There was an excellent piece on Gumbel's Real Sports show on HBO (the racist host aside, it is a very good show). About how these countries (Russia, Greece, and now Brazil) have taken a bath on building these stadiums for the Olympics/World Cup. Apparently Brazil basically build a giant stadium in the middle of a rainforest, that will essentially host 13 soccer games during the World Cup and then will be left empty and un-used! The biggest "success" would be when Atlanta turned the Olympic Stadium into Turner Field (which is already outdated and is going to be replaced) not even twenty years later! I would hate to be a tax payer who footed the bill for any of these events.
First you have to bribe the correct FIFA/Olympic committee members in order to get awarded the games. Then you have to build giant multi million dollar stadiums and dorms. And then after the security costs, you will lose maybe a billon dollars! When you think of how Greece's economy collapsed after they hosted the games, I fear for Brazil.
You make several good points.
1) The FIFA venue selection process (not to mention match conduct) is almost certainly corrupt. It is so bad that it is now widely reported that members of his board and others have asked Sepp Blattner not to run for re-election as FIFA President. It is so bad that the Qatar selection might actually be put to a re-vote and rescinded as a result. That's bad!
2) The Olympic selection process has been corrupt in the past, but seems to have cleaned itself up.
Where I might disagree with you and with Gumbel's view is that each country has to make its own assessment of the short and long-term trade-offs around the expense of putting up what are virtually single-use sites vs. the marketing and public relations benefits that accrue to the country as a result.
In the case of the Beijing, Korea and Sochi Olympics/World Cup decisions, the widely held view is that the tradeoffs were worth it in the two former cases and were likely worth it in the latter case, though not enough time has passed to be sure about Sochi.
The Atlanta Olympics were indeed a disaster in the eyes of most for many reasons, so I'd probably agree with your assessment there, but for different reasons. Vancouver also had a lot of problems.
It is difficult to draw a "cause and effect" link between the Athens Olympics and the Greek economic collapse. While the economy was a basket case without the Olympics and the country almost certainly should not have tried to host the games, that economy was doomed with or without the games.
Brazil falls in the "too early to tell" category. We need to see the impact of the World Cup and Rio Olympics before we will know for sure. It's not looking good, but I'm going to wait and see.
