Paris Olympics on channels 26.7.–11.8. Go to the competition website here.
From four billion euros to 8.8 billion euros.
This is how much the costs of organizing the Paris Olympics have increased, according to the Danish professor Bent Flyvbjerg and an English Ph.D Alexander Budzier. The duo has been researching the increased costs of the Olympics since 2012 and their work has received international attention, for better or for worse.
The increase in Paris costs mentioned at the beginning is wild, but not exceptional. The previous summer Olympics in Tokyo were originally supposed to be organized with around five billion euros, but the end result was something completely different.
Although the organizers declared in their report of the games that the costs would eventually be around 13 billion, according to the researchers, things that belong there have been deliberately left out of the amount.
– The organizers practically gave the land of the Olympic Village for free to a group of investors who were committed to developing the area for further use. In addition, investors received considerable tax breaks, Budzier tells one example.
Budzier estimates the final sum of the Tokyo Games to be around 20 billion euros. The investigation group appointed by the Japanese government came to a sum of the same size even before the Games.
Double sums
20 billion would mean that the Tokyo Games exceeded their original budget by 300 percent. In the Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics 2016, the cost overrun was in the same category, 352 percent.
Paris will be the third race host in a row, which has exceeded its budget by more than 100 percent.
– Originally, under the guise of the Olympics, reforms were promised to, for example, the public rail network, so that traveling from one competition venue to another would be as fast as possible. As is so often the case with public projects, the vast majority of them were delayed and were not completed for the Games. However, the costs accumulated until now have disappeared from the budget, says Budzier.
According to Budzieri, a common problem with the budgets announced in competitive bidding is that they do not carry out a sufficient risk assessment. Since Paris won the race in September 2017, inflation has shot up due to, among other things, the corona pandemic and Russia’s war of aggression.
President of the French Court of Auditors Pierre Moscovic reviews for France 24 in March, that the public money spent on the Paris Olympics is something between three and five billion euros. A year earlier, the taxpayers’ cake was estimated to be a good two billion euros.
– It is only possible to estimate the exact amount after the Games, Moscovic said.
The French Court of Auditors is scheduled to issue its report on the Paris Olympics by the fall of 2025.
Security absorbs resources
If the Tokyo Games were closed due to the corona policy, the organizers of the Paris Games have marketed their event by reaching out to the people.
Among other things, the Olympic organizers want to bring the opening ceremony and medal distribution to public places, where tickets are not required. The downside is the ever-increasing security costs.
For example, the police and other security forces participating in the security arrangements requested and received an additional one-time compensation in the range of 1,000–1,900 euros. According to Radio France sources additional funding of 500 million euros is coming for the security of the Games.
– The 2012 London Games had similar security costs. At that time, the organizers had to pay overtime compensation to the police, says Budzier.
How in the future?
In addition to the corona, the Tokyo Olympics were talked about by the glittering competition venues. In Paris, only one completely new performance venue has been built for the Games and will remain standing after the Games.
A similar development can also be seen in the 2028 Los Angeles and 2032 Brisbane Summer Olympics. According to Budzier, despite this, Los Angeles has already increased its budget from 5 billion to 6.4 billion.
There were rumors of cancellation around the Brisbane Games since the beginning of the year. The background was the decision that caused a stir in Australia last summer, when the state of Victoria announced that it would not be able to organize the 2026 Commonwealth Games. The original budget of the event was 1.6 billion euros, of which the costs would have increased to 3.7–4.4 billion.
Brisbane announced in its competition bid that it would organize the 2032 Summer Olympics for 3.5 billion euros. In the recent budget review, the amount has increased by one billion. However, the Australian authorities and competition organizers assure that the Summer Olympics in Brisbane will be held as planned.
A change in attitudes
Budzier and Flyvbjerg have been studying the costs of the Olympic Games for more than a decade. The English doctor says that at first the International Olympic Committee and the rest of the Olympic movement treated them with great suspicion.
In recent years, the duo has received much warmer treatment.
– In the beginning, our work was treated with hostility in the Olympic movement. Nowadays, no one denies the problem of increased costs. Access to information about expenses has become much easier since Tokyo. It has been the result of 12 years of work.