King Charles should pay for it; it’s his plaything now.
Interesting. I wonder if there are other instances of hosts pulling out of a major sporting event like this after they have been confirmed to host (and with such little time left).
I can’t remember something like this happening before, and the cost of hosting sports events has only really ballooned out in the last 50-60 years, so quite possible it hasn’t happened before.
There have been quite a few cases where cities have rejected events because of cost (America’s Cup is a favourite here), but that’s always before they’ve agreed to host.
When you think about it, it seems like quite a big deal to pull out of something like that 3 years before its supposed to go ahead, especially when you consider something like Olympics has its hosts selected like 10 years prior or something like that.
Understandable decision I guess, but really sucks for the athletes.
It’d be interesting to know why costs increased so much.
I guess some of it will come down to how much was already built and the increases in construction costs in general since the start of the pandemic. But also, its pretty common - every Olympics since 1960 have gone over budget; and if the Commonwealth games work like the Olympics then the whole financial risk is born by the city - none of it by the games organisations themselves. And the IOC is a haven of corruption and grift as far as I understand it.
Running these big tournaments - even for stuff like Rugby barely makes any economic sense nowadays with requirements to spend so much building stuff that’ll often barely get used outside of the 2 weeks or so of competition.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-07/what-japan-learned-from-olympic-white-elephants/100329488
Are there rules about the commonwealth games? Are they not allowed to run it on the cheap, use existing stadiums, charge more for tickets to reduce demand so they don’t need bigger stadiums, etc? I guess there are a set of requirements they have to meet, perhaps those requirements need rethinking.
I really struggle to see how a city or country would get two billion dollars of benefit from hosting the games, let alone seven.
