By utilizing the log‐linear gravity model, other authors have found statistically robust, permanent and large effects of hosting mega‐events (e.g. Olympics) on international exports. Surprisingly, they found that the unsuccessful bidders to host the Olympics experienced a similar impact on exports. Utilizing alternate specification such as the Poisson pseudo‐maximum likelihood (PPML) estimation that allows for heteroskedasticity prevalent in trade data, the this paper fails to find a robust positive effect of hosting and bidding for a mega‐event on total aggregate exports. Under heteroskedasticity, the parameters of log‐linearized models estimated by ordinary least squares (OLS) lead to biased estimates of the true elasticities.