Tokyo Letter: Soaring cost of Japan’s 2020 Olympics

As Rio has again showed, the Olympic games invariably leave their host cities with a throbbing hangover. The price tag for the 2016 Rio Games is $4.6 billion (€4.1 billion), 50 per cent over-budget, according to a study by Oxford University's business school. Forbes says the eventual cost will be at least double that.

That's par for the course. Not a single Olympic Games since 1960 has met its cost target. The average overrun has been 179 per cent, says the Oxford study. The 1964 Tokyo games cost 10 times more than the Rome Olympics in 1960, and started Japan's addiction to bond issuance to pay for construction projects.

Costs could top $30 billion

Japan

surely knows this history better than most. Yet, the tag for hosting the Tokyo games in 2020 could top $30 billion, more than four times the original estimate, a panel warned this week. The panel, set up by the city’s new governor

Yuriko Koike

, says the cost for one venue has soared seven-fold since Tokyo’s successful bid in 2013.

Japan's Olympic Committee (JOC) initially promised a "compact" Games, with 85 per cent of the competition venues within an eight kilometre radius from the athletes' village on the city's waterfront. At least one venue, for rowing and canoeing, may now be yanked 250 miles (440km) north-east of the capital's city centre. That adds to several others – for basketball, cycling and taekwondo – that have already been moved, in one case 90 miles from Tokyo.

City planners initially saw the event as an opportunity for another great leap forward, a scaled down version of the remarkable urban transformation (and architectural vandalism) that accompanied the 1964 Games.

Waterfront

In addition to a clutch of new Olympic venues and a $2-billion stadium, potentially the world’s most expensive, the plans included new roads and railway lines and waterfront redevelopment.

Three years later, heads have cooled. Masuzoe is gone, toppled by a financial scandal, and the Games' centrepiece has been scrapped. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the stadium was so unpopular the government had to literally return to the drawing board. The cost of the new 80,000-seat venue has been capped at a still startlingly expensive 155 billion yen.

Spiraling construction and security costs are partly to blame. But the panel head, Shinichi Ueyama, also cited a familiar tale of poor governance and leadership. Releasing his report on Thursday, he said the Olympic organisers were irresponsible, like "a company without a president and a chief financial officer."

Disorganisation

This disorganisation was symbolised by the confusion over the official logo for the Games, which was also scrapped last year amid allegations of plagiarism. There have since been claims of bribery in the bidding process – a panel commissioned by the JOC found, to nobody’s surprise this month, that a $2 million payment to a consulting firm in connection with the bid was “legitimate”.

The sense of money being scattered like confetti alarms taxpayers in a country with a declining population and a public debt load of about $11 trillion (roughly two-and-a-half-times GDP). One reason why a string of earlier Tokyo bids to host the Games failed was lacklustre public support.

That will not be lost on Koike, a populist governor who trounced her establishment rival this summer with a promise of clean government. She praised Ueyama’s report and said she would give it serious thought. But with time ticking (venues must be ready for preliminary events by 2019), she must make decisions quickly, and faces stubborn opposition.

Bête noire

Her bête noire is Yoshiro Mori, president of the Tokyo Games’ organising committee. “For Japan to overturn decisions that have been completely settled with the

International Olympic Committee

would be extremely difficult,” he said after the panel report was released.

Much of this will be familiar to Japanese old enough to remember the 1964 Games, which turned Tokyo into a 24-hour building site and was plagued by cost-overruns, missed deadlines and scandal. In the end, they were among the most successful Olympics in history, a symbol of Japan’s transformation from wartime pariah to economic superpower. Few would bet against another triumph, but the hangover may well last longer.