Madrid wasted 9 billion euros on Olympic infrastructure that will never get used

I think I understand Ana Botella’s much-maligned answer to the reporter who asked about whether spending all this money on the Olympics was a good idea in the midst of the crisis.

The reporter was saying that it’s well known that hosting the Olympics is usually a net loss for the country/city that hosts them, since the economic benefits rarely outweigh the cost of building a bunch of (otherwise) useless infrastructure.

However, if you’ve already blown all the money on infrastructure before you even win the bid and treat that as a sunk cost, the Olympics might actually be a net positive… maybe they’d only end up a couple billion in the hole as opposed to 9. So Ana’s meandering answer on how much infrastructure they had already built sort of made sense.

But Ana’s speech in “english” was pretty funny.