In October, Chicago will learn whether its $5 billion bid to host the 2016 Olympics will beat out competition from Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, and Tokyo. But while hosting the Games can boost a city’s economy and bring international prestige, it also can bring mountains of debt. The bidding process alone will cost Chicago more than $50 million.

“It’s very high-risk to host the Olympics because of the huge investment involved,” says John Findling, a former history professor at Indiana University Southeast who has studied the modern Olympics. For example, London’s projected costs for the 2012 Games have jumped from $6 billion, when the city made its bid, to $15 billion—and the Games are still three years away. The 2004 Athens Olympics cost more than $11 billion and brought the city only about $2.8 billion in revenue. China has not released earnings from the 2008 Games in Beijing, but the $43 billion price tag shattered all Olympic records.

Mayor Richard Daley says Chicago’s plan is “financially conservative, reasonable, and feasible” and is designed to avoid the kind of debt that has beset past hosts. It took Montreal 30 years to pay off its $1.5 billion debt from the 1976 Games. Allen Sanderson, a sports economist at the University of Chicago, says the key is to ensure that spending is kept in check and that new infrastructure will retain value after the Games end. Beijing’s $423 million Bird’s Nest Stadium, for example, sits largely unused. But Atlanta’s $235 million Olympic Stadium, built for the 1996 Games, is now Turner Field—home of the Atlanta Braves. The aquatic center and Olympic Village are used by Georgia Tech. “This is a very cosmopolitan, international city now,” says Mary Rolinson, a professor at Georgia State University. “Before the Olympics, we were not that at all.”

— J. Scott Orr

