Hosting the Olympics Costs Billions. What Does a City Get Back?

It was a sunny morning in mid-June and the athletes’ village for the Summer Olympics, in Seine-Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, was still nominally under construction. Workers sweated in hard hats and yellow vests, watching over the empty site. Built in the midst of various housing developments, the village sprawls across 128 riverine acres. Several dozen new, mostly beige, timber-frame apartment blocks, pleasant but banal, spill down to a tree-lined promenade along the Seine. Luc Besson’s former film studio complex, in a converted power plant, has been partly turned into the athletes’ mess hall. Next door, another power plant, gut renovated and whitewashed, which now houses a gym, will become office space for 2,500 civil servants in France’s Ministry of the Interior after the Games are done.

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Every couple of years, when another Olympics rolls around, a familiar story is recycled: The Games are a way for host cities to fast-track infrastructure and urban-redevelopment projects. But there is surprisingly little evidence to back this story up and examples galore suggesting the reverse. Athens, which splurged on white elephant arenas in 2004 for sports that few Greeks play, stirred a rush of national pride but incurred debts that helped fuel an economic meltdown with ripple effects across Europe. Rio threw itself a giant party in 2016, then had to sell off its Olympic Village at a discount.

So dubious have the outcomes been for host cities that some experts argue New York actually won the competition to host the 2012 Summer Games because it lost out to London. In preparing the city’s bid, a team headed by a New York deputy mayor mapped sites that could be converted into parks, housing and office towers after the Olympics. When London won the Games, New York more or less went ahead with its plans anyway, rejuvenating large swaths of waterfront without having to divert billions of dollars toward a short-lived sporting event in the teeth of what turned out to be a global recession.

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg (center) reviewing a design proposal in preparation for New York’s 2012 Olympics bid. New York ultimately lost out to London, but Bloomberg went ahead with many of the plans for parks and housing anyway, leading some to argue the city actually “won” by losing.Credit…Ramin Talaie/Corbis, via Getty Images

During a different era — before the costs of staging the Olympics rose to the G.D.P. of certain medium-size nations and the dream of promoting world harmony through athletics was shattered by a string of terrorist attacks (Munich in 1972), doping scandals (pick your Games), boycotts (Moscow in 1980, Los Angeles in 1984) and bombings (Atlanta in 1996) — postwar cities like Rome (1960) and Tokyo (1964) used the event as coming-out parties for their new economies and societies. During the 1950s and early ’60s, Japan remade Tokyo into a stylish new capital, enlisting pioneering architects such as Kenzo Tange and Yoshinobu Ashihara to devise Olympic monuments that showcased the reborn country’s cutting-edge technology and design.