Last night on The Feed Australia’s former Immigration Minister and Ambassador to Italy, Amanda Vanstone, called for an end to the international rotation of the Olympic Games.
They should be permanently based in Greece, she said.
“I suspect – and I don’t think I’m in a very small club here – that there’s a bit of corruption that goes on when the IOC are looking around the world to decide which capital will next host the Olympics,” Vanstone said.
“You could get rid of the whiff of corruption – some would say even the stench – if you just gave it back to its ancestral home, Greece,” she said.
Vanstone also questioned the money spent on the Olympics, at the expense of other government priorities.
The former Ambassador's 'not very small' club includes head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde.
“To the extent that it’s going to create demand – which is what this economy absolutely needs – it would be great,” Lagarde said in June.
Brazilians might have been happy to have this year’s games held in Greece. As many as 60% say they expect the Olympics to do more harm than good.
“I am so upset,” 64-year-old Rio native Marie Auxiliadora told the New York Times in an article last week.
“I have not gotten my retirement check for a month. Our hospitals and schools are broken. Shooting every day, and they spend all of our money on this Olympics,” she said.
“The rich play, and we die.” – Marie Auxiliadora
Economists at the University of Oxford have estimated the cost of this year’s games in Rio to be $6 billion, in a country suffering a severe recession, unemployment levels above 11% and declining wages.
The cost overrun – estimated at just above 50% – is in line with the usual cost over-runs for countries holding the Olympics, economists said.
To make things worse, there’s a lot of research to show that the money will likely be a bad investment.
A 2004 study Matheson was involved with found that the promised economic benefits of mega-sporting events such as the Olympics often failed to materialise.
“Supporters of mega-sporting events such as the World Cup and Olympics claim that these events attract hoards of wealthy visitors and lead to lasting economic benefits for the host regions,” the report said.
“Independent researchers nearly unanimously find that boosters’ projections of the economic impact of sporting events exaggerate the true economic impact of these competitions by a wide margin,” it found.
In a 2007 report, researchers at Monash University in Australia found that the 2000 Sydney Olympics also failed to deliver on promised gains.
“[In] terms of purely measurable economic variables […] the Sydney Olympics has had a negative effect on New South Wales and Australia as a whole,” the report found. “In present value terms the loss in Australian real private and public consumption […] is $2.1 billion.”
Professor Victor Matheson, an economist who specialises in ‘mega sports events’, says the culprit for runaway spending is the International Olympic Committee.
Given the fierce competition among cities to hold the games, the IOC is in a position to make exorbitant demands, he says
In October 2014, Norway withdrew its bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics in Oslo after the IOC’s demands were leaked.
Officials wanted schools to be closed to minimise traffic, a cocktail party with the King before the opening ceremony, complete control over all public advertising spaces in the city, free Samsung phones, and 50 luxury cars with drivers.
“Cities not only have to worry about accommodating all of the events but also presenting a lavish enough bid to beat out the competition,” Matheson wrote last week.
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach. The IOC has been criticised for turning the selection process into a spending war. Source: AAP
Amanda Vanstone agrees, telling The Feed that the IOC should focus on running a good, clean Olympics, not the side-issue of selecting a new host every two years.
While she suggested Athens as a permanent host, like it was in ancient times, she wasn’t exactly singing Greece’s praises.
“They don’t have a lot of natural resources like we do, they’re not industrious people like the Chinese, or with a work ethic like the Germans – so giving them the Olympics would give them something to make a buck out of,” she said.
“And they need that.”
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