by Felix Richter, Statista.com
— this post authored by Niall McCarthy
The 2016 Summer Olympic Games will officially get underway this evening after a spectacular opening ceremony in Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã Stadium.
The organizers have put a huge amount of work and invested an impressive amount of cash to get to this point. Hosting the Olympics is expensive with the people of Hamburg voting to withdraw their city’s bid for the 2024 games in late 2015, primarily on funding grounds.
Costs ran 51 percent over budget in Rio, ending up at $4.58 billion. Even though that may seem like a huge amount of money, it pales in comparison to the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014. Costs there quickly snowballed with many venues coming in catastophically over budget. The final bill for the games came to a whopping $21.89 billion.
This chart shows the cost of hosting the Olympic Games since 1992.
You will find more statistics at Statista.
