Are Olympics an overall good or bad for the cities where they are hosted?

The Olympics are a large-scale, high-risk project

Question: Are Olympics an overall good or bad for the cities where they are hosted?
Position‹2 of 2: The Olympic Games are an overall bad for their host city
Argument‹2 of 3›: The Olympics are a large-scale, high-risk project

While they may seem incredible for the weeks that a site is used, more often, “host cities are often left with specialized sports infrastructure that has little use beyond the Games” with cities forced to bear the brunt of maintaining them.

The argument

To host an enormous international cohort, host cities must undertake a colossal infrastructure and construction projects. While they may seem incredible for the weeks that a site is used, more often, “host cities are often left with specialized sports infrastructure that has little use beyond the Games” with cities forced to bear the brunt of maintaining them. Beijing’s 2002 Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium is an iconic image, but one that costs Beijing $11 million a year to maintain and sits mostly unused. In Rio de Janeiro, the $700 million athletes’ village for the 2016 Summer Games are now in disuse. Additionally, Sofia Sakorafa, Greece MP and a former Olympian stated that the facilities built for the 2004 Athens Games “are rotting away because we don’t even have the money to maintain them. A lot of entrepreneurs and property developers got rich very quickly” while there is little benefit to the average Greek citizen. Across the world in former host cities, Olympic stadiums are covered in weeds and graffiti. Cities are now even taking preemptive efforts, for example, PyeongChang for the 2018 Winter Games had a date set for their stadium’s demolition before the games even began. For Sochi in 2014, their hosting of the Olympic Games was a public-relations disaster (and a disaster otherwise) for many reasons, but notably due to the fact that their facilities went unfinished in time for the games. All of these examples are not coincidence, together the articulate a cohesive story that the infrastructure and construction the Olympic Games demand are simply not worth it.

Premises

[P1]Host cities must build colossal, specialised sports infrastructure that has little use after the Games, such as Beijing's Bird's Nest ($11m/year to maintain) and Rio's disused athletes' village. [P2] Across former hosts these venues rot, sit unused, or are demolished, while entrepreneurs profit and average citizens see little benefit, as with Athens 2004 and Sochi 2014. [C] The Olympics are a large-scale, high-risk project whose costs are not worth it, making the Games overall bad for their host city.

Counter-arguments

The old saying goes, “no risk, no reward.” While that is not a sound way to make economic decisions, with careful planning, it does hold true for hosts to the Olympic Games. With thoughtful planning for both present and future, as well as careful budgeting, it is more than popular for the high-risk project to pay off. London’s largely depressed and under resourced East End became revitalized by construction for the 2012 games, Barcelona once again became an international destination, Seoul’s Han River received a major cleanup for the 1988 Games, and citizens of Vancouver greatly appreciate the transit line built from downtown to the airport for their 2010 Games. All of these improvements would not have come about without the pressing timeline of the Olympic Games in these various locations.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Every venue named is a case selected because it failed, and the premise draws a general rule from them without the comparison it would need — no account of venues that are in use, and none of what the same cities would have built or spent otherwise. [Rejecting P2] The examples also point at different problems rather than one: an unused athletes' village is a planning failure, a stadium demolished on schedule is planning that worked, and unfinished facilities are a construction failure — so what the premise presents as a cohesive story is a list of separate decisions by separate hosts, several of them avoidable.

Proponents cited

Helena Smith
“But then you notice little things [in Athens venues]. The clocks have stopped along the corridors of endless basement offices, outside changing rooms beneath and around the site's velodrome. The light fixtures are rusty; there's tumbleweed almost everywhere and graffiti on the walls. Behind their peeling paint several of the buildings are in decay and locked behind wrought-iron fences, dozens of bigger edifices and hundreds of little office blocks are standing idle.”
Louisa Lim
“Beijing's acclaimed Olympic venues are saddled with high maintenance costs and are struggling to get by. And the most famous, the Bird's Nest stadium, has been repudiated by its own creator, dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Even the state-run government mouthpiece, the China Daily, worries that Beijing's iconic structures risk becoming "white elephants.”