’88 Olympic legacy opens up possibilities
Calgary committee is exploring economic feasibility of bid for 2026 Winter Games
Nearly 30 years have passed since Hidy and Howdy roamed the streets of Calgary, but the footprint of the 1988 Olympics is embedded throughout the city.
The Olympic Oval at the University of Calgary still hosts speed skating World Cups. The sliding track is still operating, with a $20-million facelift scheduled for next year.
WinSport’s Canada Olympic Park — Eddie the Eagle’s personal playground in 1988 — has the capacity to run Olympic moguls, aerials, slopestyle and halfpipe in freestyle skiing, and slopestyle, halfpipe and big air in snowboarding. The Saddledome — home to the 1988 Battle of the Brians — survived an epic flood and is still (barely) an NHL rink.
It’s by reusing those venues that Rick Hanson envisions a compact approach to costs should Calgary bid for the 2026 Winter Games.
“We’re never going to justify huge capital costs based on 16 days nine years from now,” Hanson, chairman of the Calgary Bid Exploration Committee, said Monday at a media roundtable to discuss the preliminary findings of the group exploring a potential Calgary bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Hanson is a former Calgary police chief who stepped down in 2015 to run for office (unsuccessfully) as a Progressive Conservative in the Alberta election. He concedes the cost of securing the Games is impossible to quantify given these uncertain times of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
Polls reveal Calgarians have let it be known while they might love another Olympics, they have little appetite for running up billion-dollar deficits.
The bid exploration committee looks at the 2014 Sochi Games — and the outrageous $50-billion cost associated with Russia building an Olympic site from scratch — as an outlier. The average price tag for the previous three Winter Games in Vancouver, Turin and Salt Lake City is estimated at $3.2 billion, with about $1.5 billion each going to security and facilities.
By setting up five clusters — Stampede Park, the University of Calgary, WinSport (Canada Olympic Park), the Canmore Nordic Centre and Lake Louise and/or Nakiska — Hanson said security costs can be better contained with help from new surveillance technology. And by drawing on the legacy facilities from 1988, infrastructure costs should be more manageable.
“Will there need to be some adjustments or some improvements? Sure,” Hanson said of Calgary’s legacy facilities. “But it’s not going to be anywhere near $1.5 billion.”
The Nakiska Ski Resort in nearby Kananaskis Country hosted the alpine events in 1988. That venue is under consideration for 2026 along with the Lake Louise Ski Resort, which is sure to create controversy given the potential environmental impact of hosting Olympic races in a national park.
Should the federal government grant permission for the invasion of the five-ring circus, watch for the traditional alpine events to take place at Lake Louise with skicross, snowboardcross and snowboard parallel giant slalom going to Nakiska. The Canmore Nordic Centre, a gem left over from ’88, is obvious for crosscountry skiing and biathlon.
The two big-ticket facilities missing from the Calgary area are an Olympic-regulation ski jump — the main tower at Canada Olympic Park is decommissioned and the wrong size — and a new arena (already under city council consideration is construction of a new home for the Calgary Flames).
“You do require two full-sized arenas to host the Games,” Hanson said. “So that’s just a fact.”
The ski jump is likely destined for another location away from WinSport, given the new size requirement of 120 metres would force competitors to land on the nearby Trans-Canada Highway. Given the lack of Canadian success and participation in the sport, spending millions of dollars on a new facility will no doubt be contentious.
All along, Hanson has repeatedly emphasized the bid exploration committee has made no decisions on whether it makes sense for Calgary to proceed. It’s called an exploration committee for a reason. But the time for researching and dissecting the possibility is drawing to a close, with a final report due in July.