympics do not perform the roles in the global community that they claim they will. While they do bring together more than 10,000 athletes to compete with and against one another, the Games do not actually work as a “peace movement”—the IOC holds that it remains entirely neutral in choosing locations for future Games, while experts note that “partnering with autocracies pays” in the long run, since referenda asking civilians whether they would like to host the Olympics in their cities often vote no. Given the costly nature, democratic countries with the resources and climates to host the winter or summer Games have been removing themselves from the bidding process, meaning autocratic governments step forward in order to use the games to improve their global public image.

Critics of the current Olympics from a global perspective have proposed two potential reforms that could address issues of infrastructure and economies: either holding the Olympics in a set spot (one for Summer Games, one for Winter Games) and having the IOC invest in sustainable architecture and facilities to reduce impact, or decentralizing the Olympics and holding different events in previously-constructed facilities around the world, depending on the needs of the sport, while making the Opening Ceremony a symbolic act of hosting. In regards to the first proposal—with many supporters of that idea pushing to place the Summer Olympics in Greece, as a nod to the Games’ origins—critics have questioned whether that would solve anything, given that the problems of corruption, displacement, and greenwashing are not individual city or governmental regime problems, but problems “imported” into whichever city places a bid to host them. The second proposal, decentralizing the games, comes with its own potential to simultaneously harm several cities’ economies every four years.

Furthermore, neither of these solutions empower or protect athletes in the long run from abuses of power or competitions in dangerous environments. Current projections show that, by 2080, all but one of the 21 cities that have previously hosted the Winter Olympics will no longer be able to host, meaning that, for the Winter Olympics, athletes will increasingly have to compete on dangerous terrain created by artificial snow. Meanwhile, warming environments pose a problem for the Summer Olympics, as organizers, logistics staff, and athletes alike struggle in the heat, such as in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, the hottest on record.

Other global competitions, such as FIFA, have not gotten it right either. Often, what gets lost in translation when talking about international competitions designed to “promote peace” is that human lives and safety ought to be the utmost priority, before any pomp and circumstance. Whether it is the safety and health of the athletes or the safety and livelihoods of those living in hosting cities, concerns for the people who make up the global competition should be paramount. The Olympic Charter claims, “The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” Any suggested reforms should not focus exclusively on economic viability or increasing capital. Rather, they should work to ensure that the Olympics actually live up to the ideals they claim to promote for everyone whose lives are touched by them. If they can’t do this, then the Olympics are no longer a viable organization that we should continue carrying into the future.

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