will the olympics be a financial disaster for greece?
 

billions spent on empty facilities... empty hotel rooms and shops.

if i had known that i could walk into any gold medal competition, i might have taken some time off work to head to greece.

Greece is super-fucked.

Ofcourse they're fucked. The sad fact is that the Olympics aren't nearly as big a moneymaker as politicians seem to think.

Maybe if there wasn't a drug scandal happening every 5 minutes people would actually be interested in watching athletes compete against eachother.

If I was in Greece, there's no way in hell I'd wait hours and hours, pass through security checks and so on just to get to view some olympic competition.

Man the stands at some events are empty. They need to start giving away tickets to fill up some of the games. I think people are staying away because of the security risk, which is very sad!

Yep, Track and Field got hit the hardest. These are usually the top draws (attendance wise) I believe and there was a article saying those events were hurting for ticket sales.

People should be allowed to use whatever drugs they want...

Games would be a lot more exciting if everyone was uber-super-human...

just think, 10 generations from now after the drugs affect their genes, the games could be packed with X-Men-esque competitors! That would r0x0rz.

Yup.. It's extremely hard to make money. Everyone made a lot of $$$ bulding the arenas, etc.. But for the city and organizers it's going to be a disaster :1orglaugh

Hey, even here in Montreal I think we're still paying for the ones in 1976.

The Olympics is more of an international status symbol then anything. The supposed income si what the governments use to boondoggle their populations into footing the bills.

They said on the news today that they won't be able to see if the games are a bust or not for at least 5 years...possibly 8.

At this point financial disaster would be if you had to pay the cost of the olympics the next years, not if you have already paid that. The sure thing is that only a small portion of the money will return in the form of generated revenues, so from the view of investment it wasn't that great. The decrease of army expenses the last years covers the largest part of the cost. I would say the upcoming unemployment is the serious worry since approximately 100k people that have been working for the olympics they'll stay with no work.

i think they said average was 50% sales.

They should be able to make a profit from that , or close anyways.

Alot of the money spent will still stay in greece anyways, and the tourism gains will most likely last years as well.