CALGARY’S PROPOSAL DOESN’T PLAY AROUND
Three years ago next month, the Vancouver Olympic organizing committee announced that, four years after the 2010 Games had left town, the event had broken even.
“This is, to me, very good for the Canada brand of being reliable, being trustworthy, keeping your promises, being on time and on budget,” said John Furlong, head of the committee, assuming he could be heard amid all the back-patting that was going on.
On Monday came the initial estimate of what a Calgary 2026 Olympics would look like. It also makes a number of promises, most notably a pledge to lose a lot of money: a $425-million operating loss and about $2.4 billion of funding required to meet total cost projections. At a time of swollen government deficits, it’s very much on brand for Canada, too.
But the Calgary proposal, which is just a rough examination of the possible plans at this point because city council has not yet decided if it wants to formally submit a bid, is surprising in a number of ways. It suggests a $4.6-billion cost to stage the Olympics, far less than the $7.7 billion for Vancouver 2010 despite the 16 years of inflation that will have passed between the two events. While it lowballs cost estimates for big-ticket items like athletes’ housing and security, which every Games bid in recent memory has done to try to make the numbers more palatable, it also doesn’t wrap itself in grandiose visions and legacy projects and dreams of a Calgary forever changed by the events of February 2026.
It doesn’t imagine spending $50 billion to transform a sleepy resort town into a bustling hub, as was the case with Sochi 2014, only to see it sink back into the sea when everyone left. It doesn’t make the long-since-abandoned promises for infrastructure that were part of Rio 2016, or even the more modest projects like a rapid-transit line and highway improvements that were part of the Vancouver experience.
Those big-ticket items in Vancouver were not technically part of the bid, which is one of the reasons it was able to claim break-even status.
The Calgary proposal imagines using mostly existing facilities that were part of the 1988 Games, and getting by with present-day infrastructure, plus already-planned transportation improvements. It sounds a lot like an Olympics boiled down to its essence. There’s something to be said for this approach, especially when other such bids tend to promise the moon and end up leaving a crater of debt.
The no-frills concept for Calgary 2026 also neatly sidesteps some of the biggest costs that are associated with being an Olympic host. There is the need for a new arena, an idea that has been percolating since about the time of the Vancouver Olympics but which has so far been notable for city council’s unwillingness to give the Calgary Flames free money to build one and Flames hockey boss Brian Burke’s willingness to call them fools for not doing so immediately and with great fervour. Will the Flames decide to go ahead and build an arena that requires minimal public investment, as has been the case in five other Canadian NHL cities? From the perspective of the Olympic proposal, that sure would be handy, but it presently has to be filed under the category of wishful thinking.
There is also the matter of an athletes’ village which, in the style of the day, the proposal imagines would be fully borne by private housing developers. The same was imagined in Vancouver and London before an economic downturn forced the local governments to assume massive debt loads to get the apartment blocks built.
On security, Calgary’s proposed $610-million spend is about twothirds of what Vancouver spent for things like extra policing. That estimate is wildly optimistic, given that there’s no way to know what the world will look like in a decade or what threats might be present.
It’s these kinds of budget-planning shortcuts that contribute to the Olympics’ well-earned reputation for spectacular cost overruns. An Oxford University paper from last summer looked at all Olympics back to 1960 and concluded that the average cost overrun for a Winter Games was 142 per cent.
“To decide to stage the Olympic Games is to decide to take on one of the most costly and financially most risky type of megaproject that exists,” the authors wrote.
Calgary’s plan would mitigate some of that risk by making it less of a megaproject. Instead, the pitch is: We won’t pretend Calgary will be all that different after the Olympics this time, but it will be a fun couple of weeks and it will be great for local pride and we will sure sell a lot of cowboy hats. That’s not nothing. Even in Rio, a place that really had better things to do with its money, there were lots of people bursting with joy at having shown themselves off to the world.
Is that worth $2.4 billion? The thing is, the Olympics are never worth the money anymore. At least this is a proposal that doesn’t seem to pretend otherwise.