How to host an embarrassing Olympic Games｜China's Olympic bid scandal｜The truth behind the Olympic bid｜The history of the Olympic bid｜Let's talk about Marley

As we all know, the Beijing Winter Olympics is an Olympic Games that has been controversial in the international community. Coupled with the recent incidents such as Peng Shuai and the Chain Girl, the ominous atmosphere of this Winter Olympics has been cast again. An awkward shadow. So without these things, would Beijing 2022 be a successful Olympics? Today we will talk about this topic.

Hello everyone, I'm Marley, this is a small channel that advocates thinking and tearing fifty cents by hand. In each issue, we will combine a political and economic case to discuss the reasons behind him and different thinking dimensions.

Today we are not talking about the clichés of human rights, boycotts, etc. I'll bring you another interesting perspective on the untold secrets of the Olympics or the Olympics.

This is July 31, 2015, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the International Olympic Committee announced the success of Beijing's bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. Following the successful bid for the Olympic Games in 2001, China once again celebrated the whole country, and successfully won the Olympic Games twice. If we say that 2001 was regarded as standing out from the powers, or the Olympic Committee gave China a huge face. What secret did China rely on for its successful bid for the Olympics in 2015? Is it expected? Or is there another reason? Let's find out.

We all know that, in addition to Beijing, there were also six cities competing for the 2022 Winter Olympics, including Krakow, Poland, Stockholm, Sweden, Oslo, Norway, Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Lviv, Ukraine. In terms of absolute economic strength, China is definitely the richest, and Sweden and Norway are not bad either. Of course, it is important to have money to host the Olympics, but more importantly, money can make a ghost run the mill. key factor. Since 2014, the second year of the bid, cities in 4 countries have withdrawn from the bid process one after another. In the end, only Beijing and Almaty are left. Beijing is basically in the finals, so Beijing wins. It's not surprising at all. So the question is, why did Stockholm, Oslo, Lviv, and Krakow withdraw from the Olympic bid process from cities whose natural conditions are more suitable for winter sports?

Before explaining this problem, let's look at a set of data. According to a report by the Association for Foreign Relations, a think tank in the United States, the cost of bidding for the Olympics is about $50 million to $100 million, mainly including the cost of planning, hiring consultants, organizing events and necessary travel. This is just a tender. stage. Since 1960, the budget of each Olympic Games has exceeded the budget by an average of 172%. The Beijing 08 Olympic Games has been the king of the Summer Olympics with an expenditure of more than 45 billion US dollars. Until the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, the good brother, Russia, exceeded 50 billion US dollars. Spending 5 times your budget tops the list. Taking the Winter Olympics as an example, four of the seven Winter Olympics seasons from 1992 to 2014 lost money, and the average cost of these seven Olympics was 125.1% overrun.

Once a city is selected as the host city, it takes nearly ten years to build new stadiums, infrastructure, and at the same time pay for various manpower, security and other related areas. According to the picture below, we can see that the expenses related to sports construction are not the main part of the cost. 85% of the money for the Sochi Winter Olympics is used to build non-sports infrastructure from scratch, while the Beijing 08 Olympics Half of the money goes to railways, roads and airports, and a quarter goes to environmental cleanup. According to verifiable data, the current investment in the Beijing Winter Olympics has exceeded 10 billion US dollars, including the 1 billion US dollars of high-speed rail lines and 5 billion US dollars of highways and other projects. This does not include such incalculable costs as the cost of epidemic prevention. Last year, the Tokyo Olympics spent 2.8 billion US dollars on epidemic prevention. If China's "clearing" strategy is followed, the cost of epidemic prevention is naturally not a small amount.

In this way, it is really impossible to take up this porcelain work without a little family background. Speaking of which, many people will ask, why is it so expensive to host the Olympics, and why are there still many countries flocking to it?

Let's take the Summer Olympics as an example to briefly sort out the history of the Olympic bid. Before the war, we will not discuss it because it is relatively long. During the Cold War, the Olympic Games were more about the demonstration of the advantages of the Eastern and Western camps. to Moscow in 1980. Among them, the estimated cost of the 1976 Montreal Olympics was $124 million, but the actual cost was about $1.6 billion, 10 times more than the budget, leaving the city with a debt of $1.5 billion. The new tax type of "Olympic Special Tax", that is, debt repayment, will be paid for 30 years, and it will not end until November 2006. What is even more outrageous is that the construction of the main venue of the Montreal Olympics began in 1970. Due to various reasons, it was only announced to be completely completed in 1987. It is also the most swollen and fat person in the history of the Olympic Games. It was called the "Montreal Trap" in history.

Due to the aftermath of the "Montreal Trap", the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics became the only Olympics without competitors. Due to the relatively complete infrastructure of Los Angeles itself, and the first time in history that it was contracted to a private company (Uber Ross), through the successful business operations of Uber Ross, the Olympic Games earned more than 200 million US dollars and became a company that can profitable project. Inspired by the Los Angeles Olympic Games and the continuous profitability of the subsequent Olympic Games, the Olympic Committee and various countries seem to realize that this is a profitable business. Since then, a climax of the Olympic bid has been opened, from the bid of two cities in 1988 to The 12 cities competed in 2004. More developing countries have also joined the game to reflect their progress, such as China and Russia.

Due to the quick success of various countries and the deception of the Olympic Committee, the standards of the Olympic Games have been raised higher and higher, and finally the 2004 Athens Olympic Games have suffered bad results. This centennial Olympic Games is the Olympic Games with the most serious losses so far, with an investment of more than 10 billion US dollars and income less than $2 billion. After the end of the Olympic Games, the various venues, hotels and other facilities that were built for the Olympic Games at a high cost were ignored, and did not bring the imagined tourism benefits to Greece, which eventually led to a financial crisis and became an important reason for Greece's national bankruptcy in 2010. one.

In addition, the legacy of the "white elephant" is an eternal pain for cities around the world that have hosted the Olympic Games. The so-called "white elephant" refers to the venue facilities that were only used for more than ten days during the Olympic Games, and most of them will be abandoned after the end of the Olympic Games. Maintenance costs, interest on the original loan, and the opportunity cost of the land are the long-term costs. The maintenance cost of the Sydney Olympic Stadium is 30 million US dollars per year, and the annual maintenance cost of Beijing's "Bird's Nest" is 10 million US dollars, and there are countless abandoned venues.

Compared with the Summer Olympics attended by tens of thousands of people, the profit and loss of the Winter Olympics with less than 3,000 athletes is even more "horrible". Let's take a look at the recent sessions, Nagano, Japan in 1998. The government spent 19 billion US dollars to build high-speed rail, stadiums and other facilities. After the Olympic Games, for a small city with a population of less than 400,000, high maintenance costs It directly brought down Nagano's economy. In 2010, Vancouver's Olympic Village was taken over by the city government because the developer could not pay nearly $1 billion in loans. By 2014, most of the houses were not sold, and the city government lost $300 million. Because of this debt, the education, healthcare and cultural budgets of Vancouver and BC have been drastically reduced since then. In addition to breaking Beijing's money-burning record, Sochi in 2014 also surpassed all previous Winter Olympics combined. At the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, the Gangwon-do government lost $8.5 million a year to maintain unused facilities.

After calculating so many economic accounts, everyone will definitely ask, is there no benefit in hosting the Olympic Games? Of course there are "benefits!"

The International Olympic Committee, after each Olympics, calls it an unparalleled feast or the best Olympics ever. However, the reason behind this is a temptation and cheating full of interests. After the Sydney Olympics in 2000, in order to fool the big guns and takers, the International Olympic Committee invented a new term for long-term benefits - "Olympic Legacy", which includes building new infrastructure, improving tourism, reducing crime rates, There are a total of more than 10 heritages such as social harmony, but carefully found that these heritages are not quantifiable and estimated. Just like building a lot of statues of musicians in a city, it doesn't make people in this city love music and become a music capital. Moreover, even if these benefits are real, it will take years or even decades to feel them, and there are many uncertain factors.

For example, economists have found that the Olympics' stimulus to tourism is not absolute, as safety, crowding and the heightened Olympics have kept many tourists away. The 1992 Barcelona Olympics, considered a success, only rose from 11th to 6th in Europe's most popular tourist destination after the Olympics. Sydney and Vancouver both saw small increases in tourism following the Olympics, but tourism in London, Beijing and Salt Lake City declined during the Games.

For another example, China's practice is to overhaul infrastructure such as subways and highways before holding large-scale events. If this is also considered an Olympic legacy, we can't help but ask, is it okay to not do things like the Olympics? There is a post on Zhihu about the discussion of the Olympic effect. Someone said that he obviously felt that the business was better after 2008, and that he felt that he was making more and more money. Someone replied, "Are you sure this is not the effect of four trillion yuan" ? Therefore, there are many, many more things about the unverifiable nature of the Olympic heritage, but if you search on Baidu, it seems that the Chinese government almost always regards this heritage as a truth to affirm and publicize it. The mystery of this is that I don’t say that you should be able to. Get it.

Therefore, hosting an Olympic Games is like a huge gamble. For the local government, it is a good opportunity to promote their city, but whether you can make money depends on whether you have bets and whether you can play.

Let's go back to the Winter Olympics bid that year. If you are the mayor of Stockholm or Oslo, are you already in a cold sweat. If you play well and leave your name, you will be a sinner through the ages. In terms of hardware conditions, financial resources and experience, Stockholm, Sweden and Oslo, Norway are strong competitors for Beijing. But just 64 days after submitting the bid, on January 17, 2014, Stockholm announced that it had withdrawn from the bid for the 2022 Olympic Games, because the city council voted against it, mainly because of the "huge investment" and "Olympic stadium competition". It has little value for later use.” In May of the same year, Krakow, the ancient capital of Poland, also withdrew from the local referendum for the same reason. A month later, Lviv, Ukraine also announced that it had withdrawn from the Olympic bid because Russia invaded Ukraine and occupied Crimea a few days after the Sochi Winter Olympics. As a country that has just hosted the Olympic Games, it is really a Great irony.

In the referendum on the Olympic bid held by the Oslo City Council in September 2013, 55% of voters supported the bid. But by June 2014, support for the Olympics had slipped to 24 percent in national polls, and three of the country's four political parties had declared their opposition to the bid. However, the last straw that killed Oslo's bid for the bid turned out to be a 7,000-page bid manual, which included numerous requirements from the International Olympic Committee to the bidding city. For example, the Olympic Committee requires to meet the king before the opening ceremony, and then hold a reception. The cost of this must be paid by the palace or the local organizing committee; the Olympic Committee must accept the welcome ceremony after arriving at the airport, and a separate airport entrance and exit is required; the Olympic Committee Members' rooms should have welcome greetings from the local organizing committee chairman and hotel manager, as well as seasonal fruits and cakes; and Olympic committee members need dedicated lanes, which cannot be mixed with public transport, etc. Until this report was released, the Oslo government was still considering whether to reduce the budget and then fight for it. When it saw such an exaggerated bid request, Oslo officially announced on October 1, 2014, you play, I will go first .

In the original six-city battle carefully planned by the International Olympic Committee, the last four players took the initiative to withdraw, leaving Beijing and Almaty in the end. In particular, Oslo's withdrawal made the IOC lose face. As a city that has successfully hosted two Winter Olympics, his withdrawal made IOC President Bach very unhappy, although he tried to explain that these so-called demands were just bids recommended, not mandatory. But the IOC's self-righteous and blatant demands that almost amount to bribery may only be met by a country like China.

Having said that, the story of Beijing's so-called victory over other cities to win the 2022 Winter Olympics is almost clear. Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, once sighed that why these withdrawing cities held a referendum seven years ago, this is a bit too democratic. When the leeks of the dynasty were still proud that Beijing was the only city with two Olympics, and envied Gu Ailing, who was better in appearance, ability and even nationality than himself, the Norwegian, who is the number one player in winter sports, should breathe a sigh of relief. Luckily we escaped!

However, just four days before Beijing was elected, Boston in the United States withdrew from its bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics due to economic problems and popular opposition, followed by Hamburg, Rome and Budapest for the same reason. In September 2017, only the remaining two cities, Paris and Los Angeles, were designated by the International Olympic Committee to host the 2024 and 2028 Games.