@stanleybmanly I did some research on this topic yesterday and though some countries made hundreds of millions on hosting the Olympics some lost as much or more. But it is truly difficult to gauge the true net economic “value” impact of what hosting the Olympics will have.
A quote from one article I read…” it’s misleading to calculate how much money is spent in a city during the Olympics. A fair comparison requires some estimate of how much would have been spent without them. When the Games come, after all, other kinds of tourism go. During the 2012 Games, the Adelphi Theatre in London’s West End suspended performances of “Sweeney Todd.” The British Museum received 480,000 visitors that August, down from 617,000 the previous year. Indeed, Britain received about 5 percent fewer foreign visitors in August 2012 than it did in the same month the previous year. Those who showed up spent more, sure, but London spent billions of dollars to lure them. “If Boston hosts the 2024 Olympics, there’s no doubt that [the city] is going to be overrun with sports tourists,” said Victor Matheson, an economist at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. “But Boston is already overrun with tourists in the summer.”
The article went on to discuss a dynamic I never considered before and that is an intrinsic value to the host cities citizens in that no matter what the profit and loss is…it is the feel good and bragging rights that it’s citizens get to have from that day on that their city/country hosted one of the biggest sporting events ever.