Calgary bid for 2026 Winter Games makes the most ‘cents’

If not now, when? If not Calgary, where?

The Olympic movement is at a crossroads — it is big, it is bloated, it is obscenely expensive to host a Games, it is beset by recidivist cheaters and their enabling nations and it has, as a partner, an anti-doping agency it evidently doesn’t trust to conduct its business professionally.

But of all these problems, the one front and centre in the wake of Sochi and Rio de Janeiro — and arguably Athens and Beijing, too — is cost.

It can’t go on like this. A host nation’s people can’t be made to suffer in poverty or taxation hell because the International Olympic Committee has made nudge-nudge, wink-wink deals with governments and organizing committees to hide the real costs of the Games until it’s too late and the bills come due.

At which point the circus leaves town and the IOC waves a cheery farewell and says, “Thanks for everything. Sorry about the mess.”

The IOC can’t keep going further and further afield, contracting with human rights tramplers and corrupt bidders to finance the pipe dream of changing the world by expanding Olympism’s global footprint, however noble that ideal might sound. The madness has to stop. Olympic Games must start reusing the facilities that already exist, in stable places run by proven, successful hosts who haven’t let those facilities go to seed so that they have to start all over from scratch. If not now, when? If not Calgary, where?

By this time next year, bids have to be submitted for the 2026 Winter Olympics. The host city will be chosen in 2019.

Monday in Calgary, a 17-member “bid exploration” committee was formed to study the feasibility of, and costs associated with, taking a run at those Games — which would come 38 years after the ’88 Olympics put Calgary on the map for more than chuckwagons and oil companies.

Already, it’s a problem for the IOC to interest cities in hosting the Winter Games. Next year’s Olympics are in Pyeongchang, Korea, which finally wore down the IOC’s resistance with its third consecutive bid. After that, it’s Beijing in 2022, which won out over Alamaty, Kazakhstan after Oslo shied away from the costs and withdrew.

But Calgary still has virtually everything it had going in ’88, with an Olympic Park still up and thriving for the sliding and freestyle sports, and the mountain at Kananaskis and cross-country trails of Canmore still completely viable, the Olympic Oval at the U of Calgary still clicking along.

The word “legacy” has been bandied around a lot in association with Olympic Games, but Calgary actually has one.

Granted, creaky old McMahon Stadium is long past its bestbefore date, and the Calgary Flames are looking up the road at Edmonton’s palatial new Rogers Place and saying to the province: “What about us?”

So making Calgary’s a really attractive bid wouldn’t be without infrastructure cost. A 2026 bid might be tied to the eventual thawing of the city’s resistance to the Flames/Stampeders’ controversial CalgaryNEXT proposal that would incorporate an arena, stadium and field house.

Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi insists CalgaryNEXT has “literally nothing ” to do with the Olympic discussion.

But Nenshi’s skepticism, and the lukewarm comments of Alberta’s NDP premier Rachel Notley, not to mention the mere 60 per cent approval rating of voters polled on the Olympic bid idea might be the best news of all.

Because it means that no one is going to ramrod this thing through without a lot of sober second thought.

But if that can be shown, with all the hard-headed doubters satisfied, then it’s up to the IOC to live up to president Thomas Bach’s much-ballyhooed series of reforms, called Agenda 2020 — not yet put to the test — designed in part to attract host city bids by adopting a “reduce, reuse, recycle” philosophy.

That doesn’t sound much like the IOC we know, but if it’s not all hot air, Calgary has a helluva shot here. And perhaps, increasingly rare among Olympic bid cities, an opportunity it would be nuts to pass up.