Then there’s China’s political climate, which, if anything, has grown more repressive since 2008. In the past seven years, the Chinese government has banned Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and has restricted speech on the social networks it allows to operate at all. Imagining an Olympics where athletes and spectators are cut off from Facebook is difficult in 2015—and may be even less plausible in 2022. For the second time in 14 years, the IOC has awarded the games to a country with a poor human-rights record.

“The 2008 Beijing Games have put an end—once and for all—to the notion that these Olympics are a ‘force for good,’” Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, wrote at the time.

Kazakhstan is little better. The country is a classic post-Soviet autocracy, one where Nursultan Nazarbayev has ruled without opposition since independence in 1991. But Almaty, its largest city and former capital, nonetheless had several advantages over Beijing. It’s an international winter-sports destination and already possesses the infrastructure Beijing will have to build from scratch. Almaty’s plan to hold every event within a 20-mile radius of the Olympic village would have made it the most compact games in three decades. And, not least, the city has ample natural snow—a point Almaty’s planners made repeatedly in its promotional materials.

Almaty took the bad news in stride Friday, and expressed a desire to bid for the games in the future. But is hosting the Olympics worth it? China dazzled the world in 2008 with state-of-the-art Olympic venues like the “Bird’s Nest” stadium and the Water Cube, but seven years later, these structures remain underutilized and burdened with debt. In order to prepare for the 2022 games, Beijing will again construct many new venues—making it questionable the city will be able to finance the event within the confines of its $3.066 billion budget.

For China, though, the Olympics have always been about more than money. In 2001, Beijing’s victory in obtaining the ’08 games sparked wild nationwide celebrations and a sense that the country had “arrived.” This time, however, the response was far more tepid.

“We are not that enthusiastic about it because it is not the Summer Olympics but only the Winter Olympics,” Wu Xiaowen, an accountant in Beijing, told the Times. “We don’t play or watch those games.”

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