Grand Events and the Bill: The Global Fiscal Turning Point of Olympic Hosting Rights

In 2024, the government of Quebec, Canada, announced it would spend $870 million to replace the roof of Montreal's Olympic Stadium. This is already the third time the stadium's roof has been replaced. Built in 1976, the stadium is nicknamed "The Big O"—and more often derided as "Big Owe." Half a century ago, a Summer Olympics with an original budget of only $124 million ultimately saddled Montreal taxpayers with roughly $1.5 billion in debt, which took a full thirty years to pay off. Today, the building hailed as a Montreal landmark is still burning public resources in the form of maintenance expenditures on the financial books.

The Olympics has never been a carnival that a city throws for itself; it has always been embedded in the contest of national strength and global prestige. But from the latter half of the 20th century onward, that contest gradually became a high-cost game. A 2024 Oxford University study estimated that since 1960, the average cost of hosting the Olympics has been three times the bid budget. Massive cost overruns have long ceased to be occasional engineering accidents; they are an institutional feature of major sporting events. From Munich to Mexico City, from Montreal to Tokyo, security upgrades, construction timelines, venue specifications, and political demands have together driven hosting costs to astronomical levels.

The turning point came in 1984. Los Angeles was the only city bidding that year, which gave it rare bargaining power. It barely needed to build new permanent venues, instead relying on existing facilities to host the Games. And because revenue from television broadcasting rights began to rise sharply, Los Angeles ultimately generated an operating surplus of about $215 million. It seemed that "hosting the Olympics with restraint" was a viable path. But what the International Olympic Committee saw was an opposite opportunity: as long as more cities could be induced to compete, the hosting rights could still be sold at a high price. Thus, the number of bidding cities rose from 2 in 1988 to 12 in 2004, and the number of bids from developing economies later grew to more than triple the level before 1988.

In such a global competitive structure, a "winner's curse" dynamic emerged between bidding cities and the IOC: to defeat other candidates, cities tend to propose more grandiose, more expensive, and more unrealistic plans. The IOC, holding the power of choice, naturally favors plans that pledge the most funding and marquee projects. Public data show that Sochi spent more than $50 billion on the 2014 Winter Olympics; Beijing allocated a budget of about $45 billion for the 2008 Olympics, with more than half going to roads, railways, airports, and environmental projects. Much of this funding was not converted into long-term benefits that ordinary citizens could enjoy after the Games, but instead left behind a group of oversized venues known as "white elephants"—massive, single-purpose structures that demand enormous maintenance costs every year.Emerging economies once regarded the Olympics as a ceremonial stage for national rise. Beijing in 2008, Sochi in 2014, and Rio in 2016 were, to some extent, displays of economic development and national confidence. Brazil and Russia even tied large-scale infrastructure projects to the Olympics, attempting to advance urban modernization through this. But if we take a longer view, we find that the marginal returns of such "prestige projects" have already declined significantly. The slowdown in global economic growth, rising public debt pressure, and the increasing demands of domestic societies have weakened the legitimacy of large-scale construction. At the same time, the international system is becoming flatter and more fragmented; a country no longer needs to rely on a global sporting badge to gain a sense of presence.

The International Olympic Committee has also attempted reforms. After 2019, the bidding process was simplified, the time window was extended, and different cities, regions, or even countries were allowed to co-host. The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina will become the first true case of a "two-city joint hosting," with plans to make extensive use of existing facilities and leftover materials from the Paris Olympics. This is a concession to the old model. But what embarrasses the IOC even more is that the number of competitors has not recovered as a result. Brisbane, Australia, won the 2032 Summer Olympics without any rival, becoming the first host city elected "without competition" since Los Angeles in 1984. This shows that reform has only lowered the bidding threshold but has not resolved the core contradiction: the sheer scale of the Olympics is tightly linked to the IOC's commercial revenue model.

From an external perspective, the IOC's revenue depends on broadcasting rights, global sponsors, and the scale of the events. To maintain its influence as a global organization, it must preserve the "premium" positioning of the Olympics; to truly reduce the burden on host cities, it must downsize and reduce extravagance. But these two goals conflict with each other structurally. This is not just a problem of the Olympics; it is also a common dilemma facing many global governance organizations amid an era of transformation: the institutional self-interest of the organization often becomes the boundary of reform. When "a world celebration" turns into "a city's bill," the waning willingness to bid is no longer merely short-term sentiment but an entirely new global fiscal judgment.

In this sense, the choices of Milan-Cortina and Brisbane may herald a more pragmatic future: regional collaborative hosting, mandatory accounting of environmental costs, full use of existing facilities, and skepticism toward permanent buildings. Major sporting events will not disappear, but hosting rights will no longer be just an honor; they will be regarded as a long-term public investment requiring careful assessment. Half a century ago, Montreal paid a heavy price for "face"; today, more and more cities have learned to calculate "substance" first. At a moment when the world political and economic order is being reshaped, no grand event can survive independently of fiscal reality.