Is India really serious about a bid to host the Olympic Games in 2036?

The country would do well to think several times before committing to such gigantic expenditure in the uncertain future

Earlier this week, Sports Minister Anurag Thakur said the government would back the Indian Olympic Association’s bid for the 2036 Olympics, with Ahmedabad likely to be the host city. Really? Or is he merely trying to retrieve lost ground in the party after his debacle in the recent Himachal elections. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost Assembly seats in his Lok Sabha constituency. 

The consensus on hosting the Olympics, meanwhile, seems to be that it is a bum deal financially. The winner of the bid is usually decided between 7 and 10 years before the Games are to be held, but the expenditure starts before then to impress the Olympic Committee. 

All told, the Tokyo Olympics cost $35 billion (more than Rs 2.89 trillion). Even if that is an inflated figure because of the Covid-19 delays, the 2016 Rio Games and 2012 London Olympics cost about $13 billion each and the 2008 Beijing Olympics cost a whopping $52 billion. India would do well to think several times before committing to such gigantic expenditure in the uncertain future.

Tokyo spent about $150 million (Rs 1,240 crore in today’s rupees) for its failed bid to host the 2016 games, and again spent about $75 million for its successful bid for the 2020 Games. In fact, Toronto decided that it could not afford the $60 million or so it would have needed to even make a bid for the 2024 Games. 

Once a bid has been won, the city goes through an extraordinarily expensive revamp, which, research shows, generates completely inadequate returns once the Olympics are done. 

According to the International Olympic Committee’s rules, the host city of the Summer Olympics must have a minimum of 40,000 hotel rooms made available for spectators, not counting an Olympic Village with the capacity to house 15,000 athletes and officials. 

Ahead of the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, the city had to construct over 15,000 new hotel rooms. Ahmedabad is no Rio in terms of being a tourist destination. If Rio had to add so many rooms, Ahmedabad will have to add several times that number.

The sheer scale of the arrangements is such that most hotels will lie unused after the Games. Look at what happened to Lillehammer in Norway, which hosted the less popular Winter Olympics in 1994. Five years after the Games, 40 per cent of the town’s hotels were bankrupt. 

There’s then the sporting infrastructure that needs to be built at an Olympic scale. By all accounts, India is only a fledgling sporting nation and does not compete in most of the Olympic sports. The latest Summer Games in Tokyo, held in 2021 but dubbed the 2020 Games because of Covid-19 delays, had 49 aquatic events, of which India was represented in just three events. 

Even in athletics, where we are stronger, India was represented in only 14 of the 48 events. Then there’s baseball, softball, the modern pentathlon, canoeing, skateboarding, sports climbing, surfing, and several others in which India has no presence, and seemingly no interest, either. But specialised facilities will have to be built that will lie unused almost immediately after the Olympics are done. 

This is not counting the expenditure on security, transport infrastructure, and other facilities to cater to the millions of tourists milling about. 

If the argument is that hosting the Olympics will encourage interest in sports, it’s more likely that a sustained infusion of funds will work better rather than a one-time expenditure and subsequent indifference, as happened after the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi and the Asian Games of 1982. The abject state of Delhi’s stadia stands testament to this indifference.