If you’re the kind of sports fan who believes in miracles, like the U.S. hockey team’s victory over the powerful Soviet squad at the 1980 Winter Olympics, you won’t be finding any in Turin, Italy, during the upcoming Winter Games – especially if you’re hoping the host city can turn a profit.

Real miracles require heavy underdogs, anonymous amateurs. But these days, the Olympics feature highly skilled professionals in the high-profile sports.That’s because the International Olympic Committee desparately wants the pros to attract corporate dollars.The IOC also wants host cities and countries to pony up billions to build arenas, stadiums, racecourses, an Olympic Village, and other venues needed for a 17-day extravaganza. It’s all about money now, not Olympic glory.

The truth is that the athletic activities, which are meant to unite the world under the banner of sports, are more a corporate bazaar than an athletic competition. Once, an Olympic medal of any color was the shining moment in the life of an amateur athlete whom the world had never met.Today,it’s hard to tell just how much a medal is worth when you consider that most of the athletes competing for it are already world renowned, well paid, and looking for something to fill out the trophy case.

What is more important for a tennis player headed for the Olympics, a Wimbledon title or an Olympic medal? The answer is, it probably doesn’t matter so long as a player’s sponsorship partners get its products flashed across TV screens around the world.

The NBA watched the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games and saw an opportunity to promote its product globally. It didn’t hurt that one of the last amateur U.S.men’s basketball teams to compete in the Olympics featured Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, and a host of other soon-to-be NBA stars. When the college all-stars were beaten in Seoul, Korea, four years later, Team USA decided it was time to construct a “Dream Team” and sell it as the greatest collection of basketball players the world had ever seen.

The NHL started sending players to the Olympics in 1998, and will again shut down the season to make way for the 2006 Games.The IOC wants the pros and the NHL wants the exposure, even though NHL games and Olympic games are two different categories.The NHL is played on a smaller rink, while the Olympic Game features a wide-open skating style without much hitting. The NHL isn’t selling its product as much as its star players.

There is still room for an athlete with the Olympic dream from a small country who doesn’t get corporate subsidies or a professional paycheck to excel in the Olympics, but those stories, which were once commonplace, are getting harder to find with each passing Olympiad. But of course,it’s easier to sell a product that buyers have already heard of.

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Around the world, people still watch the Olympics on TV in big numbers, with estimates of more than 100 million people tuning in at various points, but the Olympics are a huge financial drain on host cities – and a breeding ground for corporate corruption. It’s not unusual for IOC officials to leak news of multimillion-dollar bribes demanded from cities bidding to host the games, as the organizers of the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City can tell you.

The Turin Games figure to be a money loser for the host committee.The IOC requires host communities’ taxpayers to underwrite losses accumulated by the games.The 2004 Athens Summer Games were an economic disaster for Greece. It is estimated that Greek citizens are on the hook for a $3 billion tab for building stadiums and other facilities that go mostly unused today.

In Sydney, Australia, the local population is paying millions of dollars every year in various forms of taxes to subsidize facilities that were built for the 2000 Summer Games. It is estimated that the Sydney Games lost $2.3 billion. As for the fans, it seemed the enjoyment of sports was predicated on the willingness to be bought and sold.

“Baskets of Sydney 2000 merchandise have been dumped at tills on the discovery that the only credit card they accept is Olympic sponsor Visa,” the BBC reported during the games. “One cafe inside the complex has even been asked to withdraw a bacon and egg roll from its menu because it was too similar to an Egg McMuffin – property of another official sponsor, McDonald’s.”

Here at home, there are few reminders that the 1996 Summer Olympics took place in Atlanta, and though a number of public development initiatives were accelerated by the promise of an Olympics, the “economic stimulus” that accompanies every Olympic sales pitch never did occur there. The Olympic stadium became Turner Field, home of the Braves, but facilities for tennis, beach volleyball, and equestrian events have since shut down after losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But at least the citizens of Atlanta didn’t see a tax spike when the Olympics arrived.Those games,like the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games, were heavily subsidized by the federal government, and the true cost of those events, according to the U.S. General Accounting Office, is difficult to judge because “local and state funds and giveaways of property have been omitted” from the analysis. Meanwhile, reports of vote buying and bribes have pervaded the biddings in Nagano, Beijing, and Sydney, and that’s just in the past 10 years.

The Salt Lake City scandal brought a change to the way the IOC handed out Olympics, but not to how communities pay for the event. In fact, hosting the Olympics has only gotten more expensive. New York Olympic backers originally thought it would cost $3.3 billion to stage the 2012 Games in the metropolitan area. But that figure eventually ballooned to $5.5 billion. Hungary pulled out of the bidding for the 2012 Games when people figured out that it would cost $28 billion to get Budapest up to Olympic specs.

If you are looking for the unexpected in Olympics competition, like a bunch of college kids beating a team filled with pros and some Hall of Fame caliber players like the 1980 U.S. hockey team, you’re unlikely to find it in Turin.It won’t be long before the Olympics have outlived their usefulness, becoming another set of games in a sporting industry that doesn’t take any time off in the pursuit of global dollars.