Les JO, poule aux œufs d’or ou gouffre financier ? Plutôt cette dernière option...
« The Curse of the Olympics »
Tokyo has been named host city of the 2020 Olympics, beating out Istanbul for the win. But hold the applause—the games are cursed! Nico Hines on why they’re such a bad business.
▻http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/07/the-curse-of-the-olympics.html
When it comes to inept financial planning, Montreal 1976 was the all-time record-breaker. After going 796 percent over budget, according to a Saïd Business School analysis, it took the Canadian city until 2006 to pay off the debt. Athens 2004 was a similar lesson in mismanagement—the Greek city is calculated to have spent around 5 percent of the nation’s entire GDP on the Games. Indeed, the $12 billion cost of hosting the Games contributed to the Greek economic collapse and left an abandoned Olympic Park, which has been overrun by weeds and graffiti artists.
While Montreal and Athens might be the most blatant manifestations of Olympic armageddon, every city has struggled to build a positive economic legacy of hosting the Games. Sydney 2000 is widely held to have been one of the most successful recent Games, but Bruce Baird, the minister who oversaw the bid in the 1990s, admits the city has been disappointed by the impact. “What’s the old song? ‘Regrets, we’ve had a few’,” he confessed by phone from Australia.
