The sustainable truth behind the Olympics

The Olympic Games claim to be of high sustainable values and encourage it. Yet this image seems to be created as an illusion. Right now, the Olympic games ae thought of to be moderately endurable but is decreasing over time. Every Olympic game has had its positives and negatives contributing to the topic. The Olympics are a huge worldwide event so they could be influential and promote There are two main reasons of why the Olympics are not said to be keeping up their values. Firstly because of the abandoned venues they leave behind and secondly because of their contribution to climate change.

First of all, the Olympic games are the most watched and most expensive events ever. An average summer Olympic can cost over 10 billion of pounds! Because of the high popularity, high political priority and the large amount of global attention they get, they could be useful to address  sustainability and introduce important change. Important change meaning they could be a platform and a model to other countries and wide world event with sustainability. But this is not realy being accomplished. It is a big honour for a country to host the Olympics. The countries who would like to volunteer to host the event go through a bidding process which is very costly and already ruins some of the countries green values.

The sustainable credibility of the Olympics definitely gets ruined by the abandoned areas left behind. Every four years when the Olympics happen (every 2 years the summer games and every 2 years the winter games), it happens in a different country. A plan about which country is going to host the Olympics in which year is made many years so that the country has time to build the Olympic park/village which will house and give training areas for the athletes and will contain the areas were they will compete. Before the 1924 Olympics, athletes had to find housing in the city which was expensive for them so in the 1924 Olympics cabins for them to stay in were built near the venue, easy for them to access. Nowadays though as the event became bigger and more popular, the area used for an Olympic village increased largely. After the event is over these large areas aren’t really used for anything else and get abandoned, which is not very sustainable because it technically becomes a forgotten wasteland or a gap between buildings and other constructions as it could be an area of land used for a better use over a longer period of time rather than just a few weeks. The abandoned places could be impactful/made more sustainable because they have high potential for reconstruction and in co-operating them into the community for an effective use. Although many of them are left to collect durst, there are some exceptions where they are repurposed for tourist attraction or for university stadiums, but it costs a lot to do that, and once a country just paid to build the venue they can struggle to pay for repurposing.  

Most of these exceptions for certain venues went into private ownership and were repurposed then. For example, London after the 2012 Olympics, the stadium they built was repurposed and is now the West Ham United football stadium. Beijing´s 2008 stadium named the “Birds Nest”, was turned into tourist attraction but it does face some struggle attendance wise. Athens 2004 Faliro sports pavilion which hosted handball and tae kwon do is now occasionally used for political rallies, ice shows and concerts, even though many of its other venues that was built for the Olympics is a reminder that the money invested could have been better spent. There has actually been plans for the Rio 2016 Olympic venue as it was originally built to be repurposed after the games are over. Part of the venue was planned to be turned into 4 state-run schools each school teaching max.500 students. The Aquatic stadium is planned to be reassembled as 2 public community pools and the Olympic park which is 1.2 square km large is planned to be made into a few public parks and private development. The International Broadcast centre is intended to be made into a high school dormitory. But actions towards these repurposing ideas haven’t been started quite yet.

On another note, the Olympics contribute to climate change, deforestation and water-pollution. This is because the event is huge. It effects Olympians for a lifetime in a good way but it also effects the environment in a bad way. For example, the Rio 2016 Olympic games produced 17,000+ tonnes of waste, 29,500 gigawatts of electricity most of it being produced by fossil fuels, consumed 23,500 litres of fuel, and emitted an estimate amount of 3.6 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. The Tokyo 2020 Olympics did ban oversea spectators mainly for the reason of covid, which reduced the carbon footprint by a big amount but still produced 340,000 tonnes of carbon.

Most Olympic venues all had their positives and negatives of sustainable use. A few examples: Sydney 2000 Olympic games was known as the first “Green Olympics” because of the encouraged use of public transport and upgrades with it, also building many bike paths to encourage biking and using tonnes of solar power known as the biggest solar suburb at the time. However, they went over the city´s guideline of refrigeration and air conditioning, which harmed the ozone layer. In Athens (2004) they planted millions of large bushes and 300,000 trees to try and balance out the carbon footprint they left behind. But the wetlands they used for rowing and canoeing competitions were one of the last few natural wetlands left in the area showing that planting trees was not enough to compensate the damage made. In London 2012, they were rainwater harvesting reducing water wastage by 40%. But the medals were made by a company who was abusing human rights and producing chemicals, polluting the air and water horribly. Tokyo 2020 was using many sustainable materials such as the athletes sleeping on reusable cardboard beds, podiums made of recycled plastic and medals made with metal from recycled phones and other electronic devices. Yet again, there was a huge amount of plywood cut down from tropical rainforests in Indonesia made for the audience, which didn’t even end up getting used!

So as we can see for years now the Olympics have been trying to make themselves more sustainable and are heading the right way with some actions that have made significant change, but there is still a lot that can be done.