Headline : How to Fix the Dark Side of the Olympics

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Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent

Today is the first day of the 2024 summer Olympic Games, held in Paris. I'm a big sports fan, and I love watching the games. But it's also true that the Olympics have awful dark sides. Past games have featured horrible forcible displacement of residents to make way for stadium construction, saddled taxpayers with huge cost overruns, and served as propaganda showcases for brutal authoritarian regimes, such as those of Russia, China, and Nazi Germany.

This year's games are less bad than many previous ones. France, for all its faults, is not a mass-murdering authoritarian state, like Russia or China. And the Paris organizers have, to some extent, kept costs down by relying on existing facilities. Nonetheless, some migrants and homeless people have been forcibly displaced for the games (researchers estimate that  some 12,500 people were forced out), and I will be very surprised if French taxpayers avoid being burdened with severe cost overruns, even if they are smaller than those for many previous Olympics.

It doesn't have to be that way. In 2022, in the aftermath of the awful Beijing Winter Games, I outlined a series of reforms that can fix the dark side of the Olympics, while preserving their role as a great athletic competition:

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