Economics of pandemic-affected Olympics

Atanu Biswas tells you all about the economics of holding Olympic Games.

A hundred years ago, Belgium recorded a loss of more than 600 million francs by hosting the first pandemic-hit 1920 Antwerp Olympics, following the Spanish flu. The costs of hosting the Olympics have skyrocketed thereafter. In his 2015 book Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup, American economist Andrew Zimbalist outlined the economic impact of hosting such grand events. With television broadcasting becoming widely revenue-generating and a massive increase in the number of Summer Olympics participants and the number of events, the 1970s marked a point of change in this context. Still, Denver rejected