Six years later, the total cost is estimated at more than fifty billion, with perhaps as much of half that figure having been lost to corruption.

The accepted bid had pegged total costs at roughly twelve billion dollars. Cameras cut to jubilant crowds: ninety per cent of Russians were said to approve of hosting the Games. announced its decision to award the 2014 Winter Games to Sochi, Vladimir Putin, who had made his country’s final pitch to the committee, said: “This means not only that Russia’s prominent standing in sports has been recognized but also that Russia itself has been recognized as a country.” Jacques Rogge praised the country’s tradition of sporting excellence and its readiness to host the Games. For one thing, Tokyo’s jubilant post-announcement rhetoric is all rather familiar. Tokyo may indeed offer the Olympic Movement safe hands, but, as Thomas Bach, who was elected on Tuesday to succeed Rogge as president of the I.O.C., has already acknowledged, there is something very wrong with the bidding process. The Japanese stock market was up on the news. Analysts have pointed to winning the Games as another sign of the robustness of so-called “Abenomics,” and the rejuvenation of the Japanese economy.

The mockup for a renovated Olympic Stadium is striking, and has met with approval. (Japan also hosted the 1998 Winter Games at Nagano.) The bid projected total expenditures at a reasonable eight billion dollars or so, significantly lower than the nineteen billion that Istanbul, Tokyo’s closest competitor, planned to spend-and dramatically lower than the money spent by other recent hosts, thanks largely to the organizers’ plan to reuse existing structures located near the city center, and to the model public-transportation system Tokyo already has. Cameras cut to jubilant crowds shouting “Banzai”: ninety per cent of the local population was said to be in support.

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