The financial toll of the Olympics is still being felt.

It cost more than $500 million US dollars to build the centerpiece of the games, the Bird’s Nest stadium. And it costs more than $9 million a year to maintain it.

But now—just one year after the Games—the stadium’s managers have handed it over to an unnamed state-owned financial institution. The stadium had become a white elephant, costing more money to maintain than it could bring in. The number of visitors is down from 50,000 a day at its peak, to now just few thousand per day.

The stadium's director of research and development, Zhou Bin, was quoted in The China Daily saying, "It is not an easy time for us either as we are wracking our brains almost every day."

In recent times, only a handful of events have been held at the stadium, like concerts and sporting events—not enough to generate serious revenue.