In honor of the winter Olympics, a camaraderie-building world-wide event, lots of promotion in favor of the games is broadcasted. However, there are a lot of cons to the Olympics that are not widely known. The Olympics are often thought to boost the economy in the country and city in which they are hosted, but this is almost never the case.
In many cities, the Olympics harm the residents by displacing them. Both Beijing and Rio forcibly and brutally evicted people at extremely high rates while giving them little to no compensation. If the Olympics are supposed to help the economy, ruining small businesses by making them completely leave their city definitely isn’t helpful, especially in the long run.
In Rio, after the games, they had hoped that the Olympic Village could be used as high-end apartments. However, no one wanted to invest so they quickly became abandoned buildings, and this is the case in many cities. So, not only did they have a bunch of abandoned buildings, they no longer had all of the residents they had evicted who likely could not find space or could no longer afford to move back into the city.
In the Los Angeles games, they actually made a profit on the games and have been using the money to fund youth sport programs, but this is the only case in which a country has profited. This is because, instead of spending money in the city, tourists stay in the stadium to buy things like meals. Additionally, the cost of boosting the city’s infrastructure and building giant sports complexes far exceeds the profit brought in.
Since 1960, there hasn’t been an Olympic Games that hasn’t gone over budget. On average, cities spend 152 percent over budget for winter games and 252 percent over budget for summer Olympics.
These stadiums create another problem altogether. Because they were built for such a specific purpose, often times they are not reused. The Nest from the Beijing games held the opening ceremonies and is still standing – but vacant. The games in Rio had a similar outcome. So much money is put into building these amazing stadiums and they are used only a few times. The stadium built for the winter games in Pyeongchang this year will only be used three times after the opening ceremony. It holds 35,000 people which is almost the entire population of Pyeongchang at 40,000. A city of this size has no use for all of the space a venue like this provides. Additionally, the materials and labor put into making this and all of the other venues needs to be found at a cheap price to keep costs down.
However, the way people go about acquiring these resources is often unethical. Human trafficking numbers rise during large sporting events, including the winter games. Human trafficking can be forced labor, including sexual labor, and child labor and all forms of it are illegal, yet cases rise in numbers during these large gatherings.
This year is particularly bad because of the Super Bowl, Olympics, and World Cup all occurring within the span of a few months. Because these events cost so much money, they often turn to cheap labor to build and provide the goods and services needed to pull these large-scale projects together.
All of this is not to say I wish the Olympics didn’t happen. I think there is a lot to be said about how the world can come together and pull something like this off every two years. I also think that the representation the Olympics and Paralympics can provide is majorly important.
What I wish would happen is that the Olympics would always be held in the same place, year after year. If profits were made, I think it should be given back to the IOC who could allocate the money as they see fit- either for fixing infrastructure or promoting the Olympics.
Emma Farina
Opinions Columnist