The financial challenges of hosting sports events. Why does history repeat itself?

Plentiful evidence exists concerning the financial underperformance of major sports events, and it seems that this problem does not go away. This is confirmed by our research, where we look at empirical data from four major sports events hosted in Norway over a time span of 23 years: The 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics, the 2011 FIS World Skiing Championship, the 2014 FIDE Chess Olympiad and the 2017 UCI World Road Cycling Championships. All these events suffered financially. This paper aims at identifying and explaining some essential factors why major sports events continually generate significant financial deficits in the form of cost overruns or underachieved revenues. We identify the following factors: (a) the awarding mechanism of major sport events; (b) exaggerated focus on legitimizing the event; (c) soft budgets; (d) disturbed cost responsibility; (e) interference by political interests; (f) financial, reputational, or political lock-in; (g) insufficient robustness of the event organization; and (h) insufficient knowledge sharing and transfer. Study data were collected from 66 semi-structured interviews and different types of documents.