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Organizers begin to pick up the pieces after costly 2026 campaign falls short
It was the night of Oct. 30 when Jason Ribeiro felt the tide was beginning to turn.
Calgary’s Olympic bid was on the verge of death after council’s Olympic committee voted to end the process and cancel the plebiscite. Yes Calgary 2026, a pro-bid group that Ribeiro helped lead as one of its organizers, had planned a massive, last-minute rally the following day at city hall, complete with Canada’s Olympic heroes in attendance, decked out in red and white.
Then, around 10 p.m., a news release from the Calgary 2026 bid corporation popped up, revealing the details of a funding proposal agreement for Calgary’s 2026 Olympic bid. The next day, council voted to keep the bid alive.
“As soon as a deal came out . . . a number of people were signing their name in support,” Ribeiro said Tuesday, before learning the plebiscite result.
“I think a switch flipped on for a number of people. Not just for citizens but for the business community as well, that may have thought, ‘I don’t like this process,’ but also now the idea that this is a fleeting opportunity. Once the deal was solidified, I think a light bulb went off in people’s minds and it got them off the sidelines.”
But as Calgary would learn Tuesday, not enough people in this city were on board with hosting the 2026 Winter Games to keep the flame of the Olympic bid process burning. More than 56 per cent of those who voted were against it.
Calgary 2026 chair Scott Hutcheson said Wednesday it would take the better part of a week for him and his team to reflect on what went wrong.
“I think we’ll step back today and in the next four or five days and we’ll debrief with our team. Maybe nothing went wrong. Maybe this is what the community would’ve wanted no matter what,” said Hutcheson.
Asked whether it’s possible the bid corporation misread voters’ appetites to bid for the biggest worldwide sporting event, Hutcheson simply twice repeated, “I accept the results.”
He added the bid corporation would focus on studying lessons learned “so in the future we don’t embark on these paths unless there’s a different outcome.
“Maybe there are things you can second guess but, importantly, we’ve spent some community money and it’s important for us to now keep a skeleton team on, wind up the books and make sure that our partners know where that money was spent,” he said.
For his part, Mayor Naheed Nenshi, who had publicly supported the Yes campaign to bid for the Olympics, said he felt the city’s leaders need to do a better job to understand what issues Calgarians were most concerned about, and what they want moving forward.
“I’m not sure that I would agree with the assertion that something went wrong in the (Yes) campaign because ultimately it’s about listening to people,” Nenshi told reporters late Tuesday.
“The best campaign in the world is not smarter than the wisdom of the people.”
But with Calgary ’s mayor, countless Olympians and community leaders backing a bid, not to mention a well-oiled private funding campaign, Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt said the vote was the Yes side’s to lose.
“It clearly showed that money isn’t going to win an election, because they dramatically outspent the No side, they had all the top endorsers,” he said.
The bid corporation, which is separate from the Yes Calgary 2026 group, also had a $30-million budget to work with. The corporation was publicly funded by all three orders of government.
Whether Calgarians would get a sense of how those tax dollars were spent, Nenshi said he “can’t imagine why not” now that the Olympic process has effectively wrapped up. Work of Calgary 2026 was not subject to Alberta’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
But Hutcheson claimed the bid corporation has been “very transparent about our costs and we will continue to do that.
“We’ve disclosed that to the public all the way along the process,” he said, adding, “I don’t know the totals today,” when it comes to how much the bid corporation spent.
Hutcheson said it’s unclear when the public would have that information.
“We will work diligently to make a report that’s appropriate,” Hutcheson said Wednesday.
“I don’t know what that time frame is today. We finished a vote (Tuesday) night. We’ve debriefed our team today. We don’t close the books today . . . Part of that closing the books may take months because we have three orders of government that we work with, so there’s a process.”
Ribeiro pointed to a number of factors that he felt led to a majority of voters rejecting a bid.
Chief among them was “misinformation” that voters had to wade through in order to form their own opinions.
“That has been incredibly frustrating,” he said. “People who are our elected representatives, either knowingly or not knowingly, misleading or reporting inaccurate information about a very complex deal to an electorate that was waiting for information.
“I make no apologies for knowing exactly what we knew about the bid book, for communicating that as positively, as thoughtfully and at a greater length than I think any other effort in a shorter amount of time span.”
Ribeiro also felt the pro- Olympics message didn’t necessarily resonate with part of Calgary’s older population, calling it a “generational shift.”
“I think that some of the folks that were here in 1988 have enjoyed, in some sense, their Games and perhaps don’t see some of the same social cues that would make them more comfortable in pursuing a Games again,” he said before polls closed on Tuesday.
Bratt said it’s not so much that Calgarians as a whole didn’t want the Olympics again.
“I think Calgarians were open to the idea. They just didn’t like either the deal or the transparency around the deal,” Bratt said.
That the three levels of government “were never on the same page at the same time” when it came to funding the bid was “the original sin of the whole project,” according to Bratt.
“Usually, in a bid process or an infrastructure process that involves all three levels of government, they would do all the negotiating behind the scenes and then there would be one big press conference. That never happened,” he said.
“Instead, the province put out their number in a Friday afternoon news release, the federal government number gets leaked on a Friday night, the municipal number gets leaked out on a Saturday night. It just never looked like the three governments were together.
“There was never any co-ordination.”
Asked if she would have done anything differently when looking back on the campaign, Calgary 2026 CEO Mary Moran pointed to “time” as a factor that hurt the proOlympics side.
“Time is always a rare commodity and it was certainly on this project, too,” she said.
As the Calgary 2026 chapter comes to a close, almost eight years earlier than some had hoped, those tasked with pushing the bid toward the finish line and bringing a Winter Olympics sequel to Calgary will be left wondering what could have been for the city.
“We were prepared to accept whatever the outcome was,” Hutcheson said. “The community spoke and obviously I’m disappointed.”