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At US$51 billion, the Sochi 2014 Winter Games were the most expensive Olympic Games ever.Olympics are mega-events involving massive expenditures that have ballooned over the past decade-but so have the advertising and broadcast revenues, even in the midst of the global financial crisis, and despite growing criticism by academics, journalists, and activists.The commonly-heard argument that these expenditures are made by powerful individuals who are deceiving the popular audience in order to forward their own interests is not a sociological argument.Academics have a responsibility to better explain what is driving this growth.This presentation argues that the Olympic Games are structured by principles that are familiar to social theorists, but on a scale that is many orders of magnitude larger than what we have typically studied.Social scientists know that humans will go into deep debt to fund rituals and ceremonies in a way that seems to fly against financial reason, but they do so because such events are essential to the gift economy, alliance formation, and the creation of imagined communities.This presentation presents new research on the Beijing and London Olympic Games, focusing on diplomatic and corporate hospitality programs, which are under-studied by academics.It argues that sport megaevents provide an unparalleled opportunity to leaders in political, corporate, and cultural spheres looking to build alliances and strengthen their networks;these venues are increasingly necessary as the global political economy becomes more closely linked.From this structural perspective, the Olympic expansion is an effect of globalization.