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> This is simply not true. The Rio, Athens, Sochi, and South Korean games were unable to sell the majority of their tickets at face value The Olympic committee

> This is simply not true. The Rio, Athens, Sochi, and South Korean games were unable to sell the majority of their tickets at face value The Olympic committee's inability to accurately forecast demand does nothing to refute my statement. Overly (and most likely, IMO, fraudulent) optimistic revenue projections are a symptom of externalizing the cost of the event. You don't need to sell over priced tickets (or many, many tickets) if your costs are low. If it costs billions and billions of dollars, yeah, you gotta sell lots of tickets. Seems like any decently size university could host summer olympic games. The question then comes down to capacity. If only 20k people can attend, that dictates a certain price per ticket. They still have television rights, etc. If it turns out not to be profitable, then that's an accurate gauge of how important it is to society.

gamblor956 7y ago
Seems like any decently size university could host summer olympic games. Scale matters. The Olympics draw millions of attendees: Atlanta sold 8 million tickets; London sold 11 million. Moreover, there are over 100 different sports in the Olympics, most of which have multiple rounds of competition (except for the long-distance races like the marathon), requiring several thousand hours of competition. No university has the facilities for all of the Olympic events. No university has the space to hold all of the events within a two-week time-frame (or even a two month time-frame). No university in the world can handle those sorts of crowds. And finally, the crowd sizes you suggest - 20k, are generally smaller than the crowds that attend annual specialty regional events like the Mt Sac Relays or Penn State Open.
- linuxftw 7y ago
  > Scale matters. To who? Why should a city invite 10's of millions of people to watch competitors? If you can generative the same profit with 20k more expensive tickets, why invite 20 million? Just so people can spend their money in your town? Money they could have spent on something else. Seems like such a colossal waste of public funds.

gamblor956 7y ago

Seems like any decently size university could host summer olympic games. Scale matters. The Olympics draw millions of attendees: Atlanta sold 8 million tickets; London sold 11 million. Moreover, there are over 100 different sports in the Olympics, most of which have multiple rounds of competition (except for the long-distance races like the marathon), requiring several thousand hours of competition. No university has the facilities for all of the Olympic events. No university has the space to hold all of the events within a two-week time-frame (or even a two month time-frame). No university in the world can handle those sorts of crowds. And finally, the crowd sizes you suggest - 20k, are generally smaller than the crowds that attend annual specialty regional events like the Mt Sac Relays or Penn State Open.

linuxftw 7y ago
> Scale matters. To who? Why should a city invite 10's of millions of people to watch competitors? If you can generative the same profit with 20k more expensive tickets, why invite 20 million? Just so people can spend their money in your town? Money they could have spent on something else. Seems like such a colossal waste of public funds.