Sportswashing: when dictatorships buy World Cups and Olympics

Hungary

Let’s end this séance with our beloved little country.

Up until now, Hungary has been particularly unsuccessful in obtaining the opportunity to host either the Olympics or the World Cup (that’s our sole luck), but in terms of smaller events, we are on pair with the Russian bear and the Brazilian favela in proportion to our size of population and economic performance.

After Trianon, we have wallowed in the mire of insignificance for a while, and our potential for tourism was slightly below the frog’s butt. Maybe we would have gone bankrupt long ago if Budapest’s ruin bars wouldn’t have saved us thanks to them becoming an international sensation by the early 2010s (that’s not an ordinary achievement: basing our tourism on the misery of lacking imagination and impotent depression of the general populace).

A surprising fact, but the wind of change was first brought to our country by the late Kádár regime (1985-88). The governments of Hungary and Austria, which then were still on the opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, decided that it would be an appropriate act to organize a world exhibition. Behind the idea was not merely the intention of bringing the two blocs closer to each other, but the desire to demonstrate that even socialism with a reputation already heavily battered at that time was capable of accomplishing great things.

There was some rationale behind Expo 1995, as the first edition of the revived world exhibition concept, the Spanish Expo of 1992 in Sevilla, ended up being a huge success and a profitable venture.

However, as soon as the Iron Curtain fell and the systemic change took place, the Austrian side suddenly pulled out of the deal after the people of Vienna voted that they did not want to organize an expo promising an uncertain financial outcome.

However, Hungary did not give up its desires at the beginning. Despite its postponement by one year, the works on Budapest world expo, now known as Expo ’96 continued. Experts marked the two shores of Danube river called Lágymányos as the venue for the event, which at that time was still an undeveloped swampy area.

Thanks to the wrongly executed systemic change, spontaneous privatization, corruption and the resulting financial difficulties, Hungary was in the verge of bankruptcy so it had to cancel the 96 expo (if you wonder why there was no Expo between 1992 and 2000, this is the reason). Some infrastructure, like the Rákóczi bridge was finished in 1995, the empty swampy area became today’s Infopark and the Lágymányos Campus of ELTE university. The half-finished Tüskecsarnok (spike hall), also planned for the expo, was abandoned in 1998, then finished by the second Orbán regime in 2014.

But we didn’t just toy with world expositions. Hungary has a rich history of applying as host for Olympic games – and failing every time. In fact, we are the nation with the most gold medals who have never been given the chance to host the Olympics.

The initial idea of Budapest hosting the Olympics came first when Hungary was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We have applied to host the 1916 olympics, but lost to Berlin. For 1920, Antwerp has won instead of us. Not that it mattered at all: the 1916 olympics were cancelled because of the first world war, and Hungary was banned completely from the 1920 olympics because of our role in the world war and the subsequent Trianon treaty.

For 1936, Budapest lost again to Berlin, and for 1944, to London. Needless to say that the London Olympics were also cancelled due to WWII. Finally, Rome won the right to organize the 1960 Olympics, and with our series of failures, this occasion also marked the last time we applied for hosting the Olympics.

At least until the millennium. Ferenc Gyurcsány, posing as sports minister and then as prime minister, started flirting again with the idea of advancing one of the most obese nations in the world into a sports nation.

Together with Croatia, we successfully applied for the right to host the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship. The voting went well in the first round, but in the second round, to out great shame, none of the UEFA committee members chose us.

That’s not all. In 2006, a new plan has emerged for Budapest to place its bid for hosting the 2020 Olympics.

If we had miraculously won against Tokyo, we could have staged the most disastrous Olympics of all time, without any hope of at least some partial financial return. By this year, people would eat each other on the street like cannibals. Although the Tokyo Olympics were extremely miserable, a country with such a huge economic power is more capable to bear the burden of this terrible flop. We would have gone bankrupt immediately.

Thanks to Gyurcsány’s decline of popularity and the lurking economic crisis, which arrived to Hungary two years earlier than the rest of the world, the draft was put back into the drawer – Only for it to resurface again 9 years later with renewed interest by Viktor Orbán.

According to the revised plan of 2015, we would have submitted a bid for the 2024 Olympics, competing with Paris, Los Angeles, Rome and Hamburg. Everything was running smoothly until Momentum came along to smash the whole wet dream through collecting signatures against the Budapest Olympics – thank goodness.

While the draft from 2006 calculates quite hefty, but realistic costs (5,000 billion HUF ~ €20 billion at that time), by 2015, they somehow managed to reduce the sum to around 1,500 billion (€5 billion). But how? Oh yes, just the usual: we lie that it only costs that much, the population takes the bait, then the budget blows up by accident after the country can no longer dance back from the responsibility. The budget was so irrationally underestimated that there was literally no city in the world post-millennium which could run the Olympic games at such a low cost.

If Orbán’s party can’t steal all the country’s money at once, he does it bit by bit using the slowly boiling frog method.

At the beginning of the second Orbán regime, the price of metro line 4 went from the planned HUF 200 billion to almost HUF 500 billion. The only factor exempting Orbán from responsibility is that most of this financial disaster was inherited from the previous Gyurcsány Regime.

But sporting infrastructure projects planned and built entirely under Orbán’s rule and events held between 2010 and now turned out to be even more disastrous for our economy.

The Puskás Arena (Central Europe’s largest football stadium) was built for HUF 190 billion instead of the 35 billion proposed in 2011. The cost of the athletics stadium to be built for the 2023 World Athletics Championships has increased from HUF 100 billion to 240 billion over the course of five years. The price of Duna Aréna, erected for the 2017 FINA World Championships, rose from HUF 8 billion to 43 billion in just 3 years!

And this is only a fraction of the infrastructure required for hosting the Olympics, where are we from the actual costs of organizing such an event?

In addition to next year’s Athletics Championships, Budapest had the opportunity to organize the 2017 and 22 FINA wet championships. We were lucky with the second edition of this, as the necessary infrastructure was already in place. According to official data, the final budget for the 2022 edition stopped at HUF 31 billion (€7.5 million). But the same budget was allocated for the first edition five years earlier, and the expenses inflated to HUF 130 billion, over 4 times higher than the initial budget. Even three years after its closure, the first wet World Cup still grew to be more expensive by a few billion forints.

By the way, these expenses were five times higher than the average amount spent on organizing the previous FINA Championships. Sometimes, a little Qatar resides in our hearts, minus the rich fields of oil. Another interesting fact is that we had won the right to organize both events after the original hosts stepped back. We were chosen for the 2021 (cancelled) championship. The 2017 event was to be held in Guadalajara, Mexico, and the 2021 one, since we replaced Mexico in 2017, in Fukuoka, Japan. Funny, but Mexico backtracked because of the rising costs (five times lower than our expenditures), and Japan was cancelled by FINA because of their completely braindead COVID restrictions.

No matter how many times an autocracy wants to organize some sporting event, the mantra is always the same: the nation is happy about the dispersion of money that causes bankruptcy. Anyone who doesn’t like this is definitely marred by envy and doesn’t wanna see happy people around himself.

But the sad reality is the following: the magic of the Olympics and World Cups wanes in a month, while the bills to pay remain with us for decades.

Also worth investigating is why the population languishing under the shackles of such systems has got no joy on its own, without having to chase megalomaniac imaginations of greatness and financially bankrupting ideas.