Dr. Stefan Szymanski is a professor of economics at City University London, and the author of Playbooks and Checkbooks: An Introduction to the Economics of Modern Sports. As such, he knows far more than you and I do on the subject of whether hosting Olympic Games is a good or bad deal for host cities. And now that the deliriously happy crowds have departed Vancouver, like all party hosts in the cold hard light of the morning after, we British Columbia taxpayers can re-assess our own 17-day party.

Between now and the next Olympics in London two years hence, you can expect to hear lots more of the harsh economic reality from unbiased economists like Dr. Szymanski. They know their stuff. Unlike the party-goers making their hungover but happy way home after Canada won gold in men’s hockey (the only gold medal that hockey-mad Canadians really needed to win, and a wildly popular TV event watched by 80% of all Canadians.  Just check this revealing graph of Edmonton toilet flushing usage for proof!) –  these economists study what has actually happened around the world in other host cities following their own Olympic Games.

You won’t hear any of this reality, by the way, from the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee and assorted boosters, politicians, corporate sponsors, or the 100,000+ party people who celebrated nightly into the wee hours along Vancouver’s Granville Street (ungraciously dubbed “the river of vomit” by The Globe and Mail’s Christie Blatchford). And Time magazine’s Sean Gregory added this description of us:

“Let’s face it: if public intoxication were an Olympic sport, Vancouver and Whistler would own the podium. These are the fourth Olympics I’ve covered, and Vancouver drinks Athens, Torino and Beijing under the table. And all of that drinking has led to a lot of public urinating. The city has had to force liquor stores to close at 7 p.m. on the nights the Canadian hockey teams played.

“Vancouver appears to have more morons per square foot than TV’s Jersey Shore house.”

Kind of makes you proud to be a Canadian, eh? Then BC Business magazine predicted in its February Olympics feature, Ten Debt Sentences:

“You can count on three things being true with these Winter Olympics: the initial cost estimates for staging the Games will be underestimated, the Games will almost certainly lose money, and organizers will claim they made a profit. Yet all this appears to be forgotten when a new city hosts the next Games.”

As quoted in Why the Olympics Are Bad Business, sports economist Dr. Jeffrey Owen of Indiana State University reminds us:

“To date, there has not been a single study of an Olympics or other large-scale sporting event that has found empirical evidence of significant economic impacts.”

Now that our obscenely expensive 2010 Vancouver Winter Games party is history, let’s revisit this Washington Post essay in which Dr. Szymanski dissects these five common Olympic myths: Continue reading →