Olympic economics

Another Olympic is gone and a lot of money has been spent by a city and a country that would have loved escaping such a burden. At a projected $11.5 billion, that's a lot of money, and this is just a “projection”. Of course it pales in comparison with $51 billion spent in Sochi and $44 billion spent in Beijing!

This made me think that a better to run the Olympics would be for the various nations and sport federations involved to take control of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and pick up the bill for the cost of infrastructure and operations to build and run an Olympic venue based on the number of athletes and officials each national federation sends to the games.

At the same time the new consortium would get all the sponsorship money the IOC pockets and would pool them into the overall budget. If the Games make any money, the federations would partake into the surplus.

The reverse wouldn't be palatable to anyone and this would guarantee that the Games would no longer lose money, that former venues get “recycled” regularly, the IOC doesn't go the way Fifa went and that the Games spend within their means and stop the escalation of spending and other excesses that we've witnessed in recent decades.