Monday, January 30, 2017

Budapest's Bid to Host the Olympics Is Uniting the Rest of Hungary Against the Games

In September, the International Olympic Committee will select the host city for the 2024 Summer Games. As of now, there are technically three contenders—Los Angeles, Paris, and Budapest—but most observers believe it's a two-city race between Los Angeles and Paris. Both are large metropolises equipped to host mega-events, and both have respectable bids that rely on mostly existing infrastructure and have relatively low levels of public expenditure.

And then there's Budapest, a city of 1.7 million people in a country with a per capita GDP around $13,000. A feasibility study published by the bid committee estimated the development cost of hosting the Games at $3.7 billion, or three percent of the entire country's annual GDP—and that is likely a tremendous underestimate of the total cost.Still, Budapest's bid has lasted until the final round even as other cities have dropped out due to public pressure Boston and Hamburg abandoned their bids as a result of populist movements with political backing. Rome's new mayor made it a personal mission to destroy the city's bid on the basis of formal studies and sound reasoning, concluding Rome had bigger problems and better ways to spend billions of dollars.

The Hungarian capital may yet join the list of dropped bids, however. In December, a group called NOlimpia, organized in partnership with a new youth-led political party named Momentum, applied to hold a signature drive to force a referendum on whether the city should drop their bid.

Read more on VICE Sports



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