A number of media outlets are reporting that NBC will lose about $200 million dollars on the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games broadcast. The network paid $2.2 billion of the US ...

The Olympics hooked me from my earliest memories of Bill Toomey, Lee Evans, and Jim Hines in Mexico City in 1968.   The Super Bowl, The Tour de France, the ...

I have been watching quite a bit of World Cup coverage, and the announcers seem to have gone out of their way to complement the new stadiums built for the ...

Rio was selected to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Despite lobbying by President Obama, First Lady Obama, and mega-star Oprah, Chicago's bid was eliminated in the first round of ...

Swimming has its version of the aluminum bat, an improvement in capital design that makes "labor" very productive, at least in an absolute sense. Maybe too much so: Since its ...

The cost of hosting the Olympics should perhaps include the induced subsidy to produce a high medal count. The government has said it will provide the first £20m of the ...

These are rants, but interesting ones. The first swing is at the 2010 Fifa World Cup in South Africa: In my home city, Cape Town, for instance, we are putting ...

There's an article on the front page of today's Denver Post about the effect of the stumbling economy on the Olympics: Although the Olympic flame was extinguished just a little ...

The opening ceremonies of the Beijing Summer Olympic games are today. I wrote a short article for the July/August issue of Foreign Policy on some of the financial aspects of ...

Vic Matheson's research shows that the economic motivation of hosting the Olympics is quite weak: the direct stimulus to income and employment is so small you can't measure it. But ...

Here’s a short post about the sacrifices made to make an athlete an Olympian. Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be Olympians. It may not have the ring ...