How much does setting up the Olympics cost?

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Back in 1948, it cost London around $1 million to set up the Olympic Games. How times have changed. Over the past decades, the cost of setting up a special megaproject of this magnitude has steadily (on an average) gone up. Truth be told, setting up the Olympic Games is like planning a number of massive multimillion-dollar projects that include infrastructure and venues. Countries bid heavily to host the Olympics because they foresee long-term monetary gains over the short-term losses, plus the fact that the changes made to their cities would be welcome improvements.

The exact total cost of the Olympic Games is always difficult to determine since there are also intangible costs to the environment and society, among others. But expenses such as improvements and renovations made to infrastructure, the beefing up of security, and the budget allotted to the many different operations are more or less estimated with acceptable accuracy.

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Beijing 2008 had the biggest price tag in Olympic history. The organizers claimed that the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games cost around $15 billion, which was roughly the equivalent of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. They also reported that revenues reached around $16 million. There were, however, some reports that estimated a total cost that far exceeded what the organizers presented. The price tag of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games was found to be over $40 billion. This meant that this incarnation of the summer Olympics was far and away the most expensive in history, until of course the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, which was marred by controversy.

In the shadow of Beijing 2008, which many global event organizers thought used blatant overspending, the organizers of London 2012 cut down costs dramatically and put up a successful Olympic Games for a little over $10 billion. Expensive? Yes. But not as expensive as Beijing.