According to a study released by a pair of New York University professors, Mitchell Moss and Carson Qing, New York saw 538,000 tourists-per-day while London attracted only a measly 429,000, a final score they believe merits the Big Apple a "gold medal" of its own.
Professor Moss summed it up to CBS:
New York is so powerful that it doesn't need the Olympics to succeed. We continue to actually out-draw London without the games by more than 100,000 tourists a day. And what we did is we got the best of this. We got all the Olympic facilities, many of them, but we didn't have the city disrupted. We had the city flourish as a tourist mecca while London actually lost tourists during the Games.
Because the two cities are roughly similar in size, the study says population disparities fail to explain the number. Instead, the professors blame the Olympics themselves. Tourists normally traveling to London, they theorized, may have avoided traveling there fearing crowds.
(August 14, 2012)