Maybe not.
The 2022 Winter Olympics are the next Games to be awarded, and as it turns out, city after city is declining the “honor” of hosting them. ….
Why the sudden mass exodus from hosting? Because cities with an eye for financial reality have seen the results: Russia spent $51 billion on the Sochi Olympics, an incomprehensible sum for any nation but particularly one teetering on the edge of political turmoil.
China spent $40 billion for the 2008 Beijing Games. Montreal lost nearly a billion dollars hosting the 1976 Games, and it took 30 years to pay off that debt. Nagano, Japan, which hosted the Olympics in 1998, apparently still hasn’t paid off its debt. …
It’s a never-ending game of no-limit poker, and the IOC is happily watching as the stakes skyrocket every two years. Want to play? Go right ahead, cities of the world. Your grandchildren will be just fine with paying it off, right?
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Accompanying the article is a gallery of abandoned venues:
Sarajevo:
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Murmansk:
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Calgary:
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Conspicuously absent: Vancouver.
Too bad about the Calgary photo. Had the camera turned the other way, it would’ve caught the two smaller towers, which are the active training home for Canada’s ski jumpers. While the big tower is unfortunately sited and heavily affected by the chinook winds, the Canada Olympic Park complex is fairly successful in general. Just beyond the knoll/bowl in the background of the photo is the home of Canada’s bobsled and luge teams, including a well-used track and indoor practice centre for starts, as well as a couple of hockey rinks. Oh yeah, and a small ski area where so many Calgarians do their first snowplowing turns, like Grouse, but well, ok, not really like Grouse, but let’s keep moving. Off site, the photographer could’ve headed across the river and up the escarpment to the Olympic Oval, some of the fastest ice in the world and home of Canada’s speed skating team, some of whom travel to the facility on the very high ridership northwest LRT line built for the games.
While the Olympics certainly don’t provide a guaranteed result in terms of long term legacy, Calgary really doesn’t belong in the same category as Sochi or Sarajevo for so many reasons both positive (a sound financial result) and profound (more than a handful of folk from the former Yugoslavia who helped with the 1988 games came back here permanently to escape their home’s tragedy).
Indeed
I lived in Canmore for many years which went through a 20 year boom after the 1988 Winter Olympics. One could even argue that it was the games that put it on the map.
But the cost-benefit analysis is not clear in many other cases, perhaps even Vancouver although the Canada Line, Olympic Village and new highway to Whistler will benefit generations to come.
This is why I get impatient with the folks who decry the Olympic Village “scandal”. It was a victim of the perfect financial storm of ’08 and it’s pretty much been put behind us with no really serious or enduring costs (aside from a “missed opportunity” to make a killing on the sale of the land). And yet that seems to be the highest profile issue that our Olympics had.
Compared to so many other countries’ experiences, I think we should be pretty happy.
Funny how everyone seems to be seizing on Russia’s extravagance as a reason not to host the Olympics instead of pointing to Vancouver as a case study of how it can be done for a fairly reasonable cost (if you consider a billion or two to be “reasonable”).
I’m not convinced that there’s much of an argument to be had in the yahoo sports article. Olympic hosting is usually pushed by elites, and I suspect that more than a few previous host cities would not have done it had it gone to referendum. In all but particularly wealthy cities that can afford nice thing AND the Olympics, the electorate has more pressing priorities.
As for venue reuse, the photo gallery seems to lean heavily toward Sarajevo, which is an unfortunate case that says nothing about Olympic hosting. Cherry picking a shot in Calgary amongst an otherwise well-used training facility, and a Soviet training facility in Murmansk that never hosted a games, seems to cement that the argument is weak. There’s no doubt that some hosts went massively overboard (and building a host city from bare ground, a la Sochi, isn’t exactly typical.
But at the other end of the spectrum, I think it would be hard to argue that fiscally responsible games like Calgary and Vancouver, can be delivered at a reasonable price and pay dividends for decades to come.