Why Back The Bid?

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You know what it's like. The party ended late the night before; with a throbbing head, you stumble downstairs to look at the living room — and God, it's a mess. That's how Athenians feel. The Olympic flame was extinguished at the 2004 Summer Games in Athens 10 months ago, ending a carnival in the Greek capital that had lasted 16 days. Now there's just the hangover, and the bill to pay. At Agios Kosmas, the Olympic sailing center, you'd never know that anyone had had any fun at all. "Look at this place," a private security guard says, panning his hand across the 336,289-sq-m marina. "It's rotting." Rather than serving as a home to the sport for which it was built, he complains, the $144 million facility is now used as a depot for a handful of vehicles. The compound is lifeless, with not even a seagull in sight.

Across the road at the Helliniko Olympic Complex, venues for another seven sports — baseball, basketball, canoeing and kayaking, fencing, handball, hockey and softball — gather dust. Posses of stray dogs roam across the expanses of untended grounds, loose electrical cables hang over dented fences and garbage mounds pile up behind chained gates. Greece's military is keeping watch over some of the 22 venues — including the main Olympic stadium — for which the state is trying to find a permanent use. Maintenance and upkeep are estimated at about $100 million a year. "Who knows what they're planning to do with this," huffs a soldier guarding the main entrance to the Helliniko complex.

Flyblown, empty arenas are not the only legacy of Athens' binge. There's the financial cost, too. The government spent $3 billion building and upgrading 36 venues for the Games and another $8 billion on infrastructure and security. Organizers dished out $2.4 billion on operations and in May said they had turned a $9.2 million profit. All told, spending on the Athens Games exceeded the gdps of more than 100 nations, including Jamaica and Malta.

Thanks to its profligacy, Greece now has a 6% budget deficit, in breach of the European Union's stability pact, and its economic growth is projected to slow from 4.2% in 2004 to 2.8% in 2005. "The fact that Greece is in breach of the stability pact is in large part due to Olympic accounts," says Christos Hadjiemmanuil, who is on leave from the London School of Economics to run the state company that is trying to lease out Olympic properties such as the sailing center.

Not everything spent on the Games was wasted, though. When the media circus left town, Athens was left with something it had never had before: the infrastructure of a modern European city. "There have probably been some overruns, but I still consider Athens' legacy to be a very good one," says Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee ( i.o.c.). "It's a new city. They have the airport, they have the ring road, they have the suburban trains and they have the metro."

You might think that in light of Athens' very mixed record, other cities would look at the Greek experience and shy away. You would think wrong. On July 6, in Singapore, the i.o.c. will announce which city will next take up the Olympic torch and host the 2012 Summer Games. The competition has been the most intense for years, with five of the world's most famous cities — London, Madrid, Moscow, New York City and Paris — vying for the honor. Each city has launched a massive, multimillion-dollar marketing effort to get the Games. British Prime Minister Tony Blair will jet to Singapore for a last-minute charm offensive before opening the G-8 summit meeting in Scotland. The French team will screen a short film about Paris directed by filmmaker Luc Besson, and Spain's Queen Sofía and Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero will be on hand to lobby for Madrid. The winning city — you can count on it — will hold a press conference and pop champagne to extol the benefits of hosting the Games. Back home, jubilant citizens will party in the streets. Everyone will claim that the Games will have a profound economic impact on the city that wins — that, of course, is one of the key arguments that has been used to persuade their residents to foot part of the bill. But does hosting the Olympics really help a city? To put it mildly, the evidence is mixed.

Athens' experience suggests that the supposed financial and economic benefits of Olympics can easily disappear. Costs can exceed budgets, job creation can fall short of forecasts, tourists and spectators can fail to materialize, and — especially in the world after Sept. 11, 2001 — unexpected expenses can crop up. Athens spent about $1.5 billion on security, 12 times its original estimate. Montreal turned a significant profit on operations alone from its hosting of the 1976 games. But don't try and convince Québécois smokers of that. Capital and infrastructure expenditures — for venues such as the Olympic Village and the stadium — spiraled so out of control that the city had to impose a $2 billion tax on tobacco to get out of its financial hole. To this day, 17¢ out of every pack of cigarettes purchased in Quebec goes to pay for Olympic construction.