Then and Now: London 1948 and London 2012

[Are_grits_groceries]

Opening Ceremony:


Olympic Village:


More: http://www.london2012.com/photos/galleryid=1366814/#london-1948-opening-ceremony-1369063

Britain hadn't really begun to recover from WWII. It was a miracle they held the Olympics.

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Really done on a shoestring

By contrast, the cash-strapped Attlee government, which at one stage considered ceding the right to hold the Games to the United States, earmarked just under £750,000 for the Olympics. Even when inflation and more than six decades of growth are taken into account, the disparity in spending between the 1948 and the 2012 Games is marked: about 0.7% of GDP in 2012; less than 0.01% of GDP in 1948.
...
What's more, they made money. The economist Stefan Szymanski has noted that it is a myth that the Olympics pay for themselves, either through Keynesian pump-priming or a surge of tourism. But if hosting the Games has bankrupted some cities and left others with white-elephant stadiums, that was not true of London in 1948.

Spending came in at £732,268, below the budget of £743,000, while receipts (mostly from ticket sales) were £761,688. The taxpayer will be footing the bill for London 2012, but that was not the case 64 years ago. The austerity Games made a profit of almost £30,000 – of which the taxman received £9,000.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/mar/30/london-1948-olympics-austerity-games

[KurtNYC]

2. Must be nice to live in a country that has an extra $30 billion laying around to

host a 17-day track meet. Everything else is taken care of apparently.

[Fumesucker]

3. You should know..

It's not like the US has never hosted the Olympics..

Is everything else taken care of here?

FWIW I care very little about the Olympics..

[Gregorian]

4. And with global warming, we should know better.

As much as I have finally decided that I love the Olympics. As much as the Olympic carbon footprint is diametrically opposed to that of the military's use of fossil fuel, this is shameful.

As I've been saying, the human race will regret it's inability to recognize limits. It had the brains and didn't use them. It didn't know when to stop.

And think about this. When one amortizes the fuel it took to build the infrastructure, and the myriad other things involved, and divides it among the participants, it's revealing. If I were to take a guess, I'd say one high dive is 10,000 gallons of fuel. One 100 meter sprint is a 1000 gallons. I wish I could do accurate numbers.