Six months have passed since the Beijing Winter Olympics, and we are two years away from the 2024 Summer Games to be held in Paris. But as the world gets itself amped up for the best athletes in the world to show what they have worked so hard for, it’s important to take a step back and examine just how much work and cost goes into the cities that end up hosting the games.

Because it isn’t just bidding to host the games; which can cost millions alone, as Investopedia estimated it can cost between $50-100 million; and waiting for them to arrive. Cities also must build stadiums for the competition, and often also must do sweeping infrastructure updates to meet the standards set by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

The most expensive Olympic games to date was the Sochi Winter Olympics held in 2014, at a stunning $59.7 billion, with the Beijing Summer Olympics of 2008 falling just behind at $52.7 billion. Beijing’s Birds Nest Stadium cost $480 million to build and takes $11 million each year to maintain it. While it was used for a few arts performances and large-scale sports exhibitions, from 2013 until 2017 it was completely unused, as it was considered too large to be used by many teams that felt they would only be able to fill an eighth of the seating.

It is largely just a temporary center for seasonal events, or for people taking tours. It holds the distinction of being the only stadium to host both a Winter and Summer Olympics, which only highlights how often stadiums like this are considered single-use as Beijing is not even close to the only city that has held both a Winter and Summer Games. While many countries have tried to adapt their stadiums for other uses, many find them to simply be too big to be usable for other ventures.

The American Economic Association released a report on the costs of hosting the Olympics titled “Going for the Gold: The Economics of the Olympics”. According to the work by Robert Baade and Victor Matheson, cities must upgrade or construct roads, train lines, and airports to support the influx of visitors to their city. The IOC requires cities to have a minimum of forty thousand hotel rooms just for the summer games. They quote the overall infrastructure costs to be anywhere from $5-50 billion.

Using Rio as an example, it cost them a combined total of $13 billion to host the games in 2016, with 27 projects set up for the city’s overall infrastructure to increase the quality of life for the people living there. A large percentage of these would be expanding transportation lines, such as their Metro and Bus Rapid Transit. Not only have none of these projects been completed, but the structures that were built for the games are not still in use. Adding to that were the people who were evicted from their homes to build the stadium in Rio’s Olympic Park that now sits empty, and it shows how little benefit there was to the city to have to foot the bill for the event. Also consider the Athens games in 2004, which contributed heavily to Greece’s financial difficulties in the early 2000’s with the $11 billion price tag. Most of the venues from that game have been left abandoned ever since.

While it is always suggested that money will flood into the cities with the people visiting to see the games, that isn’t always a guarantee. Consider the Tokyo games, which had to be deferred by a year due to the pandemic. Even after a year, people were still hesitant to travel, and less visitors and athletes that were projected ended up going. While this might seem like an aberration unlikely to be repeated, this isn’t the first time a health crisis kept people away. Once again, look at Rio, which was in the height of the Zika crisis at the time, and had waters that were polluted with trash and sewage. These factors kept people from wanting to visit Brazil and risk their health and led to far less revenue than had been projected.

With Los Angeles set to host the games in 2028, it is important to consider how the city will be affected in the next few years, and if it is even worth it to host the games at all.