Highlights Hosting the Olympics is an honour, but abandoned venues in Athens, Beijing, and Rio show the need for long-term planning.
Athens showcases abandoned sites after 2004, while Beijing and Rio also have venues left to rot post-2008 and 2016 Games, despite huge spending.
Rio has made efforts to salvage hope from abandoned arenas by repurposing facilities for community use, a lesson Paris should heed in 2024.
Hosting the Olympics is a huge honour for any city that wins the right to do so. Paris is up next in 2024, but will need to learn lessons from the past to make sure that the facilities used aren’t abandoned after the two-and-a-half-weeks of events.
Previous Olympic hosts such as Athens, Beijing, and Rio have all seen stadiums used in the Games be totally abandoned and left to rot, despite the huge amounts of money spent by each to host one of the biggest sporting events in the world.
Athens 2004
In 2004, the Olympics was brought home. £8 billion was spent by Greece to host the event. It seems, though, for several of the venues used, it was only the two-and-a-half weeks in the middle of summer that mattered. To go along with this, Greece suffered big economic issues after the Olympics and, given the cost of the Games, the global showpiece can’t have helped with those struggles.
The Olympic Village in Athens is filled with abandoned sites which showcase the long-term detriment the Games had on Greece, even if they did shine in front of the world for half a month.
The Schinias Centre, which hosted rowing and canoeing competitions, is now completely baron. The same can be said for some training fields and swimming pools in the Olympic village which are now overgrown, with some inhabiting wildlife. Even a fountain which once showcased the famous Olympic rings is completely abandoned. Baseball and softball venues also remain unused.
The Faliro Olympic Beach Volleyball Centre was able to host 7,300 people in the arena during the Olympic Games, but now it is completely deserted and overgrown, with marks of graffiti on it.
It was only recently, in May 2024, that Athens’ Olympic stadium reopened after it was ordered to stop hosting organised events due to safety concerns.
Beijing 2008
One of the most memorable Olympics ever. Beijing 2008 saw Usain Bolt rise to superstar status as he took home his first Olympic gold medals. But residents of the Chinese capital may not look back on the Games with as much nostalgia as the rest of the world. It is estimated that Beijing 2008 cost £32 billion. Despite this spending, their arenas suffered a similar fate to the ones in Athens.
The venue for kayaking remains unused and has completely dried up. The BMX track, which once saw incredible sport on display in front of 4,000 live spectators, is now overgrown and mirrors a forest more than anything else. The beach volleyball stadium may not be overgrown like the BMX track, but it has still been left to rot.
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Pools that have been abandoned have also dried up. In most of these abandoned arenas, though, there are eery reminders of the summer of 2008 where the eyes of the world were on Beijing, in one of the best Olympics ever hosted.
Beijing’s Olympic Stadium is still in use today, a silver lining to the fact that so many other stadiums have been left to rust.
Rio 2016
The last Olympics that we saw with a full capacity of spectators. The Rio Olympics was once again a big success at the time. Again, though, hosting the Games was costly and, given that over $13 billion was spent on hosting them, the state of the stadiums now would suggest that the price wasn’t worth it.
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However, less than a decade after the Games were over, the Olympics Aquatics stadium had been abandoned in the Olympic Park. Inside and outside the venue were pools of water, which posed possible risks of zika and dengue. Other facilities used, such as football pitches, a skate park, and mini-basketball courts have all been abandoned.
In recent years, though, Rio has managed to salvage some hope from the abandoned arenas. In 2022, Bangu Atletico Clube and a samba school in Lins de Vasconcelos received parts of the Aquatics Stadium as donations. Then, earlier this year, the stadium was taken apart completely in order to donate pools to different projects around the city. Other stadiums used in Rio 2016 are now being used to help give back to the community, with the velodrome, for example, hosting sports and recreational activities for 2,000 local residents a month. So, it’s not all doom and gloom for the once electric Olympic arenas.
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Despite some positives in these examples, the fate of lots of past Olympic venues is a warning to Paris that the work does not stop after the two weeks of glory. Arenas must be maintained, and the needs of the people must be considered after such a massive investment is made.