One year today, the 2018 Winter Olympics will kick off in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Because of the spy-novel-worthy Russian doping scandal and the full-throttle debacle known as the Rio Olympics, South Korea’s preparations for the games have stayed quietly under the radar.

Despite the media silence, these Olympics — like all Olympics — ripple with difficulties.

Some of these stem from the games’ bankrupt business model. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) rules a post-fact universe, free from accountability. Host cities, forced to import this fantasyland, inevitably discover that they have over-promised and under-delivered.

After the Rio Olympics, IOC president Thomas Bach heralded the event as an economic success. He claimed that 2016 proved that “the financial model of the Olympic Games” could withstand an economic “stress test” and come out fine in the end.

Never mind that Rio’s citizens were left with stadiums they don’t want, a golf course few use, and filthy waterways the Olympics had promised to clean up. Even the hallowed Maracanã soccer stadium has fallen into disrepair — the pitch looks like a dog’s mange, looters have pilfered the copper wiring from the ceilings and walls, and, after months of unpaid bills, the electricity was shut off.

Despite the IOC’s pro-Olympic propaganda, the world is beginning to wise up. The games simply do not bring the economic boom that the five-ring honchos have long promised. In fact, since 1960, every single Olympics with reliable data has gone over budget by an average of 156 percent.

Pyeongchang won’t break this streak. Bidders originally pegged the event’s operational costs at $1.5 billion with an additional — and a suspiciously vague — $2 to $6 billion budget for infrastructure. Now, estimates have essentially doubled, bringing the projected price tag to around $13 billion.

Compared to the Sochi Olympics, where costs catapulted from $12 billion to more than $50 billion, this may seem trivial. But it’s still a lot of money — far more than initially planned — that could be used differently.

Alongside escalating costs, greenwashing has become a modern Olympic tradition. IOC officials have long trotted out grand promises about the games’ environmental legacy, but Rio 2016 should have convinced them to stop. Even Kahena Kunze, Brazil’s gold-medal winner in sailing, couldn’t help but lament the environmental failures: “Rio de Janeiro is wonderful and we are all enjoying it,” she said, “but imagine if the water were clean.”

If the 2016 games made a mockery of Olympic-style sustainability, the next ones won’t restore its credibility. To make way for a ski run, organizers clear-cut 58,000 trees from an ancient forest on Mount Gariwang, a conservation area home to rare species like the yew tree and the wangsasre tree, the latter of which only exists on the Korean peninsula.

Further, the Guardian reported that “protected species such as the flying squirrel and the lynx, as well as endangered species of plants and birds” inhabit the area. Many South Koreans consider the five-century-old tree stand sacred thanks to its cultural and historic ties to the Chosun dynasty, which dubbed it a “royal, forbidden mountain.”

Olympic organizers have vowed to replant the trees, as if mono-cropped saplings are equivalent to an old-growth landscape thrumming with biodiversity. A coalition of international environmental organizations has teamed up with local groups to protest the deforestation. Simone Lovera, executive director of the Global Forest Coalition, stated:

The forests on Mount Gariwang are not restorable to their original state because they are composed of an intrinsically balanced mixture of tens of different temperate broad leaf and coniferous tree species.

Activists are also worried about what will happen to multi-million-dollar venues for relatively obscure sports like bobsled, luge, and skeleton. Maintaining these venues represents a significant investment that’s typically not included in public estimates. All too often, once the spectacle has zipped off to the next location, taxpayers in host cities shoulder these costs.