The organizers of the Tokyo Olympics, which were delayed a year by the coronavirus pandemic, put the final cost of the games at 13 billion dollars (1.4 trillion yen), double what was forecast when the IOC awarded them the venue in 2013.
Meeting on Tuesday ahead of the body’s dissolution at the end of the month, Tokyo Olympics officials broke down the final figures.
However, the final amount announced by the organizers was below the 15.4 billion dollars that they forecast when the fair ended almost 11 months ago.
“We made an estimate, and the estimate turned out to be lower than expected,” said organizing committee executive director Toshiro Muto. “As a total amount, whether it’s big or not — when you talk about it, it’s not easy to assess.”
Accurately measuring Olympic costs — who pays, who benefits, and what expenses are and are not Games — is a moving maze.
Calculating the costs is difficult due to recent fluctuations in the exchange rate between the dollar and the Japanese currency. When the Games started a year ago, 1 dollar was equal to 100 yen. On Monday, $1 was equal to 135 yen, the highest level of the US currency against the yen in 25 years.
Victor Matheson, a sports economist at the College of the Holy Cross and author of numerous works on the Olympics, wrote in an email to The Associated Press that most “expenditure and income are in yen, so the fact that that the exchange rate alters the figures in dollars does not affect the ‘feel’ that the organizers have about the event.
In the run-up to the Tokyo Games, the organizers used to use the exchange rate of 107. In such a case, 1.42 trillion yen would equal 13.33 billion dollars as the final price.
Matheson and Robert Baade investigated the costs and benefits of the Olympic Games for a paper titled “Going for Gold: The Economics of the Olympics.”
They write that “the determining conclusion is that in most cases the Olympics are a business that generates losses for the host cities; they only yield net benefits under very specific and unusual circumstances.”
But the organizers lost at least $800 million in revenue by not selling tickets, a figure that had to be covered by the Tokyo metropolitan government.
An Oxford University study in 2020 said that the Tokyo Games were the most expensive Olympics in history.
According to the organizers, the absence of public reduced the costs of security, maintenance of the arenas and others.
There is an undeniable fact: more than half of the costs were covered by public coffers: the Tokyo government, the national government and other official entities.
The most important legacy is undoubtedly the National Stadium, designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, and which cost 1,400 million dollars. The colossus fitted in perfectly at its central location in the Japanese capital.