The Olympics Promised Neutral Sport. The IOC Took $8.1 Billion Instead.

There was a moment during the Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony when the cameras panned across the VIP section, and I noticed the seating arrangement. Not the athletes on their boats along the Seine—everyone saw those. The seats in the viewing stands at Trocadéro. Front row: Thomas Bach, IOC President. Second row: Emmanuel Macron. Third row, partially obscured: a delegation from Riyadh whose members were not identified in the broadcast but whose attendance had been confirmed in Le Monde three days earlier. The Saudi Olympic Committee had been suspended twice in the past fifteen years, once for gender discrimination, once for failing anti-doping protocols. They were there anyway.

I am not sure what I expected, but it was not this: that the theater of neutrality would be performed with such precision even as the business of influence proceeded undisguised.

The Arrangement

The International Olympic Committee generated $8.1 billion in revenue during the Paris 2024 quadrennium—broadcast rights, sponsorships, hospitality packages sold to governments and corporations that understood what they were buying. The IOC calls this "the Olympic Movement." The movement, it turns out, moves money. Broadcast rights to NBCUniversal alone: $1.23 billion for Paris, $7.65 billion for the contract running through Los Angeles 2028. The TOP sponsorship program—Coca-Cola, Visa, Toyota, Alibaba—contributes another $2 billion per cycle. What the sponsors receive is called "association." What the governments receive is called "diplomatic access."

Paris 2024 was the cleanest Games in two decades by the IOC's own anti-doping metrics: 6,130 tests conducted, 40 violations. What the numbers do not show is who was not tested. The Russian Olympic Committee remained suspended for violating the territorial integrity of Ukraine—specifically, for organizing competitions in occupied Crimea and Donetsk. Individual Russian athletes competed anyway, under the designation "Individual Neutral Athletes," a category invented in 2017 and refined in 2024. They won 16 medals. They stood for no anthem. The cameras did not show their families in the stands, many of whom had traveled from Moscow on visas facilitated by the IOC's own diplomatic channels.

I know what I am talking about here. In 2008, I covered the Beijing Olympics for a magazine that no longer exists. We were told that the Games would "open" China, that the IOC's engagement policy would bring reform. What the Games brought was $4.1 billion in infrastructure contracts for state-owned enterprises, a surveillance system that remained operational long after the torch was extinguished, and a model that other autocracies studied closely. By 2014, Vladimir Putin had read the manual. Sochi cost $51 billion, most of it unaccounted for. The IOC called it "a successful Winter Games."

What Neutrality Buys

Saudi Arabia has never hosted an Olympics. It has hosted, since 2021: the Saudi Cup (horse racing, $20 million purse), the Diriyah Tennis Cup, the Dakar Rally, LIV Golf, Anthony Joshua's heavyweight rematch, and the 2034 FIFA World Cup, awarded in October 2024. The strategy is not subtle. Simon Chadwick, Professor of Sport and Geopolitical Economy at Skema Business School, calls it "reputational acceleration"—the use of sports mega-events to compress the timeline between pariah status and diplomatic legitimacy.

Saudi Arabia's General Sports Authority budget in 2023: $7.3 billion, more than the GDP of Liberia. The Kingdom has never competed in a Winter Olympics. In April 2026, Riyadh submitted a formal bid to host the 2036 Asian Winter Games—an event that will require artificial snow in a desert nation where summer temperatures exceed 115 degrees Fahrenheit. The feasibility studies were prepared by Arup, the same firm that designed the London 2012 velodrome. The IOC has not rejected the bid.

This is how sportswashing works now: not by hiding the source, but by normalizing it. Qatar spent $220 billion on the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Migrant worker deaths during construction: 6,751, per a Guardian investigation aggregating data from embassies of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. FIFA's official response referenced "improvement in labor standards" and pointed to the Legacy Supreme Committee, a Qatari government body. The tournament proceeded. Gianni Infantino, FIFA President, called it "the best World Cup ever."

The Athlete Who Spoke

Mahmoud al-Attar was twenty-three years old when he won silver in the men's 800 meters at the 2023 Asian Athletics Championships in Bangkok. He competed for Bahrain, though he was born in Kenya—one of 347 African-born athletes who have represented Gulf states since 2000 under "nationality switch" programs that pay signing bonuses and monthly stipends. Al-Attar's bonus: $50,000 plus a passport. After the race, he was asked in a press conference about his views on Bahrain's human rights record. He said he was an athlete, not a politician. The question was not asked again.

At Paris 2024, the situation was different. Amani al-Hajjaj, a Qatari long jumper who finished seventh in qualifying, posted on Instagram: "I jump for myself and for the workers who built the stadium I train in." The post was deleted within four hours. Al-Hajjaj's management cited a "misunderstanding" and "poor translation." She did not compete again in Paris. The Qatar Olympic Committee issued no statement. The IOC's Athlete Rights and Responsibilities Declaration, adopted in 2020, guarantees "freedom of expression" during the Games, except where it violates "the Olympic spirit," a phrase that remains undefined in the Charter.

The Precedent We Set

There is a history here that we pretend not to remember. Mexico City, 1968: Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists on the podium. They were expelled from the Olympic Village within 48 hours, banned from Olympic competition for life by the United States Olympic Committee, and defended by exactly zero corporate sponsors. The IOC President at the time, Avery Brundage, called their gesture "a deliberate and violent breach of the fundamental principles of the Olympic spirit." Brundage had been IOC President in 1936, when he successfully advocated for holding the Berlin Games despite Nazi Germany's Nuremberg Laws. His principle was consistent: politics and sport must remain separate, unless the politics serves the sport's financial interest.

By 1980, the principle had changed. The United States led a boycott of the Moscow Olympics in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Sixty-five nations joined. The boycott accomplished nothing except the absence of 5,179 athletes who had trained for years. The Soviets remained in Afghanistan until 1989. Jimmy Carter, who ordered the boycott, lost the 1980 election. The IOC, which opposed the boycott, collected its broadcast revenue anyway—$101 million from the USSR's state broadcaster and a reduced but still profitable $87 million from NBC, which aired 52.5 hours of coverage despite the U.S. absence.

The lesson learned was not about morality. It was about leverage. Governments that threaten boycotts lose. Governments that buy hosting rights win. Beijing 2008 cost $44 billion and was followed by a construction boom that reshaped the Chinese interior. Sochi 2014 cost $51 billion and was followed by the annexation of Crimea six months later. Qatar 2022 cost $220 billion and was followed by a diplomatic normalization with Saudi Arabia brokered, in part, through FIFA channels. The sports are incidental. The spectacle is the point.

The Betting Line

And then there is the other kind of money, the kind that flows through sports not as investment but as extraction. Sports betting is now legal in 38 U.S. states, generating $11.4 billion in revenue in 2024, according to the American Gaming Association. The NFL signed partnerships with DraftKings, FanDuel, and Caesars Sportsbook worth a combined $1.9 billion over five years. The NBA signed with FanDuel for $235 million annually. The partnerships are called "official sports betting sponsors," a designation that grants the apps real-time data feeds, in-stadium advertising, and the league's tacit endorsement.

The apps do not advertise odds. They advertise excitement, control, insider knowledge—"the feeling of being in the game," as one DraftKings executive described it in a 2023 earnings call. What they deliver is a clinical conversion funnel optimized by behavioral psychologists. The average sports bettor loses $1,200 per year, per the National Council on Problem Gambling's 2024 survey. The apps lose nothing: the house edge on parlays ranges from 20% to 35%, compared to 2.7% on European roulette.

The leagues accepted the money because the alternative was losing it to offshore books. The IOC has resisted, so far. No Olympic sport has an official betting sponsor, though the restriction is semantic: the IOC's TOP sponsors include Alibaba, whose Taobao platform hosts third-party vendors offering Olympic betting pools. The IOC's position is that it cannot control what sponsors do on their own platforms. The position is technically accurate and morally empty.

What It Means to Lose

I think often about a moment I did not witness but that was described to me by someone who did. Los Angeles, July 2028 bid announcement, September 2017. The IOC vote was unanimous: LA would host the 2028 Games, Paris would get 2024. The decision had been negotiated in advance—both cities had bid for 2024, the IOC convinced LA to wait four years, and in exchange LA received a $180 million advance payment and permission to use existing venues, avoiding the white-elephant fate of Athens, Beijing, Rio. The announcement was framed as a triumph of fiscal responsibility. What it actually was: a surrender to the reality that no democratic city could afford to host the Games under the IOC's terms anymore.

Boston, Hamburg, Rome, Budapest—all withdrew their bids after referendum defeats or public outcry. The voters had done the math. London 2012 cost £8.77 billion, nearly four times the original estimate. Rio 2016 cost $13.7 billion and left the city with $40 million in annual maintenance costs for venues that sit empty. The only cities willing to bid now are those where referendums are not required: autocracies, or democracies where the decision is made by committee.

The 2030 Winter Games will be held in the French Alps, a joint bid by Nice and regional governments that avoided a national referendum. The 2032 Summer Games will be in Brisbane, awarded without competitive bidding under a new IOC process that allows "targeted dialogue" with a single preferred host. The 2034 Winter Games have one remaining candidate: Salt Lake City, which hosted in 2002 and still carries the debt. The IOC calls this "sustainability." What it is: a cartel running out of willing customers.

The Reckoning

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The story about the Olympics is that they represent the best of human achievement, that they transcend politics, that the athletes are what matter. The story is not false, exactly. It is incomplete. The athletes matter to us. They matter somewhat less to the IOC, whose financial model depends on their labor but not their consent. The Russian "neutral athletes" competed in Paris because Russia continued paying its share of broadcast revenue. The Saudi delegation sat in the VIP section because the Kingdom is negotiating to host the 2034 Asian Games, worth an estimated $4.7 billion in IOC-linked contracts.

The question is not whether sport can be separated from politics. It cannot, and it never could. The question is who benefits when we pretend otherwise. In 1936, the benefit accrued to the Nazi regime, which used the Berlin Games to present a sanitized face to the world while constructing the camps. In 1980, the benefit accrued to the IOC, which collected its fees while the United States staged a boycott that harmed only athletes. In 2024, the benefit accrues to autocracies that have learned the IOC's price and are willing to pay it.

I return to the image of the VIP section at Trocadéro. The seats arranged just so. The delegation from Riyadh in the third row, not close enough to suggest endorsement, not far enough to suggest distance. Thomas Bach in the front, presiding over the ceremony and the business arrangement it represents. The cameras panning past, recording everything, revealing nothing. This is the Olympics we have now: not a festival of sport, but a transfer of legitimacy, packaged as inspiration and sold to the highest bidder. The athletes still run and jump and swim. We still watch. The question is what else we are watching, and whether we are willing to see it.