Image courtesy © 2005 Torino 2006/LaPresse.

Hosting the Olympics, whether it is the summer or winter edition, is a huge deal for any city. On the plus side, the city gets all sorts of attention from the media and can become a "world class city" from the exposure.

Hosting the Olympics is also a huge amount of work. At the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, there were over 1,000 athletes, 78 events, 234 medals and 1,600,000 visitors! It costs lots of money to pull it off successfully. Let's look at all of the different things that go into hosting the Olympics today.

The first thing that the host city has to do is start building. Most cities have a hockey stadium, but that's about it. No city has a giant speed skating rink, or a bobsled run, or a ski jumping tower. Every one of these events needs not only the tracks, but also seats for the spectators, parking lots for the cars and buses, concessions stands, heliports, medical facilities and lots of other stuff.

The city also has to build an Olympic Village to house all the athletes during the Olympics. There needs to be enough hotel rooms for all the visitors, enough restrooms, restaurants and shops, enough buses to carry everyone around the city. The roads have to be made larger to handle all the extra traffic, and maybe the airport does too. All of this construction can cost billions of dollars.

What about security? Terrorism is a big concern, so every Olympic event is surrounded by a fence and guarded by security officers. There are people who check all the cars and buses and bags for bombs. Overhead there are radar planes, fighters and helicopters to keep bombs from flying into the airspace around the events. At the 2002 Olympics, there were thousands of Olympic security guards, thousands of police officers from Salt Lake City, 3,400 people from the National Guard and 1,100 other military personnel. Perhaps 10,000 people in all were on hand to guard the 1.6 million visitors and keep them safe.

And then there is the snow. What if there isn't enough snow for all the events? That would be a big problem for things like alpine skiing, cross country skiing and ski jumping. To solve this problem, they truck in snow and store it in huge piles just in case. There are tractors and trucks to haul all the snow around to where it's needed.

At Salt Lake City they had the opposite problem -- too much snow. Just before the Olympics started, eight inches of snow fell and covered everything, including all the parking lots. They could not just plow the snow to the side because that would cover the security fences and give terrorists places to hide. So they brought in 150 dump trucks, filled them up using bulldozers and loaders and carried thousands of tons of snow out to the countryside.

When all this preparation comes together, the Olympics are perfect. Hundreds of millions of people get to watch the world's greatest athletes doing what they do best. It is something we all can be proud of.