Top 10 Times the Olympics Bankrupted a City

For over a thousand years, the Olympic Games were held in ancient Greece, until eventually disappearing in the fourth century AD. So, it makes sense that Greece was the country to bring back the Olympics in the 1890s for the first modern games, winning a unanimous vote despite already being in dire financial straits. Greece’s Crown Prince had to rally the Greek public to foot the bill, and even then came up short. Fortunately, businessman George Averoff made a substantial donation that kept the dream alive. The events were, of course, immensely successful, relaunching the Olympics; but they certainly didn’t leave Greece financially better off.

Decades on, it remains unclear how positive the 2000 Olympics ultimately were for Australia – at least from a financial standpoint. The Sydney Olympics themselves were definitely a successful event; it was widely watched and a lot of fun. But it overran on costs so significantly that the New South Wales government had to step in and take control of the event from the original committee. The Olympics also didn’t draw many more additional tourists to Sydney, and many of the stadiums stand unused and therefore aren’t earning any money to give Australia back its investment.

France took a huge financial hit on what would be the country’s last Olympic games until the competition heads to Paris in the summer of 2024. The problem was that, like many Olympic cities, Albertville didn’t have the necessary infrastructure – but its own plan definitely made this even worse. The organizing committee decided that instead of taking place in one, central location, the games would be split across 13 venues, which meant even better transport links were needed in the French Alps. It more than doubled its initial budget and didn’t draw in the tourists like it was supposed to, losing a huge $56 million.

The US has hosted some of the most successful Olympic Games of all time, most notably the hugely profitable 1984 games in Los Angeles. But only a few years previously, Lake Placid’s second turn at hosting the winter games didn’t go as planned. It seems that the Olympic organizers didn’t quite solve the problem of how to transport people to the events, or even how to sell unsold tickets (you needed a ticket to get to the ticket booth). The Games have also had an unpleasant legacy on the area, with the former Olympic Village now being the Federal Correctional Institution, Ray Brook – a medium-security prison. Even with that, Lake Placid was still millions of dollars in debt.

#6: Rio 2016

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Many people questioned Rio’s ability to foot the bill for the Olympics in the lead-up to the 2016 games, the first-ever to be hosted anywhere in South America. And those fears may not have been unfounded. At the time, Brazil was already facing a severe economic crisis and an outbreak of the Zika virus – not to mention a high-profile money-laundering scandal. There were public protests against the events before they happened because of the huge expense of hosting, and in the end, the debts piled high, leaving the city over $100 million worse-off. Many of the expensive venues sit totally abandoned and Brazil has yet to recover.

You know something went horribly wrong when the Olympic organizers would rather burn all the financial documents than admit just how deep into debt they were. That’s exactly what happened in the wake of Japan’s 1998 Winter Olympics held in Nagano, when it came out that the details of the successful Olympic bid had been incinerated. Nagano overran by much less in real terms than other games, only around 50%, and was generally seen as a success for the region because of the infrastructure development it led to – but it still landed Japan in significant debt. It would be over twenty years until the Olympics returned to the country.

In 2010, Canada was back to host the Winter Olympics once more. Like Lake Placid, the Vancouver committee designed the Olympic facilities – specifically the village – with a secondary purpose in mind after the games were over. The village was set to become hundreds of luxury condos that the city could sell to make back some of the expense. Unfortunately, they overestimated the demand for high-end condos, and very few of the former village buildings were sold. The events landed the city $630 million in debt and it took an additional four years for the condos to be sold and Vancouver to be back in the black.

More than a hundred years after Athens relaunched the Olympics, Greece had a successful bid to host again. Unfortunately, hosting in the early 21st century turned out to have dire consequences. Not only was Greece’s economy already in danger by the early 2000s, but with the benefit of hindsight, we can see how the Olympics harmed the country as both the Greek Debt Crisis and the 2008 financial crash happened shortly afterwards. Though technically the 2004 games did potentially turn a profit for Greece, many of the stadiums are today lying empty and unused and Greece is still struggling economically.

They were the single costliest games on record, and despite the Sochi authorities apparently sparing no expense, when you look at the bill, they were absolutely disastrous. They were also the biggest winter Olympics so far at the time in terms of the number of events held, which required even more infrastructure. Ultimately, it cost over $50 billion, making it significantly more expensive than even the summer games. On top of that, the games were plagued with controversies, including the Russian doping scandal and allegations of labor law violations. It’s even been speculated that Sochi’s vast expense contributed to political unrest throughout Russia as it didn’t boost the economy as hoped.

It was this poorly organized event in Canada that led to widespread skepticism about the viability of the Olympic Games and the detrimental effects they could have on their host cities. Montreal 1976 was an extremely expensive Summer Games, plagued from the beginning by poor labor management, lots of strikes, and construction delays so severe many of the venues weren’t finished in time. It took Montreal thirty years to pay off the immense debt that hosting the games cost, and it remains the first and only time Canada has ever hosted the summer events. It overran by an enormous 720% from its initial projected budget and caused many countries to rethink and even withdraw their own Olympic bids.