BACKERS SHOULD FOCUS ON CIVIC PRIDE,
Olympic backers should focus on civic pride rather than selling Games as financial boon
In a recent interview on the CBC, Scott Russell asked Mary Moran, head of the bid committee for Calgary 2026, about the reasons for hosting an Olympic Games.
“We could talk ad nauseam about the financial benefits of hosting the Olympics and Paralympics in Calgary in 2026,” Russell said, and then it seemed like he was giving Moran the opening to note that there are many other great reasons to host an Olympics: civic pride, investment in amateur athletes, the chance to get some nifty red mittens.
On finances, Russell asked: “Is that the major reason why people should vote ‘yes’ on plebiscite day?”
Moran didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” she said. As the head of Calgary’s economic development arm, she said, she’s never seen a project like this that has such a return on investment.
“The majority of this money only comes if we have the Games,” Moran said, adding Calgary is struggling. We need this money, she said.
And so continued what has been the strangest aspect of Calgary’s prospective bid for a Winter Games: the argument that an Olympics is a sound, practical investment in a purely economic sense. Given recent Olympic history, it is akin to arguing that up is, in fact, down.
With Calgarians voting in a plebiscite Tuesday that will determine the bid’s fate, one might have expected much of the pitch at this late stage would come down to the softer stuff: that hosting a Games is great for the civic ego, and taking on the challenge of one is an undeniable boon for the country’s sports programs.
Canada’s approach to amateur athletics was utterly transformed in the lead-up to Vancouver 2010, and the result of that,evenseveralGameslater, is a high-performance sport program that competes with the best in the world and has the swagger and pride to show for it. At the last Olympics in Pyeongchang, there were Americans asking Canadian officials for the secrets of our success in sport. Americans!
But it is also undeniable that an Olympics is, at the least, fraught with economic risk. Cost overruns are as much a part of the Olympic experience as cute mascots and Russian doping scandals.
Promises of frugality early in the bidding process are overwhelmed by the competition to impress the International Olympic Committee, and dollars-andcents forecasts are notoriously unreliable given the length of time between bid and Games.
Calgarians would know that last part first-hand: the bid for the 1988 Games came during the low point of the National Energy Program. By the time the Olympics rolled round, Alberta was on better economic footing. (Those Games, notably, were also considered a raving success.)
Put simply, if hosting an Olympics today was such an unqualified sweet deal, why are so many prospective host cities barge-poling away from the opportunity to do so?
Skepticism about the merits of an Olympic bid is understand- able. An arms race to build evermore impressive spectacles led to the bloated budgets of Beijing in 2008 and Sochi in 2014. Rio in 2016 was a perfect example of a shifting economic picture: when Brazil was selected as the first South American host, it was in the middle of boom times. By the time the Games arrived, the country was in crisis and spending money on things like a velodrome was wildly out of step with its needs.
The Pyeongchang Games of last winter were promoted as an opportunity to transform a rural area of South Korea into a resort town; various levels of government are now arguing over who should pay for the upkeep of unused facilities. London had massive security-cost overruns in 2012, and Vancouver’s case for an on-budget Olympics is 2010 is made by excluding large infrastructure projects that were not part of the original plan.
But that is also what happens when an Olympics comes to town. Brad Humphreys, an economics professor at West Virginia University who provided some early feedback to Calgary on its potential bid, says host cities always end up with something larger than what was originally planned.
“You do everything you can to leverage the fact that the Games are coming,” he says. “Which is why cost overruns happen.”
This also takes place before a city is chosen, when potential hosts are forced to tart up their bids to impress the IOC. That organization’s attempts at reform toward a more lowbudget Olympics began when it became clear that fewer and fewer democracies wanted to do business with it. It resulted in a Tokyo 2020 that is now overshooting spending targets by billions, and a Pyeongchang 2018 in which no one knows quite what to do with a leftover hockey rink and a ski hill.
That is not to say Korea necessarily regrets hosting an Olympics, despite the usual billions in unanticipated costs. The locals were devoted supporters of the home side, making heroes of their medal-winning skaters and curlers. For a country that is literally divided, a Games was a uniquely unifying experience. The Olympics were a great party.
What they were not was a great deal.