hosting the olympics

Do you think that only rich countries should host the olympics.

I know somebody in Brazil and she says most people there are against having the olympics because there are alot of poor people in Brazil, the economy is in bad shape and they think the money could have been better spent on things like education and healthcare.
Also they are not exactly doing a very good job of things so far either seems to be one screw up after another.

Other poor countries like Greece they put on a good show in the end but they got into a ton of debt to finance them.
England, America and the traditional richer countries who host the olympics traditionally put on a very good show and they can afford to do it so should the olympics only go to the rich countries?

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TexasGrandpa · 61-69, M

I can't imagine why a city would want to host the Olympics. That being said, the present method of selection seems fair.

Do the Olympic Games generate profits?
No. Unfortunately, they do not. That's straight from the mouth of the head of the International Centre for Olympic Studies, Robert Barney [source: Berkes]. A city might see a surplus of cash post-closing ceremonies, but if you include all those (at every level) who help fund the Olympics in any given games, he says no city has profited in the long run from its hosting role in a purely bottom-line sense. Many cities like to boast of mega-profits, but they often gloss over all the money that the federal government, among other contributors, poured in. And that tends to add up to a lot.
Although that's not to say a city doesn't benefit in any way from the Olympics. Before and during the games, local denizens gain jobs and revenues. Plus, after the Olympics, said city is usually improved in a multitude of ways (better infrastructure being but one example), and those improvements may attract further investment and development. Then, too, billions of people are exposed to a locale that they've probably never paid much attention to before. Talk about mega-marketing.
So that being said, Olympic cities do usually have an increased amount of international trade -- to the tune of roughly 30 percent [source: Berkes]. On the other side of the coin, though, lots of the Olympic-related developments can end up as future money pits. Some venues end up underused following the games, and incur lots of costs in upkeep.
By the same token, many Olympics leave a city with some serious debt. Montreal, for example, took about 30 years to pay off the debt incurred from its 1976 summer games. The original budget for the Athens 2004 games was $1.6 billion. Final tally? They cost the public about $16 billion [source: The New York Times].