Why we should stop changing locations for the Olympic Games
Every two years, sports fanatics and nonfanatics alike have the ultimate form of entertainment on their TV screens for weeks at a time: the Olympics. With Milano Cortina hosting this year’s winter games, 2026 has been no different.
Whether in the winter or the summer, this longstanding athletic tradition inspires pride in the country, exposure to new or re-remembered athletic competitions and overall celebrations of some of the world’s best athletes—a showcase that irrevocably changes the cities that host it.
Featured in cities around the world (sort of), it is considered an honor to host the Olympics—to be specially selected for the massive undertaking that will bring a hopeful economic boom. But this boom often doesn’t provide long-term benefits to these communities.
This massive event requires up to a decade of planning, from selecting the host city, to constructing additional infrastructure required for a variety of competitions and overall prepping the environment for a mass influx of people.
According to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), just selecting a city to host the Olympics, from the pool of bids that are submitted, requires assessment of the funding strategy, the plans for venues, accommodation capacity, public transportation and even the public and political support.
These considerations, and more, were made more comprehensive with the IOC’s Olympic Agenda 2020+5, which aims to reduce the harms the Games have on their host cities after the IOC has been put under scrutiny for the Olympics’s impact. Such harms have included the financial investment that comes with preparing a city to host the Olympics, which often outweighs any long-term gain, and, in some cases, evicting or gentrifying communities of local residents to cater to the Olympic Games.
Although hosting the Olympics has been used to prompt needed projects or stimulate economic growth, these aspirations often aren’t fulfilled. Since the turn of the century, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, each host has spent a minimum of $2.7 billion dollars on hosting the Olympics, peaking with an estimated $28.9 billion spent on the 2014 Sochi Olympics. The Council on Foreign Relations also concluded that every Olympics since 1988 has gone above (and sometimes way beyond) the intended budget.
The result? More frequently, Olympic facilities, which are a large portion of the expenses, fall into disrepair, as they aren’t used beyond the games. Some, referred to as “white elephants,” are too specialized to be used after. This contributes to environmental pollution, both in the resources expended on constructing the facilities and the destruction of the environment needed to build the facilities—not to mention the displacement of any residents of the host city.
Expenses for the hosts also last far beyond their time hosting, as some countries have taken decades to pay off their investments in hosting the Olympics, such as Montreal finally paying off its debt from the 1976 Olympics three decades later.
The Olympic Games are a tradition in sports—they’re a spectacle to behold. Their impact on patriotism, athletics and beyond are proof of their significance, but their other impacts demand an adjustment to the damage the games can provoke. Although the IOC hopes to account for some of these impacts with its new regulations, the nature of this massive event does not bode well for meaningful change and legitimate harm reduction.
The solution, although not wholly simple, is straightforward enough: have one location for the games to be hosted, both for the winter and summer games. Each Olympic cycle, there can still be a “host” who renovates and designs the facilities, adding their own spin to the tradition, but without the abandoned facilities, economic peril and other instability that comes at the cost of host communities.
The IOC, as a part of their new regulations, now tries to prioritize the existing infrastructure when picking hosts to limit the amount of new facilities, but imagine how compatible a permanent Olympic site would be with the needs of the Olympic Games. This location could even represent the origin country of the event itself—Greece.
Historically speaking, the Olympics have been primarily hosted in North America (primarily the United States), Europe and eastern Asia—locations that are not already spread across the globe due to the financial and infrastructure specifications. South America has only hosted one Olympic Games and Africa has not hosted any. The competition that is winning an Olympic bid would be forfeit if there was no bid to win, and there could be the potential for more inclusion of more “host” countries if the costs of building facilities was out of the picture.
However, with the locations of the Olympics already scheduled out through 2034 (Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.) the Games will likely continue to descend on different parts of the globe for years to come. Nonetheless, the impact of hosting the Olympic Games should not be taken lightly, and the environmental, spacial, financial and ethical impacts of this event should not be brushed aside.
References
“2024/2028 Host City Election.” Olympics, International Olympic Committee, www.olympics.com/ioc/2024-2028-host-city-election. Accessed Feb. 2026.
Chavkin, Daniel. “Future Olympics Locations: Full List of Host Cities for 2028, 2030 Games and Beyond.” Sporting News, 15 Feb. 2026, www.sportingnews.com/us/olympics/news/future-olympics-locations-host-cities-2028-2030-2032-2034/b9c5bd9fc2ae435ece7c5e56. Accessed Feb. 2026.
“IOC Releases Olympic Agenda 2020+5 Midway Report Highlights.” Olympics, International Olympic Committee, www.olympics.com/ioc/news/ioc-releases-olympic-agenda-2020-5-midway-report-highlights. Accessed Feb. 2026.
“List of Olympic Host Cities.” Architecture of the Games, architectureofthegames.net/olympic-host-cities/. Accessed Feb. 2026.
“The Economics of Hosting the Olympic Games.” Council on Foreign Relations, July 2016, www.cfr.org/backgrounders/economics-hosting-olympic-games. Accessed Feb. 2026.
“Requirements to Host the Olympic Games.” Olympics, International Olympic Committee, www.olympics.com/ioc/becoming-an-olympic-games-host/requirements-to-host-the-olympic-games. Accessed Feb. 2026. Wolfe, Sven. “Paris 2024: The Persistent Problems of the Olympic Games: Gjia.” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 25 Aug. 2024, gjia.georgetown.edu/2024/08/25/the-persistent-problems-of-the-olympic-games-a-focus-on-paris-2024/. Accessed Feb. 2026.