Calgary’s ‘no’ vote results in more questions than answers
TORONTO — Rotating Olympic hosts? A single go-to destination every four years? Maybe dump the bid process altogether?
There are no easy answers for what has become a challenging effort of late: finding interested and qualified suitors to host the Winter Games.
Calgary essentially scuttled plans for a 2026 bid after the ‘no’ side’s plebiscite victory on Tuesday night. That left Stockholm and Milan-Cortina as the only contenders and both have already had issues with significant hurdles still to clear. Canada’s previous efforts to host the Winter Games, Calgary in 1988 and Vancouver in 2010, were by and large considered success stories. However, massive cost overruns from other host cities — notably Sochi in 2014 — have helped stoke Olympic hangover worries.
Bid races seem to have been affected. The IOC recently broke from tradition on the Summer Games front by transforming the bid process and instead declaring two hosts (Paris in 2024 and Los Angeles in 2028) at the same time.
For the Winter Games, Beijing — not exactly a winter wonderland — beat out a single contender in Almaty, Kazakhstan for the 2022 Games. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen now with 2026.
“The world has changed,” Canadian Olympic Committee president Tricia Smith said Wednesday. “I think we’ve seen some (recent) mega-projects that maybe have scared people off a little bit. That is something the IOC has certainly been addressing with this, call it the new norm, or the 2020 Agenda.
“It’s something that I thought Calgary addressed really, really well in their bid. I thought their bid was really responsible. Certainly a (bidder) can do what they want in a bid and include a lot of things that aren’t really necessary, but Calgary didn’t do that.”
The Alberta city trumpeted its strong core of venues and infrastructure from 1988, but it wasn’t enough to sway voters.
Many athletes expressed their disappointment Wednesday at the plebiscite result and voiced concern about the potential impact.
“I’m sad, I feel like it’s a missed opportunity for the city and for the country,” said bobsledder Kaillie Humphries, who won Olympic gold in Vancouver and Sochi.