Nothing Succeeds Like Success
Simple movements, repeated intelligently and systematically, build strength for athletic achievement. The Olympic movement reflects this strength. It plays a pivotal role in engaging millions of people to be more active and stay engaged with others who share this goal. It leverages this following to encourage steady improvement to achieve goals. And on its best days, it inspires confidence that accelerates success.
The Olympics has provided a valuable foundation of iconic and universal symbols that resonate in over 200 hundred nations and inspire people from all walks of life. Sometimes the symbols are so prominent that they overshadow the regimens that make the entire Olympic movement possible. These regimens build strength and build expertise that is widely shared through coaching and team efforts in the Olympic tradition.
The benefits of encouraging so many people to improve their physical fitness are substantial—and sometimes the most effective course for counteracting chronic diseases and other maladies. Diplomatic merits such as providing a common interest to bring the two Koreas closer together add to this value.
All benefits have costs. Some cost/benefit evaluations of the Olympic Games look unconvincing. And some individual components of producing the Olympic Games might never return the investments they require. Computing this with the precision of analyzing a bridge or toll road is not possible when many benefits are intangible or unknown until many years in the future.
But it is possible to spotlight individual components of the Olympics that create substantial value to gauge an order of magnitude of how valuable they have become. The multibillion dollar expenses of producing each edition of the Olympic Games make these kinds of comparisons important for discussions about how to plan for the future of the Olympics.
Two benchmarks from major league sports help to show how large the value created by the Olympics has become: team revenues average two times athlete compensation and market values for teams which are sold are typically eight times revenues. Olympic athletes do not receive conventional compensation, but the amounts paid in individual Olympic solidarity scholarships are about $85,000 for one season and top college athletic programs make similar investments. Financial analysts call this kind of measure a “proxy.” For all Olympic athletes competing in the Summer and Winter Olympics combined—14,200—this simple estimate of total value is $20 billion. That is a high value by any standard.
Of course, there is much more. Olympic qualifying events, Olympic ceremonies, the Youth Olympic Games, Olympic-affiliated high-performance training centers, documentaries, television series, books, websites, and other media are also assets made possible by the modern Olympic Games.
The very large scale of the Olympics creates a valuable advantage—economies of scale. The economics of high-quality professional video production help to demonstrate the value of this advantage. ESPN Films spent $5 million to produce a seven and a half hour series which won the Oscar for best documentary in 2016. The production cost included storyboards for project planning, research, writing, casting, narration, text and sound overlays, filming, editing, and postproduction quality enhancement. The $5 million budget equates to $667,000 per hour of the completed documentary. The 2016 Summer Olympics supported the production of 357,000 hours of high-quality original video for ESPN Latin America and other official broadcasters. These assets would have cost $238 billion to create if the expenditure level was comparable to ESPN Films for an individual project such as the Oscar award winning documentary. Total television production costs at Rio 2016 were in the billions of dollars, but just a small fraction of $238 billion, because the infrastructure of the Olympics venues and International Broadcast Center was shared by over 60 broadcasters and a large part of the research and preparation was provided by Olympic Broadcasting Services.
The total operating costs for Rio 2016 were finalized at $13.2 billion. When the accounts were tallied up, revenues covered the expenses, but $13.2 billion is a large amount for 17 days of sports events and ceremonies plus a year of test events. It is more than $1,000 per resident of the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan region. But it is a modest amount compared to typical costs for producing 357,000 hours of high-quality original video.
The Olympics also earn a premium for audience aggregation. The large premium marketing professionals have been paying for NFL Super Bowl ads in the United States reflects this. The NFL Super Bowl is seen by about one-third of the entire population in the United States. The price for one minute of advertising broadcast nationwide was more than $10 million in 2018 to reach an audience of 107 million viewers. Conventional advertising campaigns to reach as many viewers through many different programs collectively cost less than one-fifth of this benchmark.
Reaching an audience 32 times larger than the U.S. audience for the Super Bowl during the Summer Olympics does not create $320 million per minute in value because most advertising rates are lower outside the United States. But this comparison shows that if the global audience watched the Summer Olympics an hour each day during the 17-day event schedule, the commercial value of this attention would approach $325 billion. This type of comparison is one reason that marketing experts often estimate the value of the Olympics brand between $30 billion and $40 billion. Olympic organizations and athletes only share part of this value since many broadcasters, sports federations, National Olympic Committees (NOCs), local hosts, and production contractors share in both the costs and the benefits.
Not all of the value created by the Olympics is purely economic. One of its greatest achievements has been to inspire the organization of 600 other international multisport competitions in two decades and 600 more in the previous century. These events help achieve other goals. The World Master’s Games promotes lifelong physical fitness. The Paralympics adapts sports practices for people with disabilities to help them live healthier and more rewarding lives.
Participation at the Ninth IOC Athletes Commission Forum in April 2019 helps to illustrate how extensive the reach of the Olympic movement has become; 350 athlete representatives took part. They worked together on behalf of hundreds of affiliates:
- 185 NOCs
- 50 International Federations (IFs)
- Five continental Athletes Commissions (ACs)
- ACs of all the Organizing Committees of the upcoming Olympic Games
- International Paralympic Committee (IPC)
- World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)
- World Olympians Association (WOA)
There are many more Olympic affiliated associations, such as the Olympic Museums Network, the League of Olympic Cities, and the Association of Presidents of National Olympic Committees. Collectively, the constellation of international multisport competitions reinforces many of the strengths that have made the modern Olympics a success story:
- Providing high-performance athletic training to tens of thousands of participants who can share their expertise with teammates and are better prepared to become trainers and coaches
- Promoting a culture of volunteerism and development of management expertise that enhances the contributions of volunteers
- Building communities of fans with common interests and promoting sociability
- Providing a showcase for the culture and talent of the host region and country
- Offering forums for international communication and dialog
- Providing interesting content for educational programs and advancing health and human performance education
- Providing a testing ground for innovative technologies and communications programs
These benefits all have one factor in common. They are worldwide. When Rossignol works with Olympic medalist Martin Fourcade to develop superior lightweight insulated jackets or other high-performance gear, these products are available to customers from every nation. The educational outreach programs developed by the Olympic education department are available to schools around the globe. Citizens of every country can register for online courses from the IOC Athlete Learning Gateway. Most sessions of the International Olympic Academy are streamed live online. Most high-performance sports training complexes affiliated with the Olympics accommodate athletes from other countries. Omega’s precision measurement technologies developed for Olympic competitions are available everywhere. Viewers worldwide can watch Olympic sports competitions and ceremonies on television and see many recordings online.
The worldwide reach of the Olympics is an impressive achievement. But this success is now testing some limits of its own. Historically, most of the operating expenditures and almost all construction for the Olympics have been funded by partnerships based in the host city. Some multinational corporations also help out with contributions. Nissan joined three Brazilian corporations in the top tier of official sponsors of Rio 2016. All of the Tokyo 2020 Gold Partners are based in Japan, but two of the second tier of Olympic official partners are based overseas—Cisco from the United States and EF Education of Switzerland. Ticket revenues and hotel taxes used to cover more of the expenses, but these have not kept up with annual cost increases averaging 11 percent. So as the success of the Olympics has grown, the resources required of host cities have grown too. For some potential host cities, this growth has been too much.
The Price of Success
Financial professionals frequently refer to a negative factor that is out of the ordinary at a successful enterprise as a “red flag.” The Olympics has one. It is too big to overlook. The vacancy rate of voting positions on the International Olympic Committee is very high. In early 2019, 20 of the 115 positions were vacant. Athletes whose results are that far from their targets never win.
In addition, participation by IOC voting members is much less than 100 percent. Only 84 votes were cast on July 31, 2015, when the voting members of the IOC selected Beijing to host the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. Fifteen voting members did not participate and 16 positions were vacant.
The Olympic tradition of being a volunteer managed organization may have outlived its usefulness. Las Vegas, founded a decade after the Olympics, had a volunteer Fire Department until 1942, when its population passed the 10,000 mark. After the workload exceeded the capacities of a volunteer organization, the city hired full-time firefighters and managers. Of course, the IOC employs over 500 professionals to manage daily operations and liaisons with other sports organizations and supporters. But there is rarely independent staff support for IOC voting members although their responsibilities are comparable to corporate directors and legislators with large budgets for capable independent advisors.
Working together with Olympic medalists, cabinet ministers, and other political heavyweights, as well as the heads of large global organizations, requires exceptional credentials, skill, and powers of persuasion. The pool of talent is limited and often recruited for roles as directors at other organizations, television show hosts, keynote speakers, political committee chairs, or other leadership positions. Unlike the community of Olympic athletes, there are no designated alternates and there is no development program to build a candidate pool large enough to meet future needs.
The Olympics also has a continuing challenge to improve public understanding of the actual costs of presenting the Olympics and its benefits, as well as the large number of communities which benefit. Nearly 5 million viewers have seen a six-minute mini-documentary from Business Insider called “Why Hosting the Olympics Isn’t Worth It Anymore” on YouTube. It included the frequently cited and controversial figure of $51 billion in expenditures for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. The operational accounts of Sochi 2014 actually reported a modest surplus, which was used to customize a Russian language version of the Olympic Channel.
The very large construction expenditures at Sochi 2014 reflected economic factors that only a few financial professionals who rate government debt ever discuss. Russia has exceptionally low government debt rates—about 20 percent of annual economic output compared to 100 percent for the United States and 250 percent for Japan. Very low government debt rates can trigger damaging deflationary cycles or constrain institutions like pension funds and foundations which must allocate a certain amount of their assets to government bonds. Government borrowing to make very large infrastructure expenditures for the 2014 Olympics and 2018 World Cup was one of just a few choices in this unusual economic environment.
The construction expenditures for Sochi 2014 were comparable to the cost of building the University of California. Many Sochi 2014 facilities were converted to become the new campus of Russia International Olympic University. This detail is downright boring compared to a provocative headline like “Why Hosting the Olympics Isn’t Worth It Anymore.” Olympic leaders have faced a big challenge in overcoming damage from widely viewed reports like this which overlook important economic factors.
These issues are causing expensive challenges of their own. In April 2019, a city council representative from the Paris municipal government, Danielle Simonnet, called for a public referendum about canceling the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics. She argued that investments in public transit and improving the environment were higher priorities. The background information she cited was imprecise, but just the kind of report that can raise objections. A mobile carrier used a polling app to poll some of its subscribers on a random basis and 62 percent of those responding favored cancellation.
Competition is a key element of Olympic sports and competing successfully for public resources is also important. Many other kinds of long-term investments merit consideration—public health research and communications, public broadcasting, public libraries, public schools, public transit, roads, highways, bridges, and tunnels, to name a few. But the mathematics of diversification make it important for sports and fitness facilities to be included in these investment portfolios. Over long terms of 30 years or more, a portfolio that is concentrated in just a few areas always underperforms a portfolio that is better diversified.
The long list of challenges the Olympics face in the next decade should include an up-to-date look at sports gambling following the industry’s explosive growth. According to Zion Market Research, total expenditures on sports betting surpassed $100 billion per year for the first time in 2017. This analysis projected 9 percent annual growth through 2024, following a U.S. Supreme Court decision in May 2018 which permitted individual states to legalize sports betting. The sports betting industry has reached a revenue level comparable to Bank of China or JP Morgan Chase, two of the world’s largest banks.
In the past decade, sports betting has only produced costs and administrative burdens for the Olympics, with no measurable benefits. In 2008, the IOC established an “Integrity Betting Intelligence System” designed to alert authorities to any unusual patterns in sports betting which might uncover unfair manipulation of competitions. Results from London 2012 showed that the technology and alert procedures worked and no criminal activity took place.
One of the most notorious cases of match fixing involving Olympic athletes also showed that monitoring can work dependably and the spirit of resilience that is a recurring theme in Olympic sports can help misguided athletes refocus on sports after they have been disciplined. In a plot more like the script of a lighthearted comedy than a crime scene investigation, a pizza parlor manager persuaded nine players of the Montpellier Handball team to underperform in competition with a lower ranked opponent so that bets favoring the opponent would yield big gains. The volume of total bets placed on the October 2012 match was 40 times levels typical for this matchup and over 99 percent favored Montpelier’s lower ranked opponent. French gambling authorities were alerted immediately. They investigated and turned in the suspects for prosecution.
The criminal defendants included Nikola Karabatic, the captain of France’s Olympic handball team, and his brother Luca, also a player on the French National Team. They were found guilty of fraud, fined 10,000 Euros each and given suspended sentences of two months. The French Handball Federation suspended Nikola for six games and Luca for two. After Nikola returned to playing handball, he won the IHF Player of the Year Award in 2016, as well as an Olympic silver medal as a player on the French National Team. Both brothers were recruited to play for Paris Saint-Germain Handball and won the 2018 Eurotournoi championship together with their teammates.
Some business contacts with the sports betting industry in the future appear inevitable for the Olympics. FDJ Group, a leader in the sports betting industry, was an official partner of the Paris 2024 bid. It is chartered as a foundation and distributes its surplus to promote education and cultural activities. The FDJ Group has ambitions to operate worldwide.
In addition, Olympic TOP sponsor VISA ranks as the single most widely accepted means of payment in the online sports gambling industry. According to thorough research by the European Commission and the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, VISA payments are accepted by 86 percent of 3,620 sports gambling websites surveyed.
The Olympics also faces challenges and opportunities in the world’s second most populous country, India. The fee Sony Pictures Network paid to secure broadcast rights in India for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics was just $12 million. That is less than one cent for each of India’s 1.3 billion residents. By contrast, Eurosport paid $1.5 billion for Olympic broadcast rights from 2018 to 2024 covering European markets with a population just one-third of India. India’s Star Sports Network, which had paid $20 million for the broadcast rights from 2014 to 2016, declined the rights for Tokyo 2020 and Sony Pictures Network did not seek an option for Beijing 2022.
India is on track to surpass China as the world’s most populous country in the next decade, but it is far behind China in Olympic sports activities. Athletes from India won 3 medals at Beijing 2008, 1 gold and 2 bronze, while athletes from China won 100, including 48 gold medals. At London 2012, athletes from India won 2 silver and 4 bronze medals for a total of 6, compared to 91 for China, of which 38 were gold. India’s results at Rio 2016 took a step backwards with just 1 silver and 1 bronze medal each, while China achieved a total of 70. India took home no medals at all from the 2018 Winter Olympics.
Sports are popular in India, where the sport of choice is cricket, a sport much like field hockey in Olympic sports. India’s showdown with Pakistan in the ICC Champions Trophy series ranked as the most viewed program in India in 2017 with an audience of 72 million. Cricket players in India’s Men’s Premier League earn the highest compensation per match of professional athletes in any team sport, more than $350,000. That is almost twice the per match compensation paid to professionals in the NFL. Nonetheless, India has not won an Olympic medal in men’s field hockey since 1980 and the national women’s field hockey team did not qualify for the Olympics from 1984 through 2012. No Olympic athlete or team ranked in the top 10 list of sports sponsorships and licenses in India compiled by InsideSport, India’s leading sports business publication.
The Olympics has great upside potential in India if it can follow a good game plan. There is a good reason this should be a high priority. By 2030, India will account for over one-fifth of the world’s university student population. It is positioned to have an influential role in education worldwide. India’s Patiala high-performance sports training center, managed by the Sports Authority of India, is the largest in Asia with facilities for 1,000 athletes and can accommodate visiting athletes and coaches from foreign countries. The Master of Science in Coaching and postgraduate sports medicine programs for doctors admit candidates from all over the world.
A Healthy Outlook
The convergence of the sports world with the field of health and human performance has good upside potential for the Olympics and its ecosystem. Sports promotion programs that may have looked expensive in the past can look good in comparison to expensive medical treatments that take many years to develop and test.
Cystic fibrosis treatments illustrate this dramatically. The standard price for Vertex Orkambi, an approved treatment which is considered suitable for about 40 percent of patients diagnosed with the disease, is about $135,000 per year. Vigorous athletic training regimens cost much less and have helped many cystic fibrosis patients avoid early death.
The World Health Organization recently described antibiotic resistance as a “global health emergency.” The ecosystem of sports and human performance expertise that has developed around the Olympics is just one resource for responding effectively to this crisis. But it may be the only resource that can be mobilized worldwide through networks of participants who have extensive experience working together and achieving common goals.
The unique network which has developed around the Association of Sport Performance Centres (ASPC) works closely with NOCs. The association has become the “Premier League” of sports technology and performance education. It is also a role model for knowledge sharing in the Olympic and Paralympic movements. The 88 centers are advancing their capabilities in injury prevention and recovery, as well as programs for athletes with disabilities. As the sports industry plays a greater role in promoting health and human performance knowhow, this network is positioned to become a more valuable asset which can promote better health around the world.
The Olympic tradition of knowledge sharing is accelerating the importance of ASPC institutes in promoting health and human performance excellence for the general public. Most provide top-notch facilities to the public on a fee basis. They also share experience working with high-performance athletes in conferences open to sports industry professionals, and publish websites, magazines, and books. INSEP, the ASPC member in France, has an entire department dedicated to producing books, magazines, newsletters, websites, and webcasts. Important ASPC institute topics covered include strength conditioning, physical literacy, body composition analysis, sports nutrition, and injury prevention.
A 2017 survey of ASPC members showed extensive development of sports science expertise. Participants whose national Olympic teams ranked in the Top 20 at the Rio 2016 Olympics all manage sports medicine and physiotherapy practices. Most also have general practitioners, chiropractors, and osteopaths working with the sports medicine team. Expertise in sports science was also strong. All Top 20 group respondents engage experts in exercise physiology, sports psychology, video performance analysis, and athletic conditioning, while almost all incorporate biomechanics and sports nutrition in their sport science programs.
Other programs managed by ASPC members have assembled a very broad range of capabilities in applying sport science. The list includes cryotherapy, sport engineering, trauma center management, and integrated recovery services. The entire Rio 2016 Top 20 tier surveyed provide athletes with sophisticated recovery services.
Integrated sports performance and injury recovery facilities are a valuable addition to the array of choices available to improve human health and performance. The increasing seriousness of some sports related injuries which have made this important detracts from the value created by the Olympic movement. More athletes died from injuries at cricket matches in the decade from 2005 to 2015 than in the entire 20th century. The NFL reported that the total of player concussions reported rose from 206 in 2014 to 281 in 2017. The concussion rate in NFL style tackle football is about 15 percent lower than in rugby, considered the most dangerous sport, according to Complete Concussion Management, a network of clinics based in Canada.
Sports science is positioned to push back against unfavorable trends in sports safety. From Torino 2006 to Sochi 2014 the FIS Alpine skiing World Cup series reported 726 injuries. Only 500 athletes compete in a typical season, so the risk of injury is very high. New airbag technologies designed for skiers are showing promising results. Italian sportswear innovator Dainese adapted airbag equipped jackets first developed for motorcyclists for ski racers and became the first vendor to win FIS product testing certification in this category. Patented textile technology fine tunes the safety gear to minimize the risk of injury. Austrian Olympic champion Matthias Meyer demonstrated the product’s effectiveness when he crashed in a race in December 2015.
The economies of scale demonstrated by the Olympics in broadcasting may become an asset in reversing unfavorable trends in sports injuries. ISPO, the world’s largest sports equipment exhibition, showcased dozens of promising technological innovations to promote sports safety at its most recent show in 2019. Standouts featured impressive innovations:
- TriEye won the ISPO Gold Award for 2019 with new performance sunglasses incorporating a compact rear view screen in the corner of one lens. This innovation was originally designed for cyclists, but also has excellent potential for applications across the field of health and human performance.
- Uvex is showing how athlete safety technologies can have much wider benefits. Its research and development team engineers both sports safety products for athletes and industrial safety products for manufacturing and construction. Uvex helmets, goggles, clothing, gloves, and lightweight running shoes are developed with input from a thousand athletes and regularly improved to combine athletic performance with protection from injuries.
- Flaxta designs helmets and wearable protective clothing which incorporate sensors to measure impacts or concussions and identify impacts which need medical attention. Flaxta sports clothes incorporate meshes of shock absorbers to reduce risk of injury and the firm’s goggles incorporate lens technology which enhances ability to see contrasts. Both features can be adapted to uses for workplace safety and public safety.
Collectively, the dozens of sports safety innovators at ISPO demonstrate that many Olympic sports are providing the critical mass to cover the research and development costs of new products that can also improve health and safety of the general public. The economies of scale which the global scale of the Olympics has created is helping to build a legacy of helping humans everywhere live longer, healthier, and safer lives.
A Human Race
Health and human performance expertise are promoting a healthy outlook for the Olympics. This is critical during the current period of ongoing challenges and confusion caused by continuing doping and other banned performance enhancements in sports. The challenge is serious and involves so many different authorities in different countries that a quick solution would be the ultimate “impossible moment” in Olympic history.
Several studies show that nonconforming drug test results are almost two-thirds lower for Olympic athletes than for professional athletes in non-Olympic sports. The layers of bureaucracy of national sports federations, NOCs, IFs, Olympic qualifying event staffs, customs agents, multiple health authorities, and law enforcement organizations are cumbersome. But at a minimum, this level of attention has some effectiveness as a deterrent.
Sophisticated applications of artificial intelligence may be able to consolidate the collective experience of many authorities working to detect and correct improper use of performance enhancements in Olympic sports. It has not been possible to obtain insurance for manipulation of competition through banned performance enhancements in the past. There was not enough data and there were too many uncertainties. At the rate technology is progressing, insurance solutions should be possible in the future.
The diversity of skills in the talent pool of the Olympic community can support solutions for many challenges that face the Olympics and host cities. The topic of biodiversity has earned much attention and deserves it. Biodiversity can impact the world’s capacity to produce critical food and medicine products in the future. For similar reasons, skills diversity deserves attention, too. Science, technology, engineering, and math, often labeled STEM, have many advocates in education and government. But these skills alone cannot manage all the challenges facing the world today. Communications skills, team management skills, agility, resilience, and other foundations of the Olympics are also important. The challenges of the coming decade can put Olympic human resources to work and help to educate a new generation.
The Olympics is already promoting global skills diversity with two large initiatives. The IOC’s Athlete Learning Gateway for online courses presented by leading experts is available to everyone who registers, not just Olympic affiliates. Earning a gold medal in the program requires effort and improvement, just as in the Olympic Games. And as Olympic volunteer programs have grown in step with the Olympic Games, online and personal training for volunteers has achieved the sophistication of corporate training programs. Many Olympic volunteers return for future editions of the Games and share their experience with new recruits.
What direction will the Olympics move in the future? What new challenges will arise? Which personalities will become legends worthy of the best Olympic traditions? No one knows for sure—that alone keeps the discussion lively and makes the Olympics a center of attention around the globe.
The Olympic community was treated to an optimistic perspective at the ceremony celebrating the graduation of the class of 2018 at AiSTS. This Masters of Sports Management program was launched in 2001 by the IOC in partnership with the University of Geneva and graduate schools in Lausanne. Its graduates have reinforced the strategic foundations of the Olympics: building on tradition, adapting to a changing world, and providing leadership for the future.
The 40 graduates in the class of 2018, from 26 different countries, were joined by relatives, friends, fellow alumni, and well-wishers from around the world. They were all accomplished athletes who also excelled in school and advanced the program’s founding goal—to promote professionalism in sports with the support of technology and sports science.
IOC President Thomas Bach congratulated each graduate in person and shared a brief talk, speaking as a colleague and as a friend of the sports community. He finished where the Olympic story began, with values so enduring the world embraces them 28 centuries after the first Olympic contests were held in Olympia in ancient Greece.
Bach reminded the graduates that the world around them is changing every day and encouraged them to “look at this with a spirit of looking for opportunities.” He observed “the Olympic values still have an impact in this world. These values are not exactly what people are promoting as the values of today. Look at politics—look at business—you don’t find much respect at all.” He promoted the view that “dialogue is the basis of sport,” reflected by a slide show of the graduates exchanging ideas in the classroom and at sports trials. He concluded, “Look at this with a view that you can promote the values to a bright future.”
How bright will this future shine? A replica of an Olympic cauldron illuminated the entry to the International Olympic Museum where the ceremony took place. It reminded all how meaningful and enduring the universal symbols of the Olympics remain, even as the world around us changes every day.
As each graduate moved across the stage with the spirit of accomplishment we see on Olympic podiums a slide with a phrase each chose to inspire the community illuminated the auditorium. Sports media entrepreneur Rita Pivoriunaite of Lithuania, a six-time European champion in karate, summed up the experience with a simple, inspiring phrase—“I can. I will. The End.”
Illustration 7.1 Surrounded by iconic images of the Olympic movement at the International Olympic Museum, IOC President Thomas Bach encouraged young sports business experts to aspire to a bright future.
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