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00:00Now we can take stock of these games from an economic perspective with Professor Victor
00:04Matheson from the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. Thanks very much for speaking
00:09to France 24 and taking the time. So you've written extensively about the economic viability
00:15of the Olympic Games and how we overspend each time, how this is not particularly pragmatic.
00:20How would you say is Paris measuring up? Before it started we did hear some reports that it was
00:26going to break even. Now it's looking like another overspend, although perhaps not a massive one.
00:33Yeah, so actually Paris looks like they're doing pretty well. This looks like it's going to be the
00:37first Summer Olympics since Sydney back in 2000, over 20 years ago, that comes in at under $10
00:44billion. I doubt they break even, but there's a whole lot of difference between losing a few
00:49hundred million or a few billion dollars than losing tens of billions of dollars hosting the
00:53event. Now Victor, we hear about these overspends and how they're justified by the cities, by the
01:00organising committees, by claims of sort of value-added things, economic, cultural, societal,
01:05perhaps even some sort of an intangible benefit to a city or a country. But what independent
01:11evidence would you say is there for these kinds of benefits? So typically there's not much of that.
01:17So you always hope for some sort of legacy because, again, if you spend over $10 billion there's no
01:22way you can make up that money in a short period of time, but perhaps you end up with some sort of
01:27legacy. The problem is the Olympics are always in places that are wonderful locations like Paris.
01:35You know, if you're counting on the Olympics to put Paris on the map, you might need to get
01:40yourself a new map. Obviously Paris is one of the most iconic tourist destinations in the world
01:46and the Olympics isn't going to add to that in any significant way. Right, so one idea that we've seen
01:52raised at how to make the Olympics more cost-effective is let's have it in one dedicated
01:57place each time. Would that not be very boring? I mean, especially as we're seeing Paris now raising
02:02the bar, hosting these events in these implausible but beautiful places, as you say. Yeah, so there's
02:08a couple ways we can do this. So first of all we could have maybe not just one, but you could have
02:13a rotating group of cities, you know, three or four cities. Imagine in Athens and Los Angeles
02:19and in Tokyo, something like that would work. So that would keep it from getting, you know, boring
02:24because at least we change locations. Another thing you can do is you can spread the games out
02:29so you don't have to have all of the events in one place because even a city like Paris may not have
02:35all the sporting facilities in place to host the games all by itself. But if you expand it out and
02:41add additional cities like they're doing for soccer and they're doing for surfing, you know,
02:47that allows you to spread out the costs and makes it much more likely that you have your facilities
02:53in place already. Yeah, but having the Olympics in the same few places each time, does that not
02:58create more of a hegemony around the hosts in terms of their, you know, their benefits they
03:03are receiving from the games, the global attention on it? Yeah, well certainly it does, right? So this
03:09is a trade-off. There is something interesting and nice for the fans, nice for the idea of this
03:16being a World Games by actually moving it around. But the question is whether that's worth the tens
03:22of billions of dollar price tags that we've seen when you have it in, when you have the Olympics
03:27in places like Rio that does not have the facilities in place to host that and then it
03:33ends up with a huge bill when the games are over. Right, I suppose it would be good to reuse some of
03:38those disused Athens stadia again. If we move on now to whether these Olympics are, as the
03:46organisers have been saying, are among the most inclusive ever and perhaps one of the greenest ever,
03:52I've just been thinking, well, do the sponsors come into this equation? Surely some of the
03:58sponsors putting together all what they need to put together to promote themselves during the
04:03Olympics, they are omitting, they are wasting. So how is this calculation actually made and are they
04:09really going to be some of the greenest? So it turns out one of the most non-green things you can
04:16do in creating an Olympics is actually build a bunch of new facilities. Concrete is one of the
04:21worst things in the world when it comes to global climate change and in
04:27Paris, since very very little in the way of new facilities were constructed, Paris will come in
04:33at one of the greenest games in the last couple decades. Simply build, use, if you build a lot of
04:39new stuff you're going to emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases. If you can use existing facilities
04:45like Paris is doing, they're in good shape. And of course from sponsorships, however we
04:52want to think about the global corporate world, sponsorships do serve a very important role
04:59in reducing the total price tag to local taxpayers. So certainly if someone is going to pay
05:04for an expensive games, you'd rather have it be Coca-Cola than the taxpayer in the northern
05:10Paris suburbs. All right and then perhaps about this inclusivity claim there and the fact
05:15that we've got these hundreds of thousands of free tickets, certainly if you walk around Paris and
05:19talk to locals here, this message isn't really getting across. Most people are saying it's been
05:25prohibitively expensive for me and my family to get tickets. So how about this claim then?
05:29Is this something that Paris can truly say is its legacy, the fact that it's opening these games up
05:33to the world? I find that a pretty far stretch myself. Remember this is a games that
05:43people can come and watch it if you're the sort of person who can travel across the globe
05:48and make it to Paris and enjoy accommodations for Paris. Sure there's a possibility for a
05:54handful of people in the local area to enjoy the spectacle of the Olympics even without
05:59expensive tickets, but let's be quite clear what the Olympics is. It's a spectator
06:04sport for the wealthy worldwide who can afford to travel globally to go watch soccer and gymnastics.
06:12And perhaps we can just talk on the benefits for countries that are maybe big medal winners
06:18but aren't the host necessarily because there's got to be some incentive for
06:22countries around the world to still put so many resources into getting the most competitive teams
06:28possible if in future we're doing a kind of rotating around fewer cities system. So what
06:34kind of benefits do countries draw from getting those big results? Sure well let's not put
06:41down the idea of a feel-good effect right. Americans we know in particular we love the patriotic
06:47Olympic Games where we can rack up medals. I noticed we moved just ahead of France in the
06:52gold medal table yesterday. These are the sort of things that this is a good sort of competition
06:58between countries and we shouldn't discount the feel-good effect entirely. Also obviously
07:04these athletes can serve as important brand ambassadors for your country. If you see a country
07:10like Brazil, Brazil has done better than most countries in the world at how much other countries
07:18like them. And why is that? Because of the beautiful game they play in soccer. We see other cases where
07:25maybe we have a brand new brand ambassador for Saint Lucia thanks to Julian's fantastic
07:32run yesterday in 100 meters. So let's not discount the fun impact that these games can have
07:40on spectators and countries alike. So these games may make us happy, they're just not likely to make us rich.
07:47All right, Inspector Matheson. That's a fair point.
07:53Thank you very much for joining us from the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. Thank you.