Toward a Sustainable Olympics — Beyond the Swelling

Beginning with the festivals of ancient Olympia, this series has traced the world history of the money that has driven the Olympics—the ideals of the modern Games, their growth into the giant business of broadcast rights and sponsors, the money surrounding bids, and the shadow of doping. Now the story arrives at the present day. What we see there is a paradox born at the far end of prosperity.

Once, hosting the Olympics was an honor for a city. It was a perfect stage to draw the world’s attention, renew the streets, and display a nation’s power. That is precisely why so many cities competed fiercely over bids. Yet in recent years, that landscape has quietly changed. The cities raising their hands have vanished one after another. The Olympics, once so coveted, were becoming, at some point, ‘something one would rather not take on.’ The final episode looks at the reason for this paradox, and at the question that lies beyond it.

The Cities Raising Their Hands Are Disappearing

Behind the withdrawal of cities from Olympic bids lay the ballooning of hosting costs. The massive deficit of the 1976 Montreal Games, which we saw in the fourth episode of this series, is by no means a story of the past. The larger the scale of the Games grew, the more the costs of new competition venues, transport networks, and security swelled, and that burden would eventually fall upon the residents.

Symbolic of this was the wall of public will in the form of referendums. In the bidding for the 2024 Summer Olympics, a number of cities are said to have withdrawn their candidacies, citing concerns over fiscal burden and a lack of public support. Some cities pulled out following the results of a referendum. Citizens had begun to hesitate over pouring their own taxes into a giant sporting festival. As a result of that accumulation, in the end only a very few cities remained.

The decline in candidate cities was a grave situation for the IOC as well. Bidding functions soundly only when there are cities competing. And so an unusual decision was taken: to determine the hosts of both 2024 and 2028 at the same time. An age had arrived in which, before considering ‘how to host’ the Olympics, one had to worry about ‘who would host them at all.’

A Stadium Without Spectators — Tokyo 2020

As the question of swelling deepened around the world, another unforeseen trial struck the Olympics. It was the global spread of the novel coronavirus.

The Tokyo Games, which were to have been held in 2020, were postponed for one year for the first time in history. And the following year, in 2021, though the Games did go ahead, many venues were held without spectators, making for an event under unprecedented constraints. In place of cheers, the breathing of athletes echoed through hushed stadiums. What the world saw through their screens may have been not money or scale, but the competition itself.

At the Tokyo Games, alongside infection control, simplification of the Games was also pursued. According to the organizing committee, with the cooperation of the IOC and others, operations were simplified, leading to a corresponding reduction in costs. On the other hand, additional burdens arose due to the postponement and infection measures, and the total cost of the Games was announced to have ultimately reached a scale exceeding one trillion yen. The Games, stripped of their splendor, ended up unexpectedly asking what the Olympics truly need.

Simplification — Re-examining the Road Already Traveled

Reflection on the swelling gave rise to a search for reform. At its center was a guideline for reform that the IOC adopted in 2014. There, as a direction for curbing hosting costs, it set out using existing facilities and temporary venues rather than building lavish new ones, and allowing distributed hosting across multiple cities and regions.

This was also a re-examination of the road the Olympics had traveled. A festival that had kept swelling toward bigger and more lavish came to a halt and looked back on the road it had come. Use over new construction, sustainability over expansion. That shift in thinking can be said to have been an attempt by the Olympics to find an answer to the reality of vanishing bidding cities.

That said, there are various views on whether the reforms are sufficient or remain merely cosmetic. While some voices welcome the simplification, there are also those who point out that it has not reached a fundamental solution. The challenges the Olympics face are not simple enough to be solved by a single guideline. Yet it is certain that the sense of crisis that ‘things cannot continue as they are’ became a force driving reform.

What, and For Whom, Are the Olympics

The festival once dedicated to the gods at ancient Olympia became, over more than two thousand years, a giant stage watched by people the world over. Its journey was the very history of human ideals and desires, of emotion and money, inseparably intertwined.

Commercialization rescued the Olympics from the crisis of deficits and gave them the power to reach the entire world. At the same time, it also invited the shadows surrounding bids, the temptation of doping, and the burden of swelling. Light and shadow remain inseparable to the end. ‘Did commercialization save the Olympics, or did it transform their nature?’—to this question, no single correct answer can be given. Depending on one’s standpoint, the answers branch into many.

Even so, once every four years, the world gazes at the same stage. Beyond nationality and language, there are surely moments when people are moved by the same competition. To what extent has that value been supported, and to what extent damaged, by money grown enormous and by problems repeated again and again? What, and for whom, do the Olympics exist? There is no need to rush to an answer. Continuing to ask is itself the work that carries this festival into the future. Each one of us, looking up at the next podium, searches for an answer of our own. Beyond that, perhaps, lies the form of a sustainable Olympics.

Thank you for staying with us all this way. If this journey, tracing the Olympics through the lens of money, shows you a slightly different view the next time you watch an opening ceremony, there could be no greater joy.

【The Olympics and Money: The Giant Business Behind the Games — End】