Statista: Sustainability of the Olympics
The following chart is based on a study published in the scientific journal Nature and compares the levels of sustainability for the Olympic Games between 1992 and 2020, based on three indicators which cover ecological, social and economic factors.
You will find more infographics at StatistaAccording to the study, the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in the United States, the 1992 Albertville French Winter Olympics and Spain’s Barcelona Summer Olympics in 1992 performed best of the analyzed group, with a mean score of 71, 69 and 56, respectively. The top scores in Salt Lake City and Albertville are somewhat unexpected, according to the report, with the former having been “overshadowed by a bribery scandal and the events of 11 September the year before”. However, Salt Lake City’s Games also saw positive after-use of venues and had overrun costs to a lesser degree than some other editions of the Games.
In the case of the Albertville Olympics, which had been criticized for environmental damage caused by the construction of new sports venues, these Games still performed fairly well due to having a smaller ecological and material footprint because it was a smaller event. None of the analyzed games, however, managed to achieve a mean score above 75, which would have categorized them as sustainable.
At the other end of the spectrum comes Russia's Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014, with an average across the three indicators of just 24 out of a possible 100, and only 20 points on the economic subcategory. Rio de Janeiro’s 2016 Summer Olympics also performed poorly with a mean score of 29 as well as the lowest score (along with Sochi) in the social category. According to the report, this low score was due to high numbers of residents having been displaced for Olympics-related development in the run-up to the competition and the new sports venues having been “poorly used” after the event, while cost overruns were also high.
Wasn't Mitt Romney in charge of the Utah Olympics?
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeletehttps://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/19/opinions/paris-olympics-homeless-move-history-goldblatt/index.html
A long shameless history of clearing the cities of homeless people.
That's an interesting chart, Jack. Somehow I'm not surprised that Salt Lake City scored well. One thing Utah has is a lot of wide open space. Seems likely they could do it without displacing many people. As far as environmental, probably their greatest stressor would have been water use, since it is an arid climate there.
ReplyDeleteEconomically, say what you will about the Mormons, they're practical people. They would have factored after-use of the facilities into their plans.
It is also not surprising that some of the less economically well off, and more crowded places didn't score as well. It's a heavy lift to recoup the expenses. I would favor having a permanent Olympic Village somewhere, with all the countries contributing so that the burden didn't fall so heavily on the host.
ReplyDeleteI never thought about ecological sustainability as a factor, but security costs at these things are always astronomical, and a terrorist incident as in Munich opens the host city to years of bad PR.
ReplyDeleteEconomically, it always struck me as a wash, at best, for host cities:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/26/economy/olympics-economics-paris-2024/index.html
When the Olympics were in London they put the main stadium in the East End, where the stories in Call the Midwife take place - not in the high end areas of London.The hope was that the redevelopment would benefit the working classes. I don’t know if it did, but it did seem to attract more of the young and hip afterwards.
ReplyDeleteWhen my son was in college in the late 1990s he did a research paper on the long- term economic costs to a city of building new stadiums to attract pro football teams. Unsurprisingly he documented that the stadiums were money losers financially for the city. But many fans feel that there are intangibles that can’t be measured in money such as team pride that tends to unite everyone who lives there and not just the fans who go to the games in person. I think that there is an element of that in the country competition to host the Olympics.
Jean, We watched about an hour of the opening ceremony. It takes a lot longer to have the teams travel by slow boats instead of walking through an enclosed stadium. Over the top opening ceremonies. I looked at all the people standing on balconies and roof tops watching the boatscparade and thought about what a security nightmare it must have been.
"Unsurprisingly he documented that the stadiums were money losers financially for the city."
DeleteAnne, this is somewhat pertinent to my life, as our local NFL franchise, the Chicago Bears, had been proposing to build a new stadium just a mile or two from where I live. They have gone to the extent of purchasing land on which a race track for thoroughbred horses had stood for many decades, and demolishing the grandstand, thus rendering the land considerably less suitable for ever returning it to horseracing.
Then, a year or so ago, the Bears hired a new team president. He came with a new plan: to build a new Bears stadium in downtown Chicago. So now the team has spent ~$200 million for a large parcel of suburban property, then rendered it unfit for its original purpose, and now want to build their new stadium somewhere else. No wonder they've managed only one Super Bowl victory since 1967.
I am a fan of the Chicago Bears (despite the reality that, like most Chicago sports teams, they make it very hard to actually like them). But I am ambivalent about the Bears moving here. I have church duties every Sunday, so it's not like I would rush out to buy tickets to their games.
Plus, one of the reasons they have pivoted to a downtown Chicago stadium is that the team is in a dispute with our local school districts about how to divvy up the expected bonanza in property tax revenue, should the Bears develop the suburban land. The Bears, unsurprisingly if unjustifiably, want the state government to subsidize their redevelopment costs for the suburban parcel via a property tax break, a strategy for which I can find zero warrant in Catholic social teaching, there being no Preferential Option for Billionaires that I have been able to locate in the Catechism. Many of us who live in this area moved here as young families, in great part because the public schools are very good. In any dispute between the Bears and the schools, I side with the schools (and their teachers, who rely on property taxes for their salaries).
All in all, the Bears are shaping up to be bad neighbors. I believe in the injunction to love my neighbor, so it seems less of a moral temptation to me if the Bears never become my neighbors.
Let me add a coda to my previous comment which circles back to the original topic of sustainability. The local racetrack had existed here since the 1920s, and it grew and, for a time, thrived the way businesses do in the United States: someone with some capital took a risk by building something new, and built up a business which employed many local people and also earned profits (and enjoyment, and bragging rights) for the owners. Government did its part in that success story by building and expanding roads, providing city services, and many other things to help that business, as it does for many other businesses. For its part, government earned a share of the gambling take, as well as sales and property taxes from the many businesses that the horse track sustained in some way, and also income taxes from the people who worked there (or who won purses at the track).
DeleteOlympic villages, stadiums and other venues are sort of the polar opposite of that story. They are national-government vanity projects which everyone knows will lose money. They create make-work jobs for favored political constituencies such as real estate developers and construction unions. As noted in the original post, some of them displace many people who lack the power to resist the project (they are the poor for whom the government really should have a preferential option).
As I noted in a post a few days ago, the Olympics started with some noble goals. But the way they have evolved make them very hard to support. If the Olympics keeled over and died from bloat, corruption and widespread disinterest, I wouldn't shed a tear or even skip a beat.
I wish they would just build a permanent Olympic venue in Greece, where it all began. This building a whole new sports complex every four years is ridiculous. The only problem would be global warming. The Paris Olympics just dodged a bad European heat wave. Maybe they could hold the Summer Olympics in the winter and call it something else like the Olympics.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I have run across the notion of "social sustainability" before. Unless I am missing it, the Statista article doesn't really explain it, perhaps beyond a mention of "social cleansing", giving the example of forced clearing out of homeless encampments (which, if done humanely, might actually work to the common good of the city in question). I poked around in Google a very little bit to get a sense of what is meant by Social Sustainability. It all sounds rather amorphous and abstract:
ReplyDelete"Social equity and justice
Ensuring that people have equal access to facilities and can control their own lives
"Diversity and inclusion
Creating communities and shared experiences that build trust and promote empowerment
"Democratic participation and empowerment
Supporting employees as they seek to care for children and elderly parents or pursue career goals
"Livelihood security
Helping people make better choices about their health, education, and work
"Social well-being and quality of life
Improving the quality of life, including healthcare support, learning opportunities, employment, security, safety, and economic accommodation
"Social sustainability can also include human rights, fair labor practices, living conditions, health, wellness, and work-life balance. In business, social sustainability can affect the quality of a business' relationships with stakeholders, mitigate risk, and appeal to consumers who want socially sustainable products"
It's not immediately clear to me that building out venues for the Olympics will contribute meaningfully to these things. I'd like to understand how Salt Lake City came out more socially sustainable than Lillehammer or Tokyo as a result of hosting the Olympics.
Jim,
ReplyDeleteMore information is found in the original article published in Nature.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00696-5
Sustainability remains an elusive concept in the Olympic Games, and in mega-events more generally. Every Olympic Games now claims to be sustainable, but all equally fail to provide a coherent definition or model for independent evaluation24,27,28.
Definition and model
Filling this lacuna, we first develop a definition and conceptual model of the sustainability of the Olympic Games, depicted in Fig. 1. We define ‘sustainable Olympic Games’ along three dimensions: having a limited ecological and material footprint, enhancing social justice and demonstrating economic efficiency. This definition reflects current debates on sustainability as minimizing resource use while guaranteeing minimum thresholds of social and economic well-being
The social sustainability is defined by three indicators:
A legal indicator: did they cut corners in regard to observing laws.
Social safety indicator: did they displace populations
Public approval: public support for the event
These are further operationalized in an appendix that can be downloaded. I did not bother to do that. Nature is a very high ranked journal; I am sure their reviewers found the authors choices acceptable. I doubt most of us are in a position to second guess.
The authors seem in fact to be on the cutting edge in attempting to quantify these goals in the face of lip service on the part of the organizers of these events. The editors decided these authors had made some major steps toward setting some objective measures. Such publication puts a challenge out there for researchers and organizations to do better measurement.