This paper tracks the growth of two of the largest tourist events: the Olympic Games and the Football World Cup, drawing on a dataset containing all events between 1964 and 2018. Overall, the size of the three events has grown about 60-fold over the past 50 years, thirteen times faster than world GDP. We identify an S-shaped growth curve and four different growth periods, with an emergent crisis phase in the late 2010s that may have brought us to ‘peak event’ – the point at which these events have reached their largest size. Outlining three different scenarios, we argue that the Olympics and the World Cup are at a critical bifurcation point, which also requires new bidding and hosting policies.

中文翻译：

---

巅峰事件：奥运会、世界杯的崛起、危机与潜在衰落


本文利用包含 1964 年至 2018 年间所有赛事的数据集，跟踪了两项最大的旅游赛事：奥运会和足球世界杯的增长情况。总体而言，这三项赛事的规模较 2018 年增长了约 60 倍。过去 50 年，比世界 GDP 快了 13 倍。我们确定了一条 S 形增长曲线和四个不同的增长时期，其中 2010 年代末出现的紧急危机阶段可能使我们达到“事件高峰”，即这些事件达到其最大规模的时刻。概述了三种不同的情景，我们认为奥运会和世界杯正处于一个关键的分叉点，这也需要新的申办和主办政策。