Once the flame goes out on the Vancouver 2010 and London 2012 Olympics, organisers are determined that their cities will be left with valuable legacies rather than white elephants.
In Canada and Britain, the people behind the next Winter and Summer Games have vowed to learn from the mistakes of past Olympics by looking back and planning ahead.
Athens 2004 serves as a stark reminder of the importance of legacy plans, having become associated with white elephants thanks to rush-built venues with no post-Games purpose.
Nearly five years after the Games, many of the Athens venues remain fenced-off and bolted, awaiting private funding to be re-opened, while the Greek government has spent hundreds of millions of euros on maintenance costs.
Beijing's iconic Bird's Nest stadium, the centrepiece of last year's Olympics, faces annual 70 million yuan ($10.2 million) maintenance costs and 80 to 90 million yuan interest payments.
Revenue from 20,000 to 30,000 tourists currently visiting the site daily could cover those costs but the 2008 Olympic factor is not infinite so more cultural activities are planned to try to keep the numbers up with two special shows a day, one with a sporting theme.
However, plans for the Beijing Guoan soccer team to play home matches at the Bird's Nest were dropped last year and although the opera Turandot should do well in August, stadium officials acknowledge it is difficult to find regular users.
With a main aim of regenerating the British capital's deprived East End, the legacy beyond London 2012 will be the Games' mark of success.
Post-Games plans for the 9.3 billion pound ($13.6 billion) Olympic Park include 9,000 new homes and vast areas earmarked for private investment, creating an estimated 10,000 jobs.
The park's flagship 500 million pound Olympic Stadium, one of just five permanent venues, is to house a school and will have its 86,000 capacity reduced to 25,000 to attract international athletics events as well as other sporting events and concerts.
"I think there are two dimensions to avoiding white elephants," Tom Russell, the London Development Agency's (LDA) Group Director of Olympic Legacy, told Reuters.
"One is that you can afford to use the venues for the purposes intended but the other side is about levels of usage.
"We've been very focused on the long-term use of those venues to attract large numbers of people on to the park to use the sports venues in perpetuity."
Earlier than any of their Olympic predecessors, 2012 organisers expect to have an Olympic legacy delivery company in place by the end of 2009, which will be responsible for the Olympic Park.
The company will be chaired by Margaret Ford, whose private and public sector experience will be used to help strengthen the park's ability to attract investment beyond 2012.
"There has to be some place where the buck stops and provides a clear accountability for the legacy programme and the company will do that," Russell said.
"The success or failure of the whole legacy project will really be measured by the extent to which we are able to attract private investment and development into the area beyond 2012."
At a fraction of London's budget, Vancouver's Winter Olympics is expected to cost 2.5 billion Canadian dollars ($2.02 billion).
Its legacy will be to use the Games and its new venues to boost post-Olympic tourism and supersede the catastrophic failures of the 1976 Montreal Games, whose spiralling construction costs crippled taxpayers for almost 30 years.
In the lead up to the Montreal Games, then mayor Jean Drapeau famously proclaimed: "The Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby."
A 1.3 billion dollar post-Games bill certainly changed his outlook on the Olympics and has made Vancouver determined to leave a more palatable legacy this time.
"The opening consideration was what would the venues mean for the community, 10, 20, 30 years after the Games?" John Furlong, chief executive of the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), told Reuters.
"We designed the venues for the long term and then modified the use of the venue to stage a great Olympics.
"We applied that logic everywhere. So if you go to the (speed skating) oval, it's the only oval in the world that will have six, eight, 10 sports living in it after the Games."
Centre of Excellence
The Richmond Olympic Oval will be transformed into an international centre of excellence for sports and wellness, and the Whistler Olympic Park will aim to host international Nordic competitions and attract ski tourists.
There have been successful formulas at some previous Games.
In 1992, Barcelona used the Games as platform to revitalise a Spanish Civil War-scarred city into a top European destination by overhauling everything from sewers to transport.
In the United States, Los Angeles hosted the first profitable Games of the modern era in 1932 and repeated the feat in 1984 with the help of big business sponsorship deals, making $220 million.