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| Fireworks burst in the air during the Feb.9 opening ceremony of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics. PyeongChang Olympic Stadium is scheduled to be torn down after the Winter Games. Yonhap |
By Kim Hyun-bin
Hosting the Olympics could be seen as an opportunity to upgrade the country's infrastructure or to bring in more tourists from all over the globe. However, the event comes with a hefty price tag.
Korea has spent 13 billion dollars to host the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics including $1.5 billion in erecting state-of-the-art stadia used for the 17-day sporting event.
The average cost to the PyeongChang Olympics host reaches roughly $10 million dollars an hour.
But after the Olympics many of the shiny new stadia will be left unused, becoming costly burdens to the host cities to maintain.
Just the PyeongChang Olympic stadium alone cost $109 million to build.
The 35,000 seat stadium will only be used four times during the event including the closing ceremony, slated for Feb. 25. But it is scheduled to be demolished after the Winter Games.
PyeongChang with a population of 40,000, will find it impossible to regularly fill and operate Olympic-grade facilities, the reason why some of the stadia are scheduled to be decommissioned.
One option is to reuse the facilities to host regular sporting events; however, few countries have succeeded in covering the maintenance costs of their Olympic venues.
Brazil has spent $2.1 billion to host the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics, but most of their facilities became ghost towns just six months after the Summer Games finished.
The Maracana Stadium in Brazil, which hosted the opening and closing ceremonies for the Rio Olympics, remains without power as no one paid the bills, while other key facilities including Olympic Park have been abandoned.
Russia, which hosted the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, spent nearly $51 billion. They initially planned to repurpose the facilities, but it did not go as planned and the shiny Olympic facilities have been quickly abandoned.
Athens, the founding city of the Olympics, spent 9 billion euros ($11 billion) hosting the Games and wanted to turn their facilities into a tourist attraction afterward. However, the government suffered a financial debt crisis and Olympic Park became an empty zone.
One study in 2016 shows that since 1960, host cities have overrun their budgets on average by 156 percent, with the biggest costs going toward constructing Olympic facilities. When South Korea won its bid, the estimated cost for hosting the Olympics was $5 billion under the actual price.
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