The Winter Olympics’ financial model asks for the host country to spend several billion dollars, the IOC to gain a couple billion dollars, and sports organisations to split hundreds of millions of dollars.
Fortunately for China, profiting from the 2022 Beijing Olympics was not a priority even before the coronavirus pandemic knocked off several planned streams of revenue.
In 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared the goal of developing a new tourism industry in the country.
“If we win, it will motivate over 300 million Chinese to join in winter sports, which will tremendously assist to the development of the international Olympic cause,” Xi remarked at the time, according to China’s official news agency Xinhua.
The buildup to the Olympics, which begin on February 4 and end 16 days later, has resulted in the construction of high-speed train lines that will transport athletes to new ski resorts outside of Beijing. Those same train lines will transport Chinese tourists to the highlands for the next few decades.
Russia is said to have spent $51 billion on the 2014 Sochi Olympics, a figure that is expected to be an Olympic record for many years. That massive sum made European voters wary of hosting in the future, prompting the IOC to rethink how Games are awarded and staged.
But, as with Russia in 2014, China’s rationale is a state-backed strategy to develop domestic leisure and tourism sectors, with the big ticket item once again being a city-to-mountain transportation system.
More than $9 billion has been budgeted by China for a high-speed rail link from Beijing to nearby ski resorts in Zhangjiakou and Yangqing, where ski slopes have been sculpted out of mountains that receive little natural snow.
The budget for Olympic-specific operations in preparation for the Games is projected to be around $4 billion. The venues built in Beijing for the Summer Olympics in 2008 have been repurposed. The Water Cube for swimming has been replaced with the Ice Cube for curling.
Post Your Comments