Tokyo obtains the organization of the 2020 Olympics, those that after the first time in South America with Rio 2016 and 12 years after Beijing will return to Asia, leaving the European option open for 2024, with Rome and Milan in contention.
The Japanese capital, which had already welcomed the five-circle event back in 1964, therefore defeated Istanbul and Madrid, which had never hosted it. And as always happens, even before organizing them, the Games have important economic repercussions. Usually negative, but not currently in this case: the Tokyo Stock Exchange celebrated the news with an increase of 2,8%, while in an almost non-random coincidence today the Japanese Cabinet Office communicated that data on Japan's GDP growth are still better than expected, with +3,8% on an annual basis.
Everything seems to smile at Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, therefore: the economy is growing and his Abenomics has convinced even the IOC jury, more than it was intimidated by the presumed consequences of the Hiroshima disaster.
In reality however, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics is already in red: the presentation of the dossier for the candidacy alone cost over 83 million dollars (62 million euros), of which just over half financed by the private sector (42,2 million dollars), while the rest has already gone to the metropolitan administration of the Japanese capital. The figure is very high, if we consider that Istanbul and Madrid spent 55 and 35 million dollars respectively for the candidacy, and that Athens in 1997 allocated "just" 22 million to obtain the 2004 edition.
But how can this figure be justified, which does not even include any costs for any infrastructural works? Above all in consultants and communicators: to convince the IOC you need to hire the best, who know how to "sell" the dossier in the best possible way. A dossier that must be very detailed, and therefore has a considerable amount of work behind it: it must in fact indicate the financing of the infrastructures, the transport network, the accommodation facilities for the IOC, athletes and the press, the ready-made sports sites and those to be built.
Crazy spending, which the IOC officially denies claiming, but which then in reality promptly rewards: it happened this time, and it also recently happened for the assignment of Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, to the detriment of Munich and Annecy, France. The European localities had spent respectively 40 and 28 million to present the dossier, while the Asians 120 million. The doubt arises more than spontaneously: can the Olympics be bought?
