3 key takeaways from Paris on hosting a successful Olympics

Athletes train for years, if not decades, in anticipation of the Games, as do the host cities. It’s no small feat to have 329 medal events in 32 different sports, around 10,000 athletes and counting, while hosting millions of visitors.

The stakes were high for Paris, as it was the venue for the event for the first time in 100 years. It hoped to do things differently by being the “greenest” iteration of the Olympics yet, turning to renewable energy sources, plant-based foods and rental sports equipment.

Paris’s investment in games didn’t stop there. The French capital has pledged to landscape the River Seine to use for open water swimming events – a move that, er, didn’t go to plan. It also built a new train line to help improve connectivity to Olympic venues.

While Paris took a fresh approach in some areas, it faced the same baggage that host cities inevitably struggle with: cost overruns.

The 2024 Games are estimated to have cost just $10 billion, 25 percent over budget, S&P Global Ratings estimates. This is not as big an overreach as the Sochi (2014) or Rio (2016) Olympics, but it still reflects the difficult trade-off cities must make when accepting the monumental task of hosting the Olympics.

“We’re seeing more spending on the infrastructure side of things, but the operational side is also not without pressure,” said Alexander Budzier, a fellow in management practice at Oxford University’s Said Business School, who co-authored of a study. study of olympic legacy of overspending.

In some ways, the Paris Olympics are on the verge of rethinking future events of this magnitude: should they stay as they are, or do they desperately need to change?

Battles of Paris

In preparation for the Olympics, Paris has decided to limit the number of new venues it builds to keep costs and carbon emissions under control. And so it happened. But in the process, the city engaged in what some called “social cleansing” as it relocated hundreds of people living near Île-Saint-Denis, where the Olympic Village is located, and elsewhere. The government denied that the move had any correlation with the Olympics.

The event appeared to have gotten off to a poor start when the opening ceremony was marred by heavy rain, out-of-sync footage and controversial acts that some saw as a parody of The Last Supper.

Sena’s preparation for an event of this magnitude was also a problem. The river has been almost dangerously polluted since the start of the Games. Then the athletes began to fall ill after swimming in the river (although it has not yet been confirmed whether the Seine is to blame).

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Some of those hiccups are to be expected and difficult to plan for, said Ken Hanscom, who was involved with the U.S. Olympic team and is COO of ticketing platform TicketManager.
“A few bumps that were expected along the way. But I think the number of bumps that were here (in Paris) was very, very small,” Hanscom said. wealth.

The Olympic “hangover”.

Cities have historically been “hungover” after hosting the Olympics. The 2004 Athens Olympics, while significant given its provenance, came at such a price that it was believed to have led to Greece’s financial crisis.

Meanwhile, the Rio Olympics eight years ago left the Brazilian capital with abandoned facilities after the Games. In Tokyo, corruption scandals have followed the city’s efforts to host the event and gain ground amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Is Paris immune to these effects? Maybe not, but he’s certainly progressed from the mistakes made by some of his predecessors.

Cost concerns, for example, persist even as the French capital has shifted to cardboard beds and fewer new locations.

The paper co-authored by Budzier found that Paris was, in fact, 115% above its original estimate in real terms. Otherwise, those costs could have been spent on public services – a concern that Budapest residents recognized and signed a petition for, leading to Hungary’s withdrawal from the 2024 Olympics seven years ago. The Paris Olympics had their fair share of criticism for the same reason, although the event went ahead as planned.

Since the IOC launched Agenda 2020 to change the way future Olympics will be organized, cities, including Paris, have had to think more about how to make the events sustainable. This has enabled progress, but it will take time to become sustainable.

Mustafa Yalcin—Anadolu/Getty Images

“The estimated costs of what this will take are coming down. At the same time, the overruns are still there,” Budzier said. “It doesn’t look like Paris, right now, is benefiting economically from it (the Olympics), so the benefits will come later.”

There were also great successes through the legacy of the Olympic Games. For example, when Los Angeles hosted the Games in 1984, it left the city with $223 million in profits. The London 2012 Olympic Games were led as a model for how the Games can stimulate urban regeneration and create infrastructure to benefit local communities.

The 3 characteristics of an Olympic success

So what does it take for the Olympics to be successful? Hanscom, which has participated in four of the iterations so far, named three things in addition to the fundamentals, such as safety.

First, staying reasonably within budget is a win-win. The Paris Olympics didn’t really achieve this, but they did help limit some of the big infrastructure and operational expenses. This is also part of an ongoing, evolving effort to reconcile the numbers. Paris officials justify the costs because they plan to repurpose Olympic Village units for housing after the Games, and their rewards may be hard to quantify.

Second, strong local participation means that everyone directly affected by being in the host country or city is immersed in a grand sporting experience. In Paris, a large number of spectators were expected to be French – a trend that Hanscom also noticed.

There were rumblings of unsold tickets and unbooked hotel rooms as fewer international tourists came to the city (which hurt Air France KLM’s revenue) ahead of the Games. But hey, at least the French passed.

In the end, Hanscom emphasized that the Olympics put on a good show for in-person and television viewers. The Olympics have suffered from a decline in viewership in recent years and she has been desperate to reverse this. But this year, the opening ceremony became the most watched event on French TV. The data shows that viewership numbers have even increased globally.

Bai Yu—CHINASPORTS/VCG/Getty Images

So, overall, Paris could have succeeded, Hanscom said.

“I think there’s a progression of how they can continue to improve and evolve, because now when you look at L.A. as well, I don’t think there’s a single new facility that’s going to be built,” he said. he said. “It can always get better.”

Highlighting the hosting of the Games can generate a positive “leverage effect”, Budzier points out.

“Hosting the Olympics allows you to do things that otherwise probably take decades of public debate and piecemeal interventions in a city that you just can do,” he said.

Take, for example, the cleaning of the river Seine. French leaders have promised in the past to make swimming possible again, but the deadline kept being pushed back further – until Paris committed to hosting the Olympics. The city spent $1.5 billion, which made the river water less contaminated. Sure, the Seine wasn’t in the best shape, but more has been done to clean it up in recent years than in previous decades.

The world is eagerly watching how the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics will fare better in the wake of the tournament and its legacy. She is optimistic enough, for now, that the idea of ​​a successful iteration of the Games is evolving, slowly but surely.