Games bid pointless without new facilities
Hosting the Olympics is all about community building. But in Calgary’s potential bid for the 2026 Winter Games, where is the building part? Frankly, where’s the community part?
Mayor Naheed Nenshi has mused about putting forward a bid using existing venues in not just Calgary, but Edmonton and Whistler, B.C., because we’re too cheap to build some ski jumps, a Nordic event centre and a needed hockey arena and football stadium for the opening and closing ceremonies.
In other words, Nenshi is considering an Olympic bid where Edmonton gets the opening and closing ceremonies because Calgary has the worst football stadium in the country, if not all of North America, and where either the figure skating or the hockey — two of the favourite sports during a Winter Olympics — would go to Edmonton because we have only one arena — which, again, is the worst hockey arena in the country for a city with an NHL team. Calgary would take all of the risk and cost of building an athlete’s village, media centre, organization and security.
At the end of the games, the City by the Bow would have nothing to show for it except a huge security bill, and perhaps a warm glow from the experience, and some publicity that would highlight the fact that we don’t have proper infrastructure for a city of our size.
Edmonton and Whistler would pull in the gold and the silver. What would Calgary get? No new arena, no new stadium, no new field house (Edmonton has three, Calgary has none), no new ski jumps (the ones in Whistler are suggested as being viable alternatives).
It would be an Olympics scattered all over the place, sucking all the joy and energy that comes from the world’s top athletes from every winter sport congregating together to experience arguably the most inspiring of all human events.
As for security, in Calgary’s bid exploration committee documents, clustering of events is recommended as a cost-saving measure. The committee estimated that security would cost $600 million for a Calgary-Canmore bid. Spread security out over two provinces and three cities and watch that number balloon.
As for going cap-in-hand to B.C. asking the province to take on the ski jumping and Nordic ski events, it’s easy to foresee all sorts of issues. At Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics, there were protests about nothing. Imagine those professional protesters now having Alberta oil and pipelines to demonstrate against?
If those B.C. protesters managed to shut down Olympic events in Whistler, what power would Alberta’s solicitor general have over that situation? If you can’t control it, why would you do it?
This three-city, two-province idea is absurd. One of the main reasons cities bid for an Olympic Games is to build needed infrastructure. The Saddledome is more than 30 years old, and because of its iconic saddle-shaped roof, was out-of-date even before it opened, with big concerts passing Calgary by from the beginning because of the physical constraints the sway in the roof places on stage set up.
Nevertheless, Calgary managed to get and keep the Calgary Flames as a result, and that has been fantastic for this city and province.
A new arena would ensure that continues.
Calgary’s 1988 Olympic Winter Games created the kind of infrastructure that has given Canada so many of its proud and memorable moments, and also helped shape some of our favourite citizens.
Think of the speedskating oval alone. Prior to the Olympic Oval being built, Canada had a measly total of 11 speedskating medals over 64 years, starting from the 1924 Olympics to 1988.
Since 1988, Canada has won 24 speedskating medals — many of them gold — in just 30 years, catapulting us into the fourth place all-time medal-winning country in that sport.
By creating a world-class training facility, some of Canada’s best citizens have emerged, including Catriona Le May Doan, Susan Auch, Cindy Klassen, Clara Hughes and Gaetan Boucher, to name just a few. They have inspired us and made us proud, drawing this vast country together.
Currently, Nenshi is in Pyeongchang, South Korea, with a delegation to investigate the Olympics, which opened Friday. Here’s hoping his absurd, zero-legacy Olympic vision of no community building goes up in a massive Olympic flame.