And yet cities end up losing money when hosting the Olympics most of the time.
In general, the revenue brought in from the games does not equate to the money put out by the host city. London generated $5.2 billion in revenue against its $14.6 billion spent, said Investopedia. In 2010, Vancouver spent $7.6 billion on the Olympics but brought in only $2.8 billion. In 2008, Beijing’s $42 billion investment generated revenue of just $3.6 billion. In fact, every Olympics since 1960 has been over budget, and an analysis from the University of Oxford found the games overrun their costs by an average of 172%. Los Angeles in 1984 remains the “only host city that realized a profit from the games,” Investopedia said, but this is largely “because the infrastructure required of them already existed.”