Rio Olympics: historic for wrong reason

The opening ceremony for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games is set for Aug 5. But Olin’s Director of the Business of Sports program, Patrick Rishe, says these games may be tainted by more than doping scandals and fear of the Zika virus. He blames the International Olympic Committee’s bidding process for the many inefficiencies and failures of recent games to benefit the cities where they are held in a recent opinion column on Forbes.com:

The great irony of the Olympic Games over the last several decades is that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) wants bidding host cities to express in their bids how hosting the Games will have venue legacy impacts, yet the legacy in practice (more often than not) has been the wasteful erection of white elephants whose future community benefits are significantly less than the costs of construction and upkeep.

Link to Rishe’s column on Forbes: The Inefficiencies Of The International Olympic Committee And Olympic City Site-Selection Process