Build the venue for the Tuesday after, not the closing ceremony

Olympic construction is judged on seventeen days of television when it should be judged on the twenty years that follow.

Every host city says the same thing in its bid book. Legacy. Community use. A generation inspired. Then the flame goes out, the broadcast compound is dismantled, and a swimming venue built for fifteen thousand spectators sits in a district that needed a pool for four hundred schoolchildren.

The mistake is not ambition. The mistake is designing a building around its single busiest day. A velodrome that seats six thousand for a keirin final is a very expensive way to house a track that forty club riders will use on a Wednesday evening in November. The seats are the problem. Roof span, structural steel, circulation, toilets, parking, the whole cost curve is driven by peak crowd, and peak crowd happens once.

Temporary seating solves this and cities keep refusing to use enough of it. Scaffold stands look cheap in a drone shot. That is the entire objection, and it costs hundreds of millions.

I would go further. A host should be allowed, openly and without embarrassment, to hold events in another country. Not for money. For arithmetic. If a city has no ice, no white-water course, no shooting range, and no plausible local demand for any of them, building all three is not investment, it is set dressing. Lend the sport to a place that already wants it.

There is a counter-argument and it deserves saying properly. Cities do sometimes get infrastructure they would never have funded otherwise, and not just stadiums. Sewers. Rail links. Cleaned rivers. Barcelona is the case everyone reaches for and it is a real case. But look at what actually endured there. It was mostly the not-sport: the beachfront, the ring road, the housing. The arenas were the least of it.

So judge a venue by a different test. Ask what it will be doing on an ordinary Tuesday in year seven. If the honest answer is a regional badminton tournament and a wedding fair, build for that, then hang temporary stands off it for the fortnight when the world is watching.

The Games are not seventeen days. They are seventeen days plus a maintenance contract that outlives every official who signed it. A city that plans for the maintenance contract first will build smaller, plainer, cheaper buildings that are still open in twenty years.

The photogenic ones are usually the ones with the padlock.