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Would hosting Olympics in Toronto be good for the city?

Olympic bids are about more than just money

With the end of the Pan Am Games in sight, Toronto Mayor John Tory is teasing the public with the possibility that the city might submit a bid for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.

These international and sporting events are “good for Toronto, good for Ontario and good for Canada,” Tory tells reporters.

But are they?

In recent years, the Olympic motto of “Higher, Faster, Stronger” might as well be “Bigger, Bloated, More Expensive.”

When it comes to Olympic hosts in hock, Toronto doesn’t have to go far afield for a prime example. The 1976 Games in Montreal remains a standard-bearer of Olympic bloat.

It took the province 30 years to pay off its Olympic debt. By then, the “Big Owe,” as they like to call the Olympic Stadium, was a crumbling shell.

But the $1.5 billion debt left to Montreal is chump change compared to the astronomical costs of Olympic Games today.

The Sochi Winter Games last year set an Olympic record with a final tally in the $51 billion range.

The 2008 Beijing Games cost a reported $42.5 billion.

The 2016 Games in Brazil is already overrun by almost $5 billion, according to reports, ballooning to $24.1 billion with a year left to go and a long list of unfinished projects.

“In general, I would say that it is not at all a good investment for a city to make,” Andrew Zimbalist, author of the book Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble of Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup, tells Yahoo Canada News.

Four of the six cities originally vying for the 2022 Winter Games seem to agree. They’ve pulled out of the bidding process, scared off in part by the exorbitant cost of the Sochi Games.

Only Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Beijing remain in the race, after Stockholm, Oslo, Norway, Krakow, Poland, and Lviv, Ukraine, abandoned their bids. Germany and Switzerland did not submit bids after voters rejected the idea in referendums even before the bidding process began.

Craig Greenham, an Olympic historian at the University of Windsor, says any country hosting the Games with an expectation of making money is kidding itself.

“Make no mistake, the Olympics generates revenue but it usually leaves the host city financially strapped with facilities that many cities find too costly to maintain,” he tells Yahoo Canada News.

Sochi was “irresponsibly” expensive.

“I don’t expect that you will see spending that wild again for a while and some scaling back is probably only natural,” he says.

In an effort to rein in the skyrocketing cost, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) adopted reforms last year.

“Potential bid cities are encouraged to place greater emphasis on the use of existing venues, and temporary and demountable venues where no long-term need exists or can be justified,” it says.

Mayor Tory points out that, thanks to the Pan Am Games, Toronto has several world-class venues already.

That’s a big bonus for the city, Greenham says.

“One of the reasons that the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles are considered among the best games ever was because it was able to use a lot of pre-existing facilities,” he says. “From that standpoint, Toronto is in the best position it has ever been to play host to the world.”

And the Games do have an upside, he says: they cast a global gaze like few other events can.

“Particularly if the hosting goes well, it cements Toronto’s status as a city of the world and few events can provide that stamp of global approval like the Olympics,” he says.

If the city, which lost its bid to host the 2008 Games to Beijing, does decide to toss its hat in the ring it will have to make that decision quickly.

Bidding cities must submit letters to the IOC by Sept. 15, and the winner will be announced in 2017.

Boston, Hamburg, Germany, and Paris have already announced they will vie for the 2024 Games.