In 1976, the Canadian city of Montreal hosted an Olympic Games best remembered for a host of gymnastics perfect 10s. But it would take the Quebec city three decades to fully pay off the $1.5bn investment into the greatest sporting show on the planet.
The money required to host such an event today is staggering; China spent $40bn to host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, and Russia spent $50bn for the 2014 Sochi Winter Games. Brazil's total expenditures are thought to have been as much as $20bn for the World Cup last summer and Qatar, which will be the site of the 2022 World Cup, is estimating that it will spend $200 billion. How did we get here? And is it worth it?
On today’s Moncrieff, Sean will be talking to Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College and the author of Circus Maximus: The economic gamble behind hosting the Olympics and the World Cup.
Tune in live at 3.35pm: www.newstalk.com/player/
In recent years, the crumbling ruins of Olympic venues have become a viral trope online, with galleries dedicated to the hubris of pouring billions of euros into a two-week-long event. But one summer games’ venue that’s bucking the trend is Moscow.
The 1980 games were not without controversy; many nations chose to boycott the competition as a response to USSR’s military involvement in Afghanistan, and the communist authorities were determined to show the union’s ability to create a grandiose sense of opulence. Today, the architecture and design built 35 years ago still stands as a testament to the ambition and vision of the Soviet Union.
The photographer Anastasia Tsayder has started to document the state of the venues today by capturing the Olympic Village and venues on film today.
“[The] Olympic buildings—mostly designed in 1975-1978, a period still marked with optimism and hopes for a bright future—acted as a manifestation of prosperity and power of the Soviet State," she writes on her website. Today the buildings have been almost entirely preserved and repurposed as sports and leisure centres.
The series, called Summer Olympics, cleverly uses an old-fashioned style of photography, making it hard to tell whether the pictures are contemporary, or whether they were taken to the lead-up to the first and only Soviet games in 1980.
Check out the images below:
[All images: Anastasia Tsayder]
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