Tokyo 2020 and the Olympic Legacy

The 2020 Games faced unprecedented challenges. Andrew Saunders considers the aftermath for any host nation once the Olympic Flame moves on.

Tokyo Olympics Even in the best of times, hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games is right up there on the list of global megaprojects. Putting on arguably the world’s greatest sporting spectacle – in the glare of the international media spotlight and with an immovable deadline – certainly withstands comparison with infrastructure programmes such as high‑speed rail lines, bridges and motorways in terms of scale, complexity, public attention and expense.

But the past year has been far from the best of times, and on top of all the inherent challenges, this summer’s ‘pandemic games’ in Tokyo was beset by more and greater troubles than any Games in the modern era. Never before has a peacetime Olympics been postponed by a year, taken place under a state of public‑health emergency or required the world’s top athletes to perform at their inspired best in stadiums devoid of any spectators to cheer them on. Concerns over public support for the Games in Japan even led top sponsor Toyota to pull its Olympics‑related advertising in Japan.

It’s enough to make even the most hardened programme manager quail. No wonder International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach admitted to having a few sleepless nights in the year up to the eventual lighting of the flame in the Olympic stadium on 23 July.

One eye on legacy?

But does the inevitable short‑term focus on delivering the event – making sure that venues are ready, athletes are housed, the media circus is well provided for and everyone can get where they need to when they need to – obscure the longer‑term but perhaps even more important question of legacy? When the medals have been handed out, the flame extinguished and the metaphorical curtain falls, what is left behind in terms of benefits for the host nation is perhaps the most enduring measure of Olympic success for any Games.

“The Olympics is a truly inspiring event that can act as a tremendous catalyst. There is a real opportunity for megaprojects like this to play a pivotal role in long‑term development,” says Bill Morris, adviser to the IOC on the Tokyo Olympics and former director of culture, ceremonies, education and live sites for London 2012.

Unfortunately, the track record of the Games on legacy matters is patchy to say the least. From the dilapidated and under‑used venues in Athens and Rio – hosts of the 2004 and 2016 Games, respectively – to questions over exactly why the Sochi winter Games in 2014 were quite so eye‑wateringly expensive (the most costly to date at over $20bn), evidence of failed Olympic legacies is not hard to find.

The struggle to deliver an effective legacy is at least partly a structural problem based on the Games’ fixed eight‑year cycle from bid to delivery, says Alexander Budzier, fellow in management practice at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School and co‑author of the 2020 report Regression to the Tail – Why the Olympics Blow Up. “The Olympics is quite a short‑term thing – eight years from bid to delivery, and quite often nothing much happens for the first three years. Then everything is focused on delivering the opening ceremony; nobody thinks much about legacy.”

But effecting lasting change, especially in ‘soft’ public behaviours around greater participation in sport and healthier lifestyles, calls for a more consistent effort. “When it comes to delivering lasting pubic benefits, what is needed is a 20‑year horizon – 10 years before the Games and 10 years after,” says Budzier. It also calls for more assiduous follow‑up and better data capture on how well legacy aims have been achieved. “While you have a project, you have a team, a PMO and governance structures. But when it ends and the team and the governance are dismantled, who is left to collect the data?”

How to avoid a flop

By no means is every Games’ legacy a flop, however. Experience suggests that lasting positive effects are much more likely to be achieved if there is a clear vision and intent for what it should be, right from the start, says Julie Nerney, transformation director of Nuclear Transport Solutions and formerly a senior leader in the transport team for London 2012. “If you look at the Games that have had more successful legacies and those where it hasn’t been so good, I think it starts with intent. In London, there were two big pillars of intent. One was about trying to get the public more active and more committed to sport. Seb [Lord] Coe was passionate about that and really inspired all of us. The other was about regeneration. I lived in Whitechapel before the Olympic Park was built; [the site] was contaminated wasteland. Now we have all these amazing facilities, and many thousands of jobs have been created.”

The same applies to other successful legacy efforts, she adds. The intent can be different for each host, but it has to be there from the start. So Beijing 2008 was a showcase for a newly confident China to take its place front and centre on the world stage, part of a soft power strategy that is growing to this day. In Sydney in 2000, the focus was on providing the ultimate sporting excitement, centred on a super‑fast swimming pool and local hero Ian ‘Thorpedo’ Thorpe. The 1984 Los Angeles Games set out to beat the ‘Olympics curse’ of overspend and made a $250m profit – the last time a surplus was recorded – securing the city’s reputation as the commercially savvy de facto capital of the most entrepreneurial state in the US.

Hosting the Olympics is not only expensive (the average cost between 2007 and 2016 was $12bn), but almost always subject to budget overspend, leading to mounting concerns that, for host cities, the costs simply outweigh the benefits. The meter for Tokyo’s delayed event currently stands at $15.7bn – over twice the initial $7.5bn estimate and 22 per cent more than last year’s $12.6bn amended sum. And empty stadiums have an associated impact on ticket sales and tourism revenues.

But for all its travails, Tokyo actually has a pretty solid background when it comes to delivering a lasting legacy. The first Games to be held there in 1964 involved building 100km of roads and a brand‑new sewage system. It was a showcase for Japanese technology, from computerised timing to the famous bullet trains. The event is widely acknowledged to have kick‑started the transformation of an ancient and overcrowded city into the modern global capital that it is today.

“Those Olympics where you see all the white elephant venues, they are the ones that haven’t thought through what they actually want their legacy to be,” says Nerney. With so much money and national prestige at stake, the onus is on the bid team to build legacy in at the ground level, rather than bolting it on as an afterthought. “I inherited a very smart bid at London 2012,” says IOC adviser Morris, “because what [then London mayor] Ken Livingstone and all the bid team did was to position how the Games could help the redevelopment of that part of the city. It was a way of achieving the level of investment required to do in 10 years what would otherwise have taken 40 or 50.”

So 560 acres of contaminated industrial wasteland has been transformed into a brand‑new urban district, home to Premier League football club West Ham United and the London Aquatic Centre, with thousands of new homes emerging from what was the Olympic village. The BBC, UCL and the V&A are all building new offices on the former Olympic site and, by 2025, it is predicted 40,000 jobs will have been created in and around the area. The Greater London Authority claims that some £6.5bn was invested in improving transport links in the city for London 2012, including on the DLR, the tube and the London Overground network.

Passing lessons on

Legacy is not only about buildings and infrastructure, however. There is also the question of legacy in terms of learning – how effectively is the experience gained from one Games transferred to the next, so that best practice can be baked in and past mistakes avoided? Because just like top athletes, even the most competent delivery and project management teams can benefit from some expert coaching from those who have done it before.

“We focus on the people who are on the ground delivering the Games, because most of them will not do an Olympics twice in their lifetimes,” says Chris Payne, associate director of Information Knowledge and Games Learning, the department of the IOC responsible for helping organisers to build on the lessons of their predecessors. “There are three main stages in terms of learning. The first is about volumetrics – everything to do with the huge size and scale of the Games. The second is organisational design – how do they need to set themselves up for success as a multi‑event delivery company? And as they get closer to the Games themselves, the third is about process. What are the key processes, policies and procedures required to deliver the Games at a venue level?’

The IOC has been formally involved in knowledge transfer since the Sydney Olympics in 2000, and although every city and every Games is different, one consistent theme is avoiding the temptation to dive straight in and start ticking off milestones on the project chart. “These are very competent organisations, but if they take time to do a bit of learning in the early days, then the quality of milestone delivery will be more effective. We want them to focus on desired outcomes initially, not on specific inputs.”

The official learning process has been refined and improved in the two decades since and now uses a combination of technology‑based initiatives around data capture and sharing with human‑based activities including workshops, observational learning and leadership development. It culminates in a major debriefing session at the close of every Games, which both parties are obliged to take part in. “The current organisers have a duty to contribute back so that knowledge is transferred to the organisers of the next Games. There are transfer experts from Tokyo doing workshops with transfer experts from Paris. [The debriefing] is an important part of the process and most of it takes place under Chatham House rules. Open questions are encouraged.”

Learning legacy for UK plc

But the lessons and experience accrued by each Olympic organising team also have value beyond the Games themselves. The success of London 2012 resulted in widespread interest from the major projects community, says Karen Elson, learning legacy adviser to both the UK’s flagship HS2 programme and the renovation of the Houses of Parliament, and another alumnus of the London Games. “What we had in London 2012 was a major project that was succeeding against a history of project failure in the UK. So we were getting a lot of requests from academics and industry for good practice and research. I was asked to look at setting up a framework to capture and coordinate it.”

And although the framework she devised was taken up by the IOC as part of its knowledge sharing programme, the primary focus of Elson and her team was industry. “The government was also using it to promote the ability of UK plc. It wasn’t about sharing with other Olympics, it was about sharing learning with other major projects.”

The principles of learning legacy that emerged have subsequently been applied to several other programmes, including Crossrail, the redevelopment of London Bridge station and now HS2 and the Houses of Parliament. Major focus areas include digital engineering, design and technical excellence, and health, safety and wellbeing – and there is growing demand around environment, sustainability and climate change.

“The learning legacy has become an industry standard and really changed the culture of knowledge sharing. At the start, there were still concerns in the supply chain about making intellectual property public, but now we’re in a position where the supply chain is actually contributing most of the content,” Elson says.

Protecting innovation

So while the international spotlight remains firmly on the Games themselves – after Tokyo comes Paris in summer 2024 and Beijing in winter 2026 – a hidden Olympic legacy is already hard at work helping to deliver better outcomes across major projects worth many tens of billions of pounds. These are projects that, just like the Games, face the same fundamental challenges over knowledge transfer when expert teams disperse when the job is over. “They say you should never start from a blank sheet of paper, but projects often do. Innovation is lost when a project closes – a learning legacy is a way to ensure that it is not,” concludes Elson.

Olympic legacy winners and losers

London Summer games 2012 - Cost: $15bn - Overspend: 76%

Legacy: Regeneration of 560 acres of contaminated industrial land in East London, new home venues for West Ham United and the UK National Athletics Competition Centre. Creation of 40,000 jobs by 2035 and 33,000 new homes by 2036. But participation in sports dropped by 0.4 per cent following the Games, despite a legacy pledge to increase it. The fall was largest among low‑income groups and in deprived areas.

Barcelona Summer games 1992 - Cost: $9.7bn - Overspend: 266%

Legacy: Redevelopment of the city’s historic waterfront, including the creation of two miles of sandy beaches. Lined with bars and restaurants, these have become a major tourist attraction and contributed to a six‑fold growth in visitor numbers to the city by 2014. But the city struggled to pay its $1.1bn share of the debt incurred, doing nothing to help ease the relationship between the Catalan capital and the national government.

Rio De Janeiro Summer games 2016 - Cost: $13.7bn - Overspend: 352%

Legacy: Many empty or underused venues due to a lack of ongoing demand. Allegations of corruption, including by a former state governor, one of several officials accused of pocketing bribes on public works associated with the Games. A new transport hub connected the affluent suburb of Barra to the centre, but was of little benefit to residents of the city’s poorest districts, the favelas.

Sochi Winter games 2014 - Cost: $21.9bn - Overspend: 289%

Legacy: The most expensive Games of all time, and the first winter Olympics where all the venues were built from scratch. Promoted by President Putin as the catalyst for a new sustainable ski resort, the Games actually involved the rezoning of a national park so it could become a huge construction site. Investigations by Russian opposition political groups revealed evidence of corruption and embezzlement on a grand scale.

By Andrew Saunders