Olympics Dead Say sJeff Ruffolo

THE Olympics are a “poison pill” that more and more cities around the world won’t swallow.

A senior official in the 2008 Beijing Games has declared the Olympics is scaring off interested cities because the costs and economic drain are simply too high.
Jeff Ruffolo, an American who is now helping China prepare its bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics, says the days of cities splurging billions on “white elephant” stadiums and facilities were coming to an end.
It comes after the highly publicised Boston 2024 Olympics bid withdrew yesterday, almost six months after the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) selected it ahead of Los Angeles to be its candidate to host the Games in nine years.
Recently, Oslo (Norway), Krakow (Poland) and Stockholm (Sweden) also pulled out of the race to host the Winter Olympics in 2022.

“The Olympics are dead,” Ruffolo told The Guardian.
“It’s a dying concept no one wants to touch.
“The idea of a bidding process is a joke.
“Everybody’s laughing about it except for the people in Lausanne (Switzerland, home of the IOC). They don’t realise they are riding a dead horse.

“There was a time when the Olympics was a good thing — Los Angeles in 1984, Barcelona in 1992, even Beijing needed 2008 to prove to the world it could do this — now since 2008 it’s a poison pill.”
Only China and Kazakhstan remain in the running to host the 2022 Winter Games.
Ruffolo says it may not be long before countries like China and Kazakhstan are the only ones bidding for the right to host the Olympics because they are hoping to make an international political statement.
Cities like Boston do not need to make a political statement.
The public costs involved in the Boston bid attracted stern opposition from locals concerned the city could be left with a huge debt.
The Boston bid team claimed its budget for public funds would be just $4.5 billion to host the Games and another $6 billion on new roads and parks.

Despite the $4.5 billion being well below the recent London Games’ expenses of $15-20 billion, it was enough to cause concern.
Coupled with the haunting images of the abandoned swimming pool, hockey field and baseball stadium used during the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece, there is a compelling argument to suggest the Olympics is a money-draining machine capable of crippling a host city’s economy.
Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College, recently highlighted this in his book Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup.
He recently told The Wall Street Journal London spent between $15-20 billion on its Games in 2012 while Russia spent $51 billion hosting the Winter Olympics in Sochi last year and China spent $40 billion hosting the 2008 Games in Beijing.
“Several studies on the economic impact of hosting the Olympics ... do not support the expectation of a positive effect on tourism, trade or foreign investment,” Zimbalast said.
“Instead, after the 17-day party is over, experience has shown that the host city can expect facilities that are underutilised, cost millions of dollars yearly to maintain, and take up five to 30 acres each of valuable urban real estate.
“These are the so-called white elephants that preclude alternate use of the land for years or decades into the future.”