4 ideas
Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau claimed the 1976 Games could no more run a deficit than a man could have a baby, yet cost overruns, labour disputes and an unfinished Olympic Stadium left Quebec with a debt of roughly C$1.5 billion. The stadium, nicknamed 'the Big Owe', became the standing example of a host city absorbing ruinous liabilities while the IOC carried none of the risk.
The IOC's doctrine that sport stands above politics works in practice as a licence to accommodate whoever holds power, not as neutrality. Under Baillet-Latour and Avery Brundage it let Nazi Germany keep the 1936 Games in exchange for cosmetic concessions, while Brundage suppressed the American boycott campaign. 'Apolitical' institutions end up serving the strongest political actor in the room because refusing to judge regimes means ratifying them.
The Olympic amateur rule, presented as a moral ideal of sport for its own sake, excluded working-class athletes who could not afford to train and compete without pay. It also produced selective enforcement, such as stripping Jim Thorpe of his 1912 medals, while state-sponsored Eastern Bloc 'amateurs' and Western athletes on quiet stipends evaded it. Seen this way, the rule's eventual collapse in the 1980s was driven by television money and Cold War competition rather than by any reform of principle.
Since Los Angeles 1984, the Olympic business model has split the event's finances. Competitive bidding pushes cities to overpromise, so the winner is typically the city most willing to understate costs, and the IOC's financial position stays insulated whatever happens to the host.