The Sustainability of Past Olympic Games
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The 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in the United States, the 1992 Albertville French Winter Olympics and Spain's Barcelona Summer Olympics in 1992 performed best of the analyzed group, with a mean score of 71, 69 and 56, respectively. Salt Lake City's Games also saw positive after-use of venues and had overrun costs to a lesser degree than some other editions of the Games.

In the case of the Albertville Olympics, which had been criticized for environmental damage caused by the construction of new sports venues, these Games still performed fairly well due to having a smaller ecological and material footprint because it was a smaller event. None of the analyzed games, however, managed to achieve a mean score above 75, which would have categorized them as sustainable.

At the other end of the spectrum comes Russia's Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014, with an average across the three indicators of just 24 out of a possible 100, and only…