By all appearances, the four finalists for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games desperately want to win.

The question is why.

The 1976 Olympics left Montreal with a $1 billion debt, which the province of Quebec fully paid off only in 2006. Australian taxpayers pay $32 million a year to maintain Sydney Olympic venues that now go largely unused. The projected budget for London 2012 was $3.9 billion; it's now $15.1 billion and climbing.

The bid cities of Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, and Madrid had many hopes going into the International Olympic Committee meeting Friday in Copenhagen, Denmark, at which the IOC will choose the 2016 host city. Chicago is hoping for international prestige to pip New York and Los Angeles. Rio hopes it will boost commerce and industry in the city. Yet Olympic historians say the cities can be certain of only one thing: a massive jolt to the municipal ego.

"It's civic pride," says Ed Hula, publisher of Around the Rings, a newsletter that follows the Olympic bid process. "It's the idea that 'we can do this' – that it's important and part of the city's history."

From pride to promotion

This notion of civic pride has often veered toward global promotion. Salt Lake City was eager to prove the falsity of stereotypes that portrayed Utah's Mormon community as insular and odd. Turin sought the Olympic spotlight to reinvent itself, saying it was more than the "Detroit of Italy" – it was an equal of Rome, Milan, or Florence. And Beijing's Olympics were nothing less than an astounding attempt to announce China's arrival as a world power.

At least two of the bid cities have had similar motivations: South America has never held an Olympics, and Chicago has always been America's so-called "second city."

"You don't realize the importance, the global importance that Chicago will receive," Mayor Richard Daley told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Chicago's bid is unusual because of the high-profile involvement of Mayor Daley, who is "a far more powerful and engaging figure than any other person on the US Olympic Committee," says Mr. Hula.

Though President Obama and the first lady are part of an 11th-hour show of official support, Chicago's bid is most intertwined with Daley's will and legacy. "He's the only one who got the Olympics bug," Hula says. "You can't do anything in that city without his support or his involvement. He has been the person out front politically all along."

But history has proved that prestige comes with a significant cost to the public, says Jeffrey Segrave, an Olympic historian at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. The economics of the Games are "extraordinarily elusive" because they involve "indirect expenses that are always difficult and cantankerous to deal with."

Page: 1 | 2