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Are Olympic cities better or worse after the games?
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The Olympics has brought increased transformation to Rio de Janiero, Brazil, but whether that is good or bad has yet to be seen - photo by Ivy Ceballo
The Olympics has brought increased transformation to Rio de Janiero, Brazil, which was made up of swamps and farmland less than 50 years ago.

According to the Guardian, the Olympics has brought stadiums, roads and electric facilities to a city that was already beginning to grow, rapidly increasing the city's progress.

One Rio landowner who has invested in a few Olympic projects even said that the changes brought by the games has helped the city develop by leaps and bounds.

The most difficult part of the development plan was the service infrastructure, and the Olympics has brought that. Its a billion-dollar jump, Carlos Carvalho told The Guardian.

But, will these changes last?

According to FiveThirtyEight, many cities that host the Olympics tend to spend much more money on the project than what they will eventually get in return. And not only that, but they also end up spending more money than they originally planned.

For a city and nation to decide to stage the Olympics Games is to decide to take on one of the most costly and financially most risky type of megaproject[s] that exists, Bent Flyvbjerg of the University of Oxford said about his research of Olympic budgets to Five Thirty Eight.

To come to this conclusion, Flyvbjerg and his team analyzed the costs of each of the Olympic Games over the past few years and compared them to the costs of other major metropolitan improvements in the area, such as bridges, railroads and dams.

The researchers found that preparing for the Olympics caused many of the cities chosen for the games to overrun their budget, compared to the other projects they researched, which mostly came in under budget.

So is it a good investment to host the Olympic Games? Sure, the highly anticipated weeks-long event brings national news coverage to the host city to watch athletes push their limits and break world records, but the results aren't always rosy.

Citing some of the difficulty Rio has had this year fighting a Zika outbreak and keeping their pools from turning green, Mark Sappenfield of The Christian Science Monitor wrote, "Rio has shown, in more crystalline clarity than any Games before, the reasons why hosting the Olympic Games is becoming an increasingly uninviting prospect."

Take a look below at the Olympic venues throughout the years. Many cities have been able to make use of the sites, but not all have been kept in good condition.

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