Imagine Toronto hosted the Olympics!
The Impact on Finances and Industry
By: Samantha Daniel
Photo taken by me
Toronto is Canada’s largest city and most important cultural center. It is the home of five major professional sports teams and fans of professional sports. In 2015 Toronto placed a bid to host one of the most important sporting events in the world: the 2024 Summer Olympics. Clearly, they did not succeed in their bid as the Olympics took place in Paris this summer. In my view, Torontonians should take this loss in stride.
In a staff report by Toronto’s City and General Managerial departments, when they pitched the Olympics, several reasons were listed for their bid, including a positive financial effect on the city resulting from building global relationships to ignite trade and business partnerships, and a potential catalyst for necessary development in the city. Hosting the Olympics can create a huge influx for the city’s tourist industry, an industry that already contributes 10.3 billion dollars to the economy. This summer, visiting Barcelona on vacation, I saw firsthand how hosting the Olympics can impact a city. Before it was the host of the 1992 Summer Olympics, Barcelona brought in less than 2 million tourists a year. Now, Barcelona brings in about 10 million tourists a year, so much that an anti-tourism campaign has been initiated by some residents due to the belief that the city is overrun by them.
Nonetheless, the Olympic Games have major financial repercussions. This would have been a major cultural event for the city and would have highlighted Toronto as a major metropolitan internationally, but it likely would have put the city in some financial trouble. According to a study by Robert A. Baade and Victor A. Matheson, most Olympic Games have left their cities in debt. Their research paper expresses that to host the Olympics, the city must build an Olympic village to host over 150,000 athletes and their families as well as a hotel industry and transit system that can accommodate 300,000 spectators and other tourists who flock to the Olympic city. What’s more, the city is required to ensure that there are facilities for every single event in the Summer Olympics, events which range from basketball to equestrian to modern pentathlon.
Olympic Rings Free Photo Clipart - Clipart Panda
Canada does not have a strong track record in hosting Olympic Games. According to the International Olympic Committee, the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal left the city in 200 million dollars in debt and the province in 750 million dollars in debt as a result of mismanagement of construction and design of the Olympic stadium. The Vancouver Olympics also required the city to take on a tremendous amount of debt, the finances for it split between the city, the province, and the federal government.
Vancouver’s Games had positive long-lasting effects for the city, but those circumstances likely would not apply to Toronto Olympic Games. For one, the Vancouver Games forced Vancouver to improve its transit system, adding new busing and metro systems that benefit the city today. The Toronto transit system, however, is in no place to expand its transit system further. The construction of the Ontario Line is already in place and set to be completed by 2031. This will have major impacts on the city once completed, but at the moment, the construction has closed off driving lanes and rearranged busing and streetcar routes in order to make this possible. Adding the construction of an Olympic stadium to Toronto’s mass transit expansion would have made an already congested city even more impossible to navigate.
Toronto famously has horrendous traffic. This was emphasized this summer by a viral video of singer-songwriter Nial Horan walking to his concert at Scotiabank Arena due to the severe traffic obstruction on the Gardiner that plagues Torontonians each day. This was just one celebrity trying to get to one venue that was impeded by severe traffic. I cannot imagine that the traffic situation would have been managed efficiently enough to ensure that the city ran smoothly enough to service the influx of visitors to the city as a result of the Olympics in addition to the hundreds of thousands of people who live and work in Toronto every day. The Olympics also require additional traffic restrictions in order to block off spaces for Olympic events such as cycling and the triathlon. The framework of Toronto is not equipped to handle such large numbers of people at a time and cannot manage more road closures at once.
Moreover, Toronto does not have the hotel space to host that many people at once. The Greater Toronto Hotel Association states that there are a total of 36,000 hotel rooms in the GTA. In comparison, Paris has almost 87,000 hotel rooms available, demonstrating that the city would need a major boost to the hotel industry’s supply to host the Olympics, adding to construction and development costs. Not to mention the fact that the construction industry in the city has a serious labor shortage. Assuming the factors that created those circumstances would have remained if Toronto won the Olympic bid, the city would have been ill-equipped to manage the necessary construction.
All of these considerations are even more relevant since the city is set to host a few FIFA World Cup games in 2026. Thus, Toronto will get a lighter taste of what could have been had the city actually won their Olympic bid, but not to the same extreme. Hosting the Olympics would have been a fascinating and memorable experience for the city, but the financial impact is simply an unnecessary burden. All the while, I loved watching the 2024 Olympics and am eager to watch Canadian athletes compete in LA in 2028—from afar.