And yes, of course, back then, the shock of such staggering costs was offset by the usual initial projections insisting there would be more than $8 billion in economic benefits. No, really.

(Ring a bell? Here in Sydney, our erstwhile premier Gladys Berejiklian once claimed with a straight face – accepted by much of the media – that the added benefits of #StadiumSplurge could see the $2 billion cost paid back in two years!)

I noted that absurdities like that are in the nature of such bids, with endless outlandish claims, but nevertheless, pretty much in the history of the modern Olympics, they never turn out like that.

In the face of the criticism I received for that, and other rants about the costs – as ever led by those claiming the economic benefit would make it all worth it – I noted: “If by spending a decade building specialised venues for a two-week sports festival you really could make billions more than you put in, if there was any history of that actually anywhere in the world, ever, doesn’t it seem odd that when they got to the final bid, Brisbane was the only city left with its hand in the air?”

For that was the case. Whereas we in Sydney were one of six contenders for the 2000 Games, by the time of the Brissie bid, it was the only city in the world that said it could make it work. All the others had run screaming from the room, and burnt the clothes they were wearing at the time.

How did anyone, ever, think it was going to work?

Certainly not an economics researcher by the name of Rodney Bogaards, who wrote an academic treatise for the federal parliament on the history of financing and reward at the Olympic Games, and who specifically looked at whether Brisbane could buck history by basing its bid on the “New Norm” principle of using existing infrastructure. He concluded it was unlikely.

“The history from cities that have hosted Olympic Games,” I quoted him, “suggests a common tendency for overly optimistic estimates of the benefits, and underestimation of the significant direct and indirect costs, which has frequently resulted in large cost overruns.”

Bogaards went on to detail how Montreal took 30 years to pay off the debt incurred by the 720 per cent cost blowout of the 1976 Olympics. He also said the cost overrun of the 2004 Athens Games had weakened the Greek economy to the extent it might have contributed to the economic crisis that engulfed the country.

You get the drift.

My point is not – all right, not only – “Nyah, nyah, nyah, I was right”. It is that the economic woe that Brisbane now finds itself in for its commitment to the Games was absolutely foreseeable. And although the Miles government is denying it took a really hard look at the possibility of reneging, like Victoria did on the Commonwealth Games, how could it not have looked at it?

The simple truth is that spending billions on brief sports festivals never really made sense, and less so now the Olympic Games themselves no longer enjoy quite the prestige they did, with global ratings for the past three Games having fallen.

The only upside is at least Premier Steven Miles has called it early, and pulled back from the most absurd of the costs, by putting the guts of the Games back in the old QEII Stadium, which previously hosted the 1982 Commonwealth Games – if you remember the Comm Games, yes? Yes, he has received bitter criticism for that decision, too, with people noting it holds only 40,000 people, and public transport to get there is very thin.

So be it.

What choice does he have?

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Queensland has decided to go ahead with the Games. It can only afford to do so if it puts on an Olympics just like mother used to make, one that smells like pumpkin scones and is not an extravaganza with neon lights and flashbulbs over every moving part. It might just be the corrective the whole Olympics needs.

Discuss.