The Olympics are the biggest and most prestigious sporting event on the planet. Every four years, even people with no real interest in sports take some time to marvel at the accomplishments of the world's greatest athletes all gathered together.

Yet for all the glamor and glory of the Olympics, their future is seriously in doubt. The 2032 Games were awarded to Brisbane, Australia's 3rd biggest city, after it was the only place to submit a bid. Voters in potential host cities like Hamburg and Budapest have rejected the possibility of welcoming the games in referendums.

It seems possible that in our lifetime, the Olympics as we know it will fade away — and the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. The Olympics can be a cruel mistress, overpromising and underdelivering.

Understandably, the Olympics are expensive to host. Even though they are usually held in major cities that already possess major stadiums, athletics tracks, hotels, transport options and so on, it's never really possible to host them with whatever a city happens to already have lying around. These were the costs for some of the past few Olympics:

• Sydney 2000: US$4.7 billion
• Athens 2004: €9 billion
• Beijing 2008: US$42 billion
• London 2012: US$11 billion
• Rio 2016: US$15 billion

In 2024 dollars, even Sydney didn't spend much under $10 billion. The cost was over $2,000 per city resident; for Athens, a much smaller city, with much more expensive games, you could have bought everyone a car for what it took to finance the Olympics.

Champions of the Games will suggest that they pay for themselves through tourism, improve long-term media coverage for the host, ticket sales, TV revenue, and so on. Unfortunately, the hard figures simply don't back this up.

To begin with, it's not even clear that tourism increases significantly during the Olympics. Given that the Olympics take place during summertime in cities already popular with tourists, it seems that Olympic tourists just tend to replace ordinary tourists who stay away to avoid congestion, higher prices, closures and so on.

And while media exposure is a nebulous, hard-to-measure thing, the idea that it justifies $10+ billion of expenditure is absurd, if for no other reason than the fact that the Olympics often damage the reputation of host cities.

The massacres at Mexico 1968 and Munich 1972 significantly damaged those cities' images concerning safety; Beijing 2008 cemented the city's reputation for appalling pollution and human rights abuses; and Rio 2016 reminded the world of Brazil's corruption, disorganization and high crime levels.

The Olympics do, of course, bring in a considerable amount of ticket and broadcast revenue, but a large chunk of this goes straight to the International Olympic Committee. What's left doesn't come close to matching the cost of the games.

But doesn't all the Olympic infrastructure spending benefit the cities after the games have ended? Not by enough to justify the expenditure. In practice, cities tend to be left with sports facilities that are rarely used and expensive to maintain, while relatively little is invested in things that generate lasting positive change, like improved public transport.

Of course, there are occasional success stories which are used to justify bids. Barcelona's heavily debt-financed 1992 games are widely recognized as putting the city on the map; Tokyo 1964 announced Japan's re-emergence as a global economic power, with the debut of the first bullet train, and also allowed it to add Judo to the list of Olympic sports, which has provided 33% of its gold medals since then.

But if we're going to list the successes, it's only fair that we also list the catastrophic failures, and here Japan must feature again. Its 2020 games were actually held in 2021 due to Covid-19. The games were held in empty stadiums, with health restrictions and a tourism ban severely limiting ticket sales. Supposed to rejuvenate the flagging Japanese economy, it did nothing of the sort.

The extravagance of Athens 2004 has been blamed as a contributing factor for the Greek financial crisis a few years later, which nearly plunged all of Europe into the abyss. And since the games are planned years in advance, sometimes they have to be held after a crisis too — the Rio 2016 games were held in the aftermath of the 2014 commodities crash which shattered Brazil's economy.

But no failure is as humiliating as going through the expensive bidding process and then being rejected with nothing to show for it. Chicago's unsuccessful campaign to host the 2016 games cost $100 million.

These problems are not unique to the Summer Olympics — they threaten the future of most big international sporting events.

The Winter version has been in decline for years, with Sochi 2014 being one of the worst-organized events in history; World Cups in South Africa (2010) and Brazil (2014), and subsequent FIFA corruption scandals, have left a sour taste in many mouths; and the Commonwealth Games are at the point of collapse, having failed to find a single bidder for 2026 or 2030.

So is there any future for these big international events? If so, significant changes to the scale of the events and to the bidding processes will have to be made.

Some have suggested the even more radical step of having permanent hosts, which mirrors the existing trend of depending more heavily upon cities which have hosted on multiple occasions (London, Paris, Los Angeles) and are accustomed to hosting major international events.

That would certainly rob the Olympics of some of their charm — but if they are to survive at all, maybe it's a change we'll have to consider.