The dust of the Summer Olympics in Sydney has barely settled, yet here we are tuning in already to Salt Lake City, Utah, where the 2002 Winter Olympics open this Friday. No doubt by the time the last light flickers out on Feb. 24, we will all have entered into the spirit of the thing, just as we did in Sydney and at the Games before that. The magic has always worked. But right now, the very thought of the bloated spectacle to come is wearying, to put it mildly. We say it every two years, but these Games threaten to take the perception to a whole new level: The Olympics have become a monster. It is time to ask, not for the first time, but with new urgency, "Who needs them?"

Consider a few facts. The 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid cost the equivalent of $363 million in today's dollars. The 1998 Games in Nagano cost $824 million. Salt Lake City's extravaganza, by contrast, will cost an estimated $1.9 billion. (All these figures exclude what governments spent on improving roads, rail links and infrastructure.) U.S. Sen. John McCain got to the heart of the matter in a recent comment on the ballooning cost of the Games. "It's outrageous, disgraceful and obscene," he said. "It was very small in the beginning, then it got bigger and then it got bigger."

There's no arguing with that. Bloat has apparently taken on unstoppable momentum, defeating even the best efforts to halt it. In response to a U.S. General Accounting Office cost estimate last November, Salt Lake City officials said they had specifically "sought to reverse the trend of having each Olympic Games be 'bigger and better' than the one before" by refocusing on the basics of sport and "reducing the pageantry" wherever possible. Why, then, is the operating budget for this year's Olympics still so gargantuan?