The Olympic Games are among the world’s largest and most expensive mega-events. Costs continue to rise, yet every Games since 1960 has gone over budget.

Created for WIRED’s global edition, this full-spread data visualisation transforms decades of Olympic data into a single visual argument. By layering total cost, athlete numbers, event counts and bidding cities, it reveals a system where growing scale drives spiralling costs and steadily shrinking appetite to host.

Normalising the data into cost per athlete brings Summer and Winter Games into alignment, exposing how expansion translates directly into financial burden. A bold visual hierarchy and illustrative system cut through the density, while layered annotations surface the political and economic forces shaping the data.

The result is an editorial graphic that reframes the Olympics not just as a spectacle, but as a high-risk economic proposition, where ambition, scale and cost are increasingly out of balance.