International oddsmakers still had Chicago a hair’s breadth behind Rio in the contest for the 2016 Olympics last week. But here on the shores of Lake Michigan, with the City Council signing off on an unlimited Olympic expense account, it feels like a done deal. Unless the IOC’s nose is still out of joint over the U.S. Olympic Committee’s abortive attempt to cut its own deal for an Olympic cable network, it’s hard to see how even the world capital of sexy can stand a chance against the Richie Daley-Pat Ryan-Oprah-Obama machine. Meanwhile, bid committee chair Ryan gets local hearts thumping with his prediction that the games would bring Illinois $22.5 billion.
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For the city’s cultural institutions, the $7 billion predicted to come directly from increased tourism is the main focus. According to an economic-impact study commissioned by the Chicago 2016 committee and released late last year, “the number of visitors to the city will increase before, during and after the games,” and the $7 billion would roll in over an 11-year period starting in 2011. Tourists are also supposed to be the primary force behind job creation—”a major underpinning” of the predicted impact of the games, because, in the alternative world of impact studies, jobs have a magical “multiplier” effect based on the idea that people who get jobs spend their pay on goods and services, which generates yet more economic activity. With the study’s muscular multiplier in play, $8.4 billion in anticipated direct spending (on games prep and operation, as well as by tourists) balloons into Ryan’s $22.5 billion bounty.
That wasn’t a fluke. The dampening effect the games have on host-city—and host-nation—tourism in the periods before and after the big event (not to mention the shut-down-city effect during) has been cited by numerous observers. Officials at Atlanta’s Fernbank Museum of Natural History and the Atlanta Botanical Garden, for example, say they had significant declines in attendance for 1996, the year of the Atlanta games. The slump is usually presented as a bump in the road to the gloriously increased tourism that’s sure to be the games’ lasting legacy. But some of the folks who study this stuff, including Mark Rosentraub, a professor of sport management at the University of Michigan, call that a fantasy. Rosentraub says the Olympics is “a good thing to do” if you manage it properly and don’t build a lot of infrastructure. But it’s not going to have a long-term impact on the host city’s economy, and “there’s no evidence that it results in a sustained increase in tourism.”
The ETOA report also points out that while Barcelona is frequently invoked as a host-city poster child and has grown as a tourist destination since the games, it lags behind comparable nonhost cities like Dublin and Prague.
