Why no one wants to host the Olympics anymore
🔥 The Olympic torch relay is a tradition that feels ancient, but it originated in 1936 as a German publicity stunt
Issue #130: ’80s nostalgia, medieval memes, and work relationships
By Harris Sockel
How much does it cost Paris to orchestrate 329 sporting events (including breakdancing and kayak crossing, new this year!) across 35 venues?
Just under $10 billion.
That’s actually less than a few recent games: Sochi spent $55 billion a decade ago ($72 billion today), and Tokyo spent over $12.6 billion in 2021. Paris did it on a budget (ish) by turning monuments and geographical features like the Seine into sporting arenas.
Still, hosting the Olympics is so expensive that no one really wants to do it anymore, as Cailian Savage on Medium explains. Brisbane was the only city to submit a bid for 2032. Cities operate the Olympics at a loss; they don’t make back what they spend, but what they lose in economic capital they may gain in cultural capital — which is hard to measure.
Case in point: Barcelona’s opening ceremony for the 1992 summer games — the first held at dusk, a dramatic choice that every subsequent city copied — was part of what may have triggered a 25-year tourism boom. I mean, Catalonian opera singers! A flaming arrow shot into a cauldron! That got people to pay attention, and to care.
Cultural change is hard to track. It’s something you can feel but not always see on a balance sheet — usually, it’s only obvious looking back years, sometimes decades. Maybe Paris’s headless Marie Antoinettes or its bespoke Louis Vuitton trunks carrying 468 medals infused with iron from the Eiffel Tower itself will accomplish something similar?
What else we’re reading
- Novelist Felicia C. Sullivan reviews BRATS (a new brat pack documentary starring Molly Ringwald and Demi Moore) through the lens of ’80s nostalgia — specifically, how the ’80s were the last time in history when “You held records in your hands. You rented video tapes. You could hold and connect with art in a way that’s impossible now.”
- From the archive: 50 medieval memes about design created by UX lead Slava Shestopalov. Here’s one relevant to anyone who’s visited a website the advent of GDPR (and before):
Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about work relationships
Your job is temporary, but your relationships with coworkers? Those last much longer. Founder Brandon Younessi shares seven lessons on career advancement, including this one that stuck with me:
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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