Coubertin wasn’t persuaded. “I decided to act as if I were stupid, pretending not to understand” the king’s speech, he recalled in his memoirs. The Greeks were overcome by “nationalistic fervour” and not being practical, he argued: “No one could seriously believe for a moment that Athens would be able to go on indefinitely every four years making the supreme effort required for the periodic renewal of the organisation and the financing.” Coubertin sent the king a letter, specifying that the second Olympics would be held in Paris.

The Greeks held out for several years, even hosting parallel games to the roving Olympic Games, but they were soon distracted by a series of wars, and Coubertin’s vision won out. “The ancient games had an exclusively Hellenic character; they were always held in the same place, and Greek blood was a necessary condition of admission to them,” he wrote in 1896. The modern games were different: “[E]very country should celebrate the Olympic games in turn.”

King George’s idea resurfaced in 1980, in the throes of the Cold War, as the United States planned a boycott of the Moscow Summer Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Games, many argued, had become too politicized. The Olympic historian John Lucas proposed establishing a fixed “Olympic Games Center” for the summer contest—a United Nations of sport, housed in a neutral country like Switzerland or Finland—and a limited rotation of locations for the smaller winter event. The International Olympic Committee (IOC), which Coubertin had founded in the 1890s to administer the competitions, studied the feasibility of creating a perennial Summer Olympics site on Greece’s Peloponnese peninsula, where ancient Olympia once stood. The location, like the Vatican, would be granted neutral status, the Greek government would provide territory and infrastructure, and the IOC and its member states would fund construction.

New Olympia never materialized.

* * *

These days, ideas for ending the costly Olympics rotation take many forms. Some argue for choosing one host location. John Rennie Short, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, suggests establishing a Summer Olympics city, and year-round convention and training center, on a sparsely inhabited Greek island. Greece could ease its debt crisis by selling land, while the IOC could cover upfront construction and operating costs with bonds or loans based on future media revenues. Others think the permanent host should be Los Angeles, which turned a profit on the 1984 Games in part by using existing facilities, or some Swiss city with the climate and geography to host both the Winter and Summer Olympics.

These schemes aren’t as impractical as they may seem, Christina Larson argues:

With every change of venue, millions of staff-hours of know-how are lost. That’s not how most other major sporting events are organized. Professional golf tournaments return to the same courses year after year, allowing the staffs there to learn from their mistakes. Same with tennis: The groundskeepers at Wimbledon have had decades to practice pulling out the rain tarps and emptying out the parking lots. Yet the Olympics tries to reinvent the wheel every time, fielding a new team of planners, contractors, accountants, technicians, security personnel, and volunteers every four years, and expecting them to execute myriad complex logistical tasks perfectly the first time out.

But wouldn’t installing the Olympics in one country tarnish the global nature of the Games? The author Roger Howard offers one potential solution: What if the IOC granted long-term hosting rights to one city, which in turn could sell rights to host each Olympic Games to a different country? The city would essentially be renting out its Olympics infrastructure. Imagine, for instance, Kenya organizing the opening and closing ceremonies in London. Howard continues:

Of course the choice of a permanent home for the Games would be highly contentious. But such a responsibility could be exercised imaginatively, and even used as a form of developmental aid. So the IOC could offer this exclusive right to a developing country that desperately needs foreign investment. … Alternatively, the Games could be based on Western soil but the hosting rights perhaps sold to a developing country at a heavily subsidised price.

Some propose rotating the Olympics among several cities that recently hosted the Olympics—perhaps choosing five to represent the five interlocking rings of the Olympic symbol—or cycling them through one permanent venue on each continent.