Tokyo 2020 Olympic Costs Rise To $15 Billion With Security Measures

The price tag on the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games is on the rise, with anti-terrorism measures boosting the projected costs to around $15 billion, per Sputnik News.

Sputnik News reports that the high costs of security and anti-terrorism measures mandated by Japanese authorities are a contributing factor in the rise.

The latest rise in price would bump Tokyo past the 2012 London Olympic Games in terms of overall budget. The BBC reports (using converted figures in British pounds) that Tokyo’s latest price increase would put ahead of both the London and Rio Olympics in operating budgets, though Tokyo is still well under the roughly $51 billion spent on the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.

There is plenty precedent for security costs to balloon in an Olympic budget. London saw its security costs double from the original budget late in the process, according to this Daily Mail piece from the spring of 2012.

The London Olympics wound up costing about $800 million (in U.S. Dollars) in the security budget alone, per that Daily Mail piece. The Rio 2016 Olympics had an estimated security cost of 1.6 billion Brazilian reais (or about $400 million in U.S. Dollars) back in 2008, according to this Wall Street Journal report, which is about what London’s security costed before they doubled in the leadup to the Games. The Wall Street Journal notes that Rio’s budget is likely to rise as well, given that “security costs… have been particularly susceptible” to overrunning their budgets historically.

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Gina Rhinestone
9 years ago

12 might be the total refugee intake & no muslims .

Gina Rhinestone
9 years ago

Security costs are not always accountable .How do you cost bringing on the army as in London ? Or the massive sweep through the Caucasus after Saudi Prince Bandar’s open threat to Sochi? Surwly these costs are warranted & serve long term national interests.
I’d wager Tokyo s are less because they do not let muslims in. Their muslim refugee intake was just 12 ppl.

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Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson swam for nearly twenty years. Then, Jared Anderson stopped swimming and started writing about swimming. He's not sick of swimming yet. Swimming might be sick of him, though. Jared was a YMCA and high school swimmer in northern Minnesota, and spent his college years swimming breaststroke and occasionally pretending …

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