[Dion]

Deadspin's Barry Petchesky has a breakdown of the cities that have scrapped their campaigns to host the event.

Krakow, Munich, and Davos/St. Moritz all withdrew their bids after the public voted against hosting. Stockholm withdrew after the city's government said that "revenues will likely be lower and costs higher" than estimated.

Oslo's bid is on life support amid mounting public opposition. And Lviv, Ukraine's bid looks to be all but finished in the face of widespread unrest in the country.

"Public expenditures on sports infrastructure and event operations necessarily entail reductions in other government services, an expansion of government borrowing, or an increase in taxation, all of which produce a drag on the local economy. At best public expenditures on sports-related construction or operation have zero net impact on the economy as the employment benefits of the project are matched by employment losses associated with higher taxes or spending cuts elsewhere in the system."

The most obvious representation of this is "white elephants" — costly Olympic stadiums that now sit empty. From Sarajevo to Athens to (some fear) Sochi, former host cities are full of examples of buildings that served a specific purpose for two weeks during the Olympics and then immediately fell out of use.

Countries, at least democracies, are no longer buying the economic benefit argument. As a result, we could be headed into an era where only non-democratic governments will want to host the Olympics.

After dropping out of the bidding, Stockholm's ruling party issued a statement saying they had no use for Olympic infrastructure:

The final two bidders for the 2022 Olympics are Almaty, Kazakhstan — who's first and only president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, won 95% of the vote the most recent election, which was roundly criticized by international monitors — and Beijing, China.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/bi...192953806.html