Calgary aims to serve as hub city for winter sports
Stakeholders tight-lipped about which, but safe to say Winsport likely involved
With the NHL and NBA proving this summer that they could return to competition safely in a one-city hub setting, other sports are looking to follow suit.
Calgary wants them to look this way.
The city is looking to attract a couple of winter sports — they’re not saying which ones yet — and have athletes from around the world compete at one of the worldclass sporting facilities in the city.
They’d have to be isolated from the rest of the population because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but there’s an optimism in the sports and tourism industries that making that happen is possible.
“You’re starting to see many national sports organizations starting to look at their competition calendar and look at how they can hold their events safely, and whether they can go after the hub city model and figure out a cost-effective and safe way to run their events,” said Carson Ackroyd, senior vice-president of sales for Tourism Calgary. “We’ve been connecting with national sports organizations across the country and Calgary has got a number of strategic facilities that give us a strategic advantage over other markets.”
While the various stakeholders involved in trying to turn Calgary into a hub for winter sports are staying tight-lipped about which disciplines might make the city their temporary home, it’s not difficult to narrow down the list.
This year alone, Winsport has hosted World Cup events in mogul skiing, slopestyle and halfpipe, with both snowboarders and skiers competing. The facility’s halfpipe is widely considered one of the very best in the world.
On its own, Canada Olympic Park would be a strong selling point as Calgary makes its pitch, and it’s not just the facilities that make it appealing.
“There is no one in the world, I’m going to say, who can do it like we can,” said Winsport chief executive Barry Heck. “There’s other facilities in the world that could maybe pull this off, but not located in the middle of a major city. Look at our ski hill, small as it is, there’s no other facility in the world in the middle of a city that has everything right there.
“Not only the hill, but the airport is right there. There’s hotels. There’s everything. This is not easy, but it’s relatively easy for us to contain it and pull it off, so, yeah, we’re excited and very much behind it.”
Winsport is already set to host a moguls World Cup event in late January of 2021, and has both snowboard and freestyle ski World Cups scheduled for February. That’s consistent with recent years, and it’s worth noting that Calgary was also going to host the Winter X-games for three years, starting in 2020.
It seems unlikely that any of those events will go ahead as originally planned, but Ackroyd believes the fact that Calgary has so reliably hosted world-class sporting events over the years will be a major selling point if any winter sport decides to go ahead with a hub city model.
“Because we’ve been at this so long and have these willing partners, we have a track record of delivering success on the events,” Ackroyd said. “The national sporting partners we reach out to, so many of them have held events here and they feel comfortable and confident that we’re on top of it.”