iSport | For the Fans, by the Fans

The Indian Olympic Association (IOA) seems hell bent on making a fool out of itself and the country it belongs to. Most people that it comprises of understand very little of sport and even less about holding mega-sports events. They look more interested in the benefits that accrue from occupying such positions. The recent management or rather the lack of it of the Commonwealth Games (CWG) is clearly a case in point. You never give a kid a toy that he can’t handle or play with. More often than not he will only break it. I do not intend to suggest here as to how the CWG Organising Committee (OC) could have managed the preparations of the Games better. Neither do I wish to bring to your notice more horror stories of how gloriously IOA has bungled up. But I wish to examine the moot point of whether mega-sporting events are of any good, particularly for India or any country in general.

A typical event like CWG has three costs associated with it. The first is operational, related to athletes’ village, security, ceremonies and transportation. Most of it is generally recovered through sponsorships, television rights and ticket revenues. In case of CWG 2010 though, with a lot of public sector companies withdrawing their big sponsorship amounts, whether IOA will be able to break even in this regard is very difficult to say. The second expense is related to city specific infrastructure like roads, airports, sanitation, public transport that is built in the host city. How much ever big this expense is, the benefits are typically long lasting. The third category involves building the stadia necessary for hosting the various sports events. It is this expense that has proved to be the Achilles heel. Though the breakup of these costs for the CWG 2010 is not available with me, the OC’s decision to not renovate but to rebuild most of the stadia means that it would have been a substantial part of the overall expenses.

Olympic history is replete with examples were most these state of the art stadia have been rendered largely useless after the games. The “Bird’s Nest” Stadium, built for a cost of $500 million for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, was found useful enough to host only one event in 2009 and that too wasn’t sport related. The Big O (later referred to as Big Woe) stadium built during the 1976 Montreal summer games was estimated to be built at a cost of $176 million. The stadium though was not ready in time for the Olympics and cost a total of $1.47 billion in construction and constant repair work. It is lying largely unused right now.

The idea behind building such grandiose and top class sporting facilities is to build them with a definite plan in mind for their reuse after the event is over. Most relevant reuse of these stadia is to host domestic sports events.  But the operating costs of these mega-facilities are so high that hardly any domestic event finds it financially viable to use them. 21 out of the 22 Olympic venues that Sydney built during the 2002 Olympics are lying unused since. If no suitable usage for these stadia is found then the association is left with two options. Either it can let them rot or it can incur regular maintenance costs. These costs too are not small by any means. Maintenance costs on the facilities Athens built to host the 2004 Olympic Games were around $124 million in 2005 alone.

Also more often than not the original estimated costs turn out to be far lesser than the actual expenses. Athens had a budget of $1.6 billion for the 2004 Olympics. The city finally incurred a cost of $16 billion. In fact some analysts believe that Greece’s current near-bankruptcy crisis had its seeds sown during the extravagant and exorbitant Olympics Games of 2004. The IOA had estimated original budget of $1.6 billion for CWG 2010 but the costs have swelled to almost $7.5 billion and still counting. With the rampant corruption which has led the global media to call it the ‘the world's most corrupt sporting event’, it’s anybody’s guess on how much money really has gone into building better facilities.

What about the impact that such events have on the quality of sportsmen that the country produces? India hosted the Asian Games in 1951 and 1982. Neither did any of those Games bring about any significant improvement in the quality of our  sportspersons nor did it inspire many to take up these sports. Also the argument that new infrastructure that is built for the Games will help our sportsmen is incorrect at the very least because there is a lot more that an athlete needs to become world class than just very good stadia. Better coaching staff; money to participate in more international tournaments; financial support during the period he/she is training to a top athlete and best sporting equipment. The IOA could have spent a substantial portion of the money it spent on the CWG in providing the above.

How successful have the Games been in putting the city or country on the world map? Before we look to answer this question we need to remind ourselves that India is hosting CWG and not Olympics. So any effort India is trying to make to get the world’s attention like China did through the 2008 Beijing Olympics is downright foolhardy to begin with. The cities that have hosted Commonwealth Games have failed to get any significant global attention after the Games.

There is no denying the fact that Delhi has over the last few years leading up to the CWG got wider roads, a world class metro and airport, better hotels and comfortable city bus system. But really are we as a nation so uninspired that we need to host  Commonwealth Games to motivate ourselves to provide better infrastructure for our cities?

The former sports minister M. S Aiyyar who staunchly opposed the idea of hosting mega-sporting events may have gone a little too far in wanting the games to fail and I do not wish the same. But the lacunae and failures so far should be a lesson for the country and IOA to get its priorities right.