On the reality side, you have Beijing ($40 billion in organizing and other costs, including infrastructure), Sochi ($50 billion), London (three times original cost projection) and now Tokyo (potentially four times original cost). And then there is Rio, where the Games turned out far better than expected yet their cost (estimated $12 billion) still looks obscene in a country that cannot pay teachers or health care workers.

Let’s deal first with the immediate issue: 2024, where Budapest is considered a non-factor. I’ll get to long-term ideas in a Monday column.

My colleague Alan Abrahamson posited a solution so sensible I am jealous I didn’t think of it first: award 2024 to Los Angeles and 2028 to Paris. (The only downside is it emulates FIFA's choosing the 2018 and 2022 World Cup hosts at the same time, and who would want to emulate anything that corrupt band of thieves did?)

Why LA first? It has so much (venues, villages) already in place that it would be no exaggeration to say the city could probably stage an Olympics next year, even if they clearly would be better Games by 2024, when the airport improvements and some other planned public transport upgrades are complete. If there is a safe bet, LA seems to be it.

But the order isn’t as important as the concept. Paris 2024, LA 2028 could work as well. The idea is to give each wonderful city a piece of the pie rather than leaving one hungry and out of sorts, with attendant we-wuz-robbed feelings. With the short-term assured, the IOC could have time to sort out long-term solutions.

And then there is the matter of assuring another Olympics in the United States, for these reasons:

*No matter how much IOC members complain about the Olympic revenue share allocated to the USOC (lowered four years ago after a bitter dispute), the Olympics in their current form could not take place without the money the IOC gets from U.S. sponsors and NBC.

*Six of the IOC’s current dozen global TOP program sponsors are U.S.-based multinationals. Three are from Japan, two from Europe, one from South Korea. Yes, those U.S. multinationals see the whole world as their market. But the U.S. market is a considerable factor in buying an Olympic sponsorship that now runs upwards of $200 million for four years.

*NBC’s 1.22 billion rights fee for Rio accounted for 43.5 percent of the IOC’s global broadcast revenue for the 2016 Summer Games. The percentage is likely to remain over 40 percent for the rest of NBC’s current contract, which goes through 2032.

*The LA 2024 bid plan meets every idea about fiscal and no-white-elephant sanity posited in Agenda 2020. Reject it, and you are saying Agenda 2020 is meaningless – and so far, it has in fact amounted to much ado about nothing.

If the IOC turns down Los Angeles, the USOC should – and will - wonder whether it is worth the trouble of ever bidding again.

But why is it highly unlikely that Abrahamson Agenda 2024-2028 would be approved?

Voting for host cities is the only role of significance most IOC members still have within the organization. When USOC chair Larry Probst suggested that just the IOC executive committee members should choose the host cities – an excellent idea, by the way – the reaction was such you would have thought he was proposing the IOC members give up their outrageous Games-period per diems ($450 per day for members, $900 per day for EB members).

Of course, the way things are going, there may soon be no city in a non-authoritarian country to vote for. And some might even wonder if that is the IOC’s morally bankrupt end game. After all, dictators and repressive countries on the make (hello, Qatar) give you what you want – and more. No uncomfortable questions asked.