Re:FIFA Officials Arrested on Corruption Charges; Face Extra...
by tzs on Thursday May 28, 2015 @06:37AM
(#9617131)
The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics were similar. It and surrounding areas had the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum with a 92k capacity and the Rose Bowl with a 103k capacity available, and numerous smaller professional arenas, and a large number of college and university facilities. For Olympic Village they used the University of Southern California.
Only two new permanent facilities were built for the games: Olympic Velodrome at California State University, Dominguez Hills and the Olympic Swim Stadium at the University of Southern California. Both of those received heavy corporate sponsorship which covered most of the costs.
Overall, the Los Angeles Olympics made a profit of around $200 million.
I lived in the area at the time (Pasadena, to be precise), and the Olympics were remarkable unobtrusive. Mot people expected traffic to be really terrible during the Games, but enough people apparently took vacations or arranged to work at home or shifted their schedules that my daily freeway commute during the games was actually much faster than it had been before.
Take for example the proposed Olympic Games 2024 Hamburg and Kiel:
Kiel hosts the largests sailing event worldwide every year, and hosted the Handball world cup before – and, due to having the best european team in Handball, we also have often large matches.
Hamburg has also lots of other sports which are done on worldcup level. Combined, we have the infrastructure done to host more than half of the Olympics RIGHT NOW. You could host more than half of the Olympics right tomorrow, without any additional constructions.
And Kiel has also been co-host of the Olympics two previous times, each of them producing a net-profit and developing a complete new district out of the investments – the facilities built for Olympia 1972 are still in use today.
What are we going to build for Olympia 2024? Nothing new – we’ll update existing infrastructure and stadiums, improve public transport (which would have been done anyway, and is already being built today), and add some new living quarters for the contestants – which could be used as cheap student housing afterwards, as both Hamburg and Kiel are facing a crisis where not enough affordable apartments for students exist.
Reusability quota: 100%. We’d have no losses, only profits, and it’d be cheap, too.