The original estimated cost of the 2010 games as forecast in 2004 was $1.354 billion. Actual costs are now estimated to be $6 billion with $580 million coming directly from taxpayers. Just for the fun of it I checked, and the number of Canadian taxpayers appears to be in the range of 22 million people who are of working age. This means that a whole $26.36 of my tax dollars went to pay for approximately 2,262 people to play games… competing for 86 gold medals in 15 categories. (Actually $26.36 is a lot lower than I thought it would be and I guess I don’t mind making that token donation, but it would have been nice to have been asked first. I might have even donated more if I could get a receipt to claim at least a portion on my taxes. I can also think of many places I’d prefer my tax dollars to go like clean water or decent housing for a lot of the northern communities, or how about a cure for potholes! Why, a single tie-rod repair on my Jeep is about to cost me $360 so I’d be more than happy to donate to road repair if I knew it would save me more than that over a period of time. But I digress…)
So using the figures above the cost is about $400 million per category, or $2.65 million per athlete or about $428.5 million per gold medal won by Canada. These are just the costs to Canada… I wonder what the world wide cost comes to.
Alright, so maybe the Olympics make sense as a business proposition but I don’t see any other use for them, and it only benefits a very small location within the country. I wonder though, since the total revenue flowing into the Vancouver area is expected to come to around $10 billion… can I apply to them for my $26.36 refund?
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