This article is part of the Future of the Olympics special report.

The Olympics thinks it’s beaten the haters.

For decades, the world’s premier sporting event was mired in controversies about draining public finances, leaving behind unused arenas and providing residents with few benefits — but lots of disruption and intrusive surveillance. Now, the International Olympic Committee reckons it’s hit on the solution. 

“It’s not for a city or region to adapt to the Games. It’s for the Games to adapt to a city and region,” said Christophe Dubi, executive director of the Olympic Games, in an interview at IOC headquarters on the banks of Lake Geneva. 

For much of this century, potential hosts have looked at the Olympics, seen the ballooning costs, and said: thanks but no thanks. In places like Calgary, Innsbruck and Hamburg, public referendums kiboshed plans to host.

Suffering from a dearth of bidders, the IOC even doled out multiple editions in one go when it awarded Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028, before Brisbane was given a free run at the 2032 edition.

The Concorde urban parc site ahead of the Olympics in Paris on July 3, 2024. Julien de la Rosa/AFP via Getty Images)

Dubi says that’s all changed — thanks to the IOC imposing less stringent requirements on potential host cities, looking to reuse existing venues for events rather than splurging billions on grandiose new arenas. Paris, with its mostly pre-existing locales in the city center, is a test case that could future-proof the Summer Olympics for decades.

“This market has now flipped over 180 [degrees],” Dubi said. “We can award the Games up until 2042 — easy.” Grabbing his phone, he pointed to a message: “I just received [this] from the mayor of Rio. ‘Give me the Games back. It’s the best thing we ever had.’”

The mayor of Rio de Janeiro’s office did not provide a comment in time for this article.

For the last 20 years, the Olympics has been locked in a spiral of controversy — largely of its own making.

For every zenith like the spectacular cultural success at London 2012, there was a crushing scandal like Russia’s massive state-sponsored doping program at Sochi in 2014. The Games hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin, plus two editions in authoritarian China, fueled a narrative that the IOC was in the pocket of the world’s dictators. 

“The IOC is full of princes and sheikhs and barons and people who do not have the best interests of humanity in mind, and they organize these Games accordingly, and they put people in charge, who will follow their directives accordingly,” said Eric Sheehan, an organizer with anti-Games group NOlympics LA, during a video interview from his home in California.

Research this year by the University of Oxford suggests that Paris 2024 will cost around $8.7 billion, compared to $13.7 billion for the pandemic Games at Tokyo 2021 and an astronomical $23.6 billion at Rio 2016, which forced Brazil’s federal government to provide the city with a $900 million bailout. 

“Rio hosting the Olympics the first time around brought way more cons than pros to the city,” said Theresa Williamson, an urban planner and executive director of Catalytic Communities, an advocacy organization that supports favela communities. “The few checks and balances that we have were set aside. The Olympics created a pressure cooker for speculation and displacement — with 80,000 low-income people evicted from their homes and pushed to the city’s outskirts — and poorly planned infrastructure that got implemented and has not fared well.”

The Olympics top brass is bullish that it has addressed the critiques, and concedes that cost overruns at Athens 2004 (which contributed to pushing Greece into financial ruin) were “disastrous” and “shocking.” 

In Lausanne, Dubi, dressed like a rock star in denim, white t-shirt and neckerchief, and sporting immaculately coiffed, Matthew McConaughey-style hair, discussed the big changes that have driven, as he sees it, renewed interest in hosting. 

“If we wouldn’t have addressed those fundamental requirements that made it an unappealing property, you wouldn’t have had anyone after 2015” willing to host, he said.

As an example of the IOC’s willingness to adapt, Dubi cited the awarding of the 2026 Winter Olympics to the city of Milan and the mountain resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo, a five-hour drive away into the Italian Dolomites. “They never expected that we would move from one city to two regions,” he said.

The beach volleyball Olympic stadium Athens, then years after the Games. | Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)

“It’s really up to us to adapt to the host to understand their own opportunities and challenges, and what the Games can do for them instead of vice versa,” added Marie Sallois, the IOC’s corporate and sustainable development director. “So that has also changed completely the paradigm of the discussion.”

But the IOC’s ambition to make the Olympics cheap again hasn’t convinced everyone. 

“They’ve got big plans, and lots of big PR announcements about how they’re sustainable. But if you talk to actual communities, and community members about what they’re doing, it’s not impressive,” said Sheehan, a passionate and eloquent speaker on the drawbacks of hosting the Olympics.

Los Angeles, Sheehan said, constructed mega venues like the SoFi Stadium with the aim of luring events like the Olympics and FIFA World Cup (which the city will host in 2026), rendering the ideal of staging a no-build Olympics “a lie.” 

City authorities in LA stand accused of militarizing the police force and booting out homeless people to try to clean up the city ahead of the mega events. Paris has also been accused of ridding the city of “everything that doesn’t fit into the ‘Emily in Paris’ postcard” ahead of this summer’s Olympic Games.

“The problem is the point of the Olympics is not to celebrate sport, but to allow powerful people to make big projects happen and powerful corporations to make big money,” Sheehan added.

Construction of the TransOlimpica highway in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. | Yasuyosi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images

Some academics who follow the economy of the Olympics closely are also skeptical. 

“Costs and cost overruns remain high. Research has also shown that the Games have become less sustainable. Whether the IOC’s reforms underway will achieve the goal of making the Olympics more attractive to potential hosts remains to be seen,” said Alexander Budzier, from the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School who co-authored the recent study.

Even if reusing infrastructure does lead to a “slight reduction in cost,” it will mean limiting the Olympics — a symbol of international unity — to a handful of mostly wealthy countries.

“You are unlikely to consider hosting if you don’t have existing infrastructure,” Budzier said. “And if we look at the future hosts, they are all from rich countries. I doubt we will see an emerging economy anytime soon.”

Asked if the IOC would like recent hosts — including London, Paris and Sydney, all of which have the infrastructure already in place — to be among the contenders for 2042 and 2046, Dubi answered: “Correct.”

“We’ve hosted it last time 100 years ago; we probably won’t wait that long for the next time,” Paris 2024 CEO Étienne Thobois told POLITICO on a hot afternoon at the Esplanade des Invalides, a lawn in central Paris that will host archery events this summer.

“But right now, we’re concentrated on the finish line on delivering these Games.”