The problem is when it's dumped into smaller countries and into small cities where everything is built for no reason.
Expanding a highway or improving subway systems in a major city like London or New York is shit the city governments fight over getting done.
A small city building rail connections and expanding highways, building swathes of luxury condos, etc is destined to collapse the economy. When they have to sell off condos in the Olympic village for $0.10 on the dollar you have a cascade effect down the property market. Why by an ordinary condo when I can get this luxury one no ones buying because everyone who could is now buying in the Olympic village. Why buy a small house on the edge of town when I can buy a nice condo downtown that would've been double my price.
The Olympics are an international event. I don't get why it can't be held internationally. Why do we need soccer in the same country as track and field? Do we have people doing high dive also doing shotput? Is it on a scale we should even care about if we prevent one Olympian?
It would be more manageable, at less risk of failure and would actually benefit the cities its in by not overwhelming the infrastructure.
As a sidenote, i really wonder why people keep phrasing it like this. Why don't you just say:
> for 10%
or
> with a 90% discount
Why would international scattering influence spectators? Flying between countries is only a little bit more annoying than flying between cities that are far apart in places like the USA.
Whether scattered in one country or internationally, I think most spectators would pick their favorite event and only go there, catching the other events on the internet (if they were scattered, entry into one olympic venue would probably include live streaming access to other events). Even if scheduling would permit flying between locations, I don't think most people would.
Scattering would also influence the social atmosphere in any one location. The olympics are almost more important as a social congregation than as a series of sporting events. Scattering them at all would disrupt that.
So, for example São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil. However, Campinas is less than 60 miles away and it's #10. Together they avoid a lot of wasted construction and end up much better off in the long term.
I don't know how many spectators would want to take bus or taxi rides between cities even if they were 1-2 hours apart. That increases logistics problems for everyone, travel plans, complexity of hotel bookings, etc.
I think my last concern might be the most significant. Scattering the olympics between two or three cities means the energy of the olympics wouldn't be the same: multiple olympic villages, and less mingling of athletes and spectators there for different sports.
Costs would be spread out between cities, but so would advantages, and the cost/benefit ratio might actually increase. It would be an interesting thing to study.
Baltimore and DC tried to do a joint bid. Between the two of them they have very fast and efficient public transportation links (DC to Balto. in about 45 mins) but the IOC said no. It was really sad because between the two of us, many of the venues for a summer games already exist. Maybe that was the bigger problem, the IOC and FIFA want brand new venues and don't care if the cities will use them afterwards.
There is only one official Olympic Village and several unofficial ones. Because the alpine events were 60 miles away from downtown Vancouver, those athletes stayed in accommodations on the mountain.
A far cry from the billions of public dollars sunk into backwater Sochi.
The images of the aftermath of Sochi are just terrible. Russia pumped and dumped the city. They knew reporters only stick around for the Olympics and within a week they can abandon the city.
I can't knock the Skytrain line to the airport or the road improvements to Whistler, which are lovely conveniences for Vancouverites but which cost taxpayers in St John's a good deal of money (and which would have been done with federal money regardless) but it doesn't change the fact that the Olympics were a lousy way to get things done (the short platforms on the Canada Line are an example of the corners cut to meet the artificial deadline involved.)
So what we can say is that in a country with an effective, robust democracy, the Olympics were still an expensive, inefficient way of promoting public infrastructure. Sadly, they may have been "better than nothing" given our ongoing neglect of that infrastructure, but surely the lesson there is to improve our democracy, not volunteer to have a gun held to our head by the IOC.
The hosting of the Olympics by any city is prima facie evidence of democratic failure, and I would hope that no Canadian city will ever again act as host without a national vote posing the question, "Do we want to spend twice as much money on bribes and security as it would take to build a few useful infrastructure improvements, or do we want to give 1/3 the amount we would otherwise spend to the host city to build themselves a new LRT/highway/whatever if they promise to never put themselves forward as host for the five ring circus again?"
Neither group has great incentives for good long-term investment in infrastructure. The Olympics are desirable for emotional/patriotic reasons, and at the same time happen to set up an incentive structure which supports infrastructure investment.
Because its a money losing proposition for the host(s) in any case, and the payoff (such as it is) is the prestige of being the unique host. I suspect that splitting the events N ways would result in per-host costs of greater than 1/N times the single-host cost, and per-host perceived benefits of less than 1/N times the single-host benefits, and even less willingness to host.
In concrete terms, I'll pay $1 for a liter of water, but I won't pay $1M for a megaliter.
I suspect the opposite. Many cities and nations have the infrastructure to support a 1/N sized event with little to no investment. If events are hosted by cities that already have the facilities then costs consist of things like borrowing extra buses from nearby cities and paying overtime for police which seem negligible compared to current Olympic costs.
> per-host perceived benefits of less than 1/N times the single-host benefits
This rings true for me and I would add that the total esteem of the Olympic games would diminish. I think that it would be in the interest of host nations to split up the games, but against the interest of the International Olympic Committee.
Similarly, Salt Lake City was hardly a city before 2002 and now has a big tech industry, great public transportation and incredibly progressive compared to the rest of Utah.
Obviously it doesn't work out for everyone and costs have certainly gotten bloated in the last 20 years, but it's unfair to lump all the Olympic towns together like you do.
And to your point of making it international it would destroy tourist numbers for the event as (at least in my experience) the point of going to the Olympics is to take in the event as a whole, not just individual sports which no one really cares about outside of the Olympics.
What? Salt Lake City hardly changed with the Olympics. The ski resorts were already there, the hockey arena was already there, the Olympic stadium was already there. The main things that was added were some cool signage, a few Olympic monuments and some roadway improvements which were already in progress. One of the biggest things built, the Olympic Park - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Olympic_Park, isn't even in Salt Lake, it is in Park City.
Attributing Salt Lake City becoming what it is today because of the Olympics is causation/correlation. Maybe the Olympics came to Salt Lake because of what it was?
It's only negative ROI for the taxpayer. The Olympics and the World Cup are just excuses for graft.