And this time, it's in Paris.

But the Olympics is a lot more than just this and this and this.

It's an extremely expensive undertaking, in many cases, causing more harm than good to its host city.

And I covered it before.

Cities are dropping out because they were spending tens of billions of dollars on the hosting process.

This chart shows a host city's initial budget versus what they ended up spending.

They're quite different, like this or this or this.

The London 2012 Olympics ended up being nearly four times more than what they initially set out to spend.

That's detrimental to a host's budget, especially problematic for cities and countries with an already weak economy and extreme inequities,

like the state of Paris, which was the result of a heavy debt load in 2016, or Greece, whose debt crisis became so catastrophic, it was put on fiscal monitoring by the European Commission just a year after hosting the Games.

But Paris is looking to be a bit different.

The city budgeted $9.7 billion, spending about half on infrastructure and the other half on operating costs.

And so far, it's looking good.

We expect the Paris 2024 Summer Games would be the cheapest of the 21st century because the needs were really limited.

So overruns were not as high as previous games.

So how did France pull it off?

And can they become the blueprint for future host cities?

This is Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee.

It's a clip from 2017 when he announced Paris as the host city of the 2024 Summer Games.

We're all therefore delighted to see that your plans include a record number of existing and temporary venues.

The key here is the record number of existing and temporary venues.

Paris's initial budget was set to $6.97 billion.

When it officially won in 2017, it revised its budget to $8.1 billion.

The city ended up with $9.7 billion, still well below the past five Olympics.

Olympic budgets are split into two parts.

Operating costs and infrastructure costs.

Operating costs are typically the more manageable of the two.

It's essentially the necessary cost to get the games up and running, like security, transportation, medical services, customs, immigration and more.

Paris was already strong in many of those areas.

The IOC set an operating budget of $4.8 billion as a result.

Infrastructure costs have always been a bit of a thorn in the side of host cities in the past.

Prior cities have overspent by billions of dollars on construction of new venues, Olympic villages and building new or expanding existing public infrastructure for the games.

To get all of that construction done before the opening ceremony starts, it becomes an expensive race against time.

In Paris's case, construction costs were manageable at $4.9 billion. 95% of the venues were already in place, only 3% were built.

There is the Olympics village that is the largest project for the game.

And you have a new swimming pool in Saint-Denis.

I think it's a bit less than $200 million.

And then you have a new sport facility within the city limit of Paris.

The Olympics village will be turned into housing and student accommodation.

They expect to have 2,800 units after the games.

So that would be a huge boost for the local areas.

You may be wondering who pays for all of this.

It's generally split into private and public funding.

It's when the weight of public funding becomes too heavy that a host fails, like in Rio and Athens cases.

For Paris and France's case, it hasn't been so, at least for now.

That's because 96% of the total operating budget is funded by things like ticket sales and TV and marketing deals.

Paris won its bid in 2017 amid a time of immense turmoil for the IOC.

Up until then, every Olympic since the 1960s had run over its budget by an average of 172%.

Rio is perhaps the most eye-popping example, at 352% over budget.

A problematic subway line that was supposed to connect vans to the Olympic venues cost the city about $3 billion.

It was overbuilt by 25%.

The renovation project of a neighborhood cost $4.2 billion, and neither were on time.

Brazil hosted the games as it went into its deepest recession in nearly a century.

The same reason why it didn't make sense to build them before the Olympics is the reason why after the Olympics they're underutilized or unused.

What are they doing?

First of all, they cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build.

Secondly, they cost tens of millions of dollars to maintain over time.

These so-called white elephants are an ongoing problem for host cities.

As we saw earlier, a big part of the Paris bid was its... - record number of existing and temporary venues.

While Paris hasn't avoided the usual overspending, it's a fraction of what other cities deviated from their original budget.

The message of the government has always been this will be cheap games, the cheapest in recent history, and they will not burden our public deficit or our debt and will benefit everyone.

If you compare the size of the budget to French GDP, it's only 0.3 percent.

So that's rather limited and it's much lower than, let's say, Athens in 2004 that represented a larger share of Greek GDP.

Paris is also uniquely positioned to host a big event, with its 100 million annual visitors accounting for 7 to 8 percent of its GDP.

Paris has an extensive metro network, but also many train lines.

And I think this was a really positive for the games, meaning that most people, tourists, will use the transportation infra to go to the different venues.

With mounting criticism, the IOC adjusted its bidding process.

In December 2014, the IOC released the Olympic Agenda 2020.

The goal?

To make hosting easier on cities.

What Agenda 2020 did at the time was to restate a policy or policies that the IOC started in the 1990s.

And the intention was to promote financial security for the host city and also to promote sustainability.

Promoted a little bit of greater flexibility on the part of the IOC in terms of allowing host cities to use existing venues rather than to build new venues.

And that was, at least on the margin, a good thing for the host cities.

Under the Olympic Agenda 2020 and its 2016 amendment, the new norm, if a city needs new venues, new construction must have long-term legacy post-Olympics.

The overall economic and environmental impact was not changed very much.

And as a result of that, they continue to have more and more problems and, in fact, worsening problems with getting potential host cities to actually express an interest in hosting.

It finally got to the point in 2017 where five cities dropped out of the competition to host the 2024 Games, the ones that are about to happen.

Only Paris and Los Angeles remained in the competition.

In 2017, it was the first time in IOC history that two hosts were chosen for back-to-back Olympics.

By locking in two cities at once, the IOC wouldn't have to worry about facing another mad dash to land a host after cities dropped their bids.

When you have a fully developed city like Paris or Los Angeles hosting the Games, and they already have the vast majority of the venues, this is obviously a smaller problem.

And that's good news. That's good news.

In 2019, the selection process changed altogether, this time by closing off the bidding process.

While Paris is considered to be one of the cheapest modern Olympics, it all hinges on what kind of economic windfall the Games will see.

While the IOC estimates that the Games will generate $7.3 to $12.1 billion, other estimates are much more modest.

One study estimates GDP growth of 0.5% in the third quarter before falling back to 0.1% for the following three months.

S&P Global projects Paris tourism and spending related to Olympic activity will grow tax income by 5%.

Paris projects its 2024 revenue to hit over $200 million, about an 85% jump from 2023.

But being a major tourism hub and holding the world's biggest sporting event may have some adverse side effects,

like increased pressure on Paris' already busy metro lines, tourism not being high as expected, or security costs becoming increasingly more expensive as the Games progress.

The main pain point would be the transportation network because many people would go at the same place at the same time for the different competitions.

And this could add pressure to the network that is already saturated.

The transportation authorities said they would add extra capacity on metro lines and train lines.

But maybe this won't be sufficient to absorb a higher ridership so we could see network disruption from time to time.

I think this is expected.

Air France estimates a loss of about $200 million from June to August as traffic to and from Paris lags behind other major European cities due to the Olympics.

And some tourists are avoiding the city altogether.

But economists like Zimbalist believes the biggest risk to Paris' cheap budget is security.

They say that the security costs in the budget are approximately $340 million.

I don't think that number is realistic.

They have already admitted to having more than 50,000 security personnel who will be working the Games.

But beyond direct personnel costs, we know that there are a lot of other costs.

You're involving and you're engaging heavy military equipment for the Games.

You're buying equipment to contest any drones that are being used by terrorists or other people.

You're doing all sorts of things that go way beyond the security costs.

And previous Olympic Games have been known to spend over a billion, up to $2 billion in security.

So they're giving us a number of $340, $350 million.

And it's just not a realistic statement of what the security costs are.

The Olympics have their host cities locked up until 2034.

So far, each city's plan will get an insight into whether or not the new guidelines are sustainable.

Paris and L.A. will follow similar blueprints with little to no building needed.

Brisbane in 2032 will test how flexible the IOC's new recommendations truly are.

Brisbane will have 11 new venues, with about half being permanent.

Since the Olympic agenda 2020 and the new norm plans were enacted, the bidding process might be more challenging for potential host cities trying to win the 2036 Games and beyond.

Previous hosts used the Olympics to put their emerging cities on the world stage, showcasing large-scale infrastructure projects in the hopes of attracting tourism and commercial business.

With decades of overspending from both emerging and established cities, the IOC may avoid picking a city that may need a lot of new infrastructure to host.

And now that the bidding and selection process is done behind closed doors, bidders won't know who they're up against or even if their bids were seriously considered.

Zimbalist believes that the solution for hosting the Olympics may not depend solely on whether or not a host city has the existing infrastructure or the capital to spend on large-scale projects.

The real solution, he says, is one central location for the Olympics.

So I think the logical longer-term solution is to have one permanent host for the Winter Games and the Summer Games.

So it doesn't have to, we don't have to rebuild it every time.

And the city would have more and more experience to be able to handle all of the very, very complicated operational and security issues that surround the Olympics.

Now, that's not an easy thing to do overnight politically, but I think it's important to start discussing that.

Maybe initially you have two or three cities that are in a rotation.

That's the direction in which I think this whole process should be moving.