Front Burner - Who, in the world, wants to host the Winter Olympics?

Episode Date: November 1, 2018

Calgary city council nearly killed a bid to host the 2026 Winter Olympics. If a city wide vote cancels the bid, just two possible locations remain, Italy and Sweden. Those campaigns face opposition as well. Toronto Star sports columnist Bruce Arthur explains why.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Let's start today's show with a question.

Who in the world wants to host the Winter Olympics? In Calgary, it is a super contentious debate right now. City Council nearly killed the bid yesterday. It'll now go to a citywide vote. But what about the other candidates for 2026? Sweden? I mean, maybe. Italy? Not sure. Because the ground has shifted under those bids too.

Which takes me back to my original question. Who in the world wants to host the Winter Olympics? It's complicated. It's messy. It's expensive. You'd think that would work out pretty well with democracy. But more and more, it doesn't. We'll try and sort that out today on FrontBurner. I'm Bruce Arthur. I'm a sports columnist with the Toronto Star. So, thank you for doing this.

I know you're answering the door for trick-or-treaters. I was coming in and out of the Calgary City Council debate. And what we know now, of course, is that council voted 8-7 to abandon the city's Olympic bid. But they actually needed 10 votes, a super majority, to officially halt the bid. So now this is going to go to a citywide vote on November 13th. Why were they so split on this? What was so hard about the decision? There were people on council who thought people

should be allowed to vote on this because that's what they committed to do. Because by terminating the plebiscite today, you'll be saying to all Calgarians, I am taking away your right to decide. You had a majority of council members say they didn't want to do this. So it was an 8-7 vote. And now you're going to the people of calgary and saying well the majority of our counselors think this is a bad idea but let's see what you guys think and what if you get 51 49 for the olympics it's a muddled message they're kind of limping along at this point and i i wouldn't be optimistic about the bid there was a lot of division in calgary on this i think it's really split down the middle because the olympics have had a lot of bad press over the last 20 or 30

years. And Western democracies, especially starting to figure that out. The Olympics are basically the most complicated human endeavor that a country puts on outside of like a war or an election. It's humongous, like especially Summer Olympics, Winter Olympics are smaller, but it's still, it's an enormous amount of money. It's for most cities, an enormous amount of investment in infrastructure. Calgary has a little less because they have some of the existing infrastructure that they just need to upgrade from 88. Calgary bids you welcome. I want to talk a little bit about why no one seems to want the Olympics right now. But first, can we just break down to be clear what's on the table for Calgary?

So Calgary is one of three countries, right, that are in the running to host the 2026 Olympics. that are in the running to host the 2026 Olympics. And this deal includes $1.4 billion from the federal government, $700 million from the province of Alberta, and then $300 million from the city of Calgary, which is what? A little more, actually. A little bit more. $390 million, I think, is the number now. Okay.

$390 million. It keeps changing, okay? Yeah. The people who are against this who who don't want calgary to have the olympics what what is their argument oh i got kids coming up the driveway can you stop right there i'll answer that question in a second because i see i can see a tiny little superman or something hold on one second yeah we have we have all the time for supermans here happy ha Halloween. Happy Halloween.

Yeah, are you having fun? Yeah. Okay, guys. Okay, so the question was, what were the people who were against the bid? What were they thinking? Yeah, what are they thinking? Why don't they want it? Well, there was a few different reasons.

And one is that, again, not everything is nailed down. They didn't know. They have a contingency in the budget, about billion 1.1 billion dollars uh for cost overruns because the olympics it's an olympic tradition that you go over budget and so they have this money in there but they don't really know what happens if they go beyond that like who's responsible for cost overruns if you go over on security that's the feds but everything else if you go over on on capital expenditure on building buildings on operating costs no one really knows who's responsible for that they also looked at in terms of infrastructure investment this would preclude calgary from doing just about anything else over

the next 48 years um and it's also it's just it's a it's an enormous complicated project and there are kind of scary stories from previous olympics some people go, maybe we don't want to do this. Well, I know Sochi was insanely over budget. Well, Sochi can't really count because Sochi cost $50 billion. So, yeah, that's way over. And China was $40 billion. But those are autocratic societies. Right.

So you have to really compare it to kind of Western democracy. But those are autocratic societies. Right. So you have to really compare it to kind of Western democracy. But in Western democracy, the security costs in Vancouver quadrupled or quintupled, actually, to about $900 million. And London's doubled. And I know Japan also is over budget. Yeah, way over budget.

So we know there's a precedent for overrunning costs at the Olympics. But like, what's the argument for keeping them? I mean, Vancouver was generally a success, no? They got some really good infrastructure. I don't remember anyone saying they were incredibly in debt. No, it was one of the more successful Olympics that we've seen in the modern era. And again, it's because Vancouver needed that infrastructure desperately. The Sea to Sky Highway was a dangerous highway. The travel in from the airport was really slow. There's no highways to or from the airport. That worked out pretty well.

The question is really, again, what's it worth? Like, would they have built those without an Olympics? Right. And would it have cost less money? You wouldn't have had to have paid $900 million for security as a country in order to have those built as infrastructure in Vancouver so does the Olympics actually generate a lot of activity that wouldn't exist either way a lot of people say no a lot of people say you don't get a tourism boost you don't get a lasting legacy boost unless you build it and that's where a lot of cost overruns happen is a lot of cities and countries are building beyond what they initially bid to do. And that's what's

happening in Tokyo. Sochi, again, was built completely out of almost nothing. A lot of it is whether you have self-restraint as a government, as a bid. And for Western democracies, increasingly what's happening is that the restraint is being kind of placed on them by the people who vote for them. Okay. So let me make sure I get this right. Olympics in their backyard because of these massive cost overruns, in part because countries are almost biting off more than they can chew in a lot of these cases and going beyond maybe what their initial cost estimates are. And as a result, there's this backlash, certainly by governments, but also by people who just don't want these Olympics in their cities.

but also by people who just don't want these Olympics in their cities. We've seen referendums and Olympic bids or the shadow of referendums and Olympic bids in a lot of places. So for 2022, the reason Beijing is hosting 2022 is, I believe, Oslo pulled out, Stockholm pulled out, Austria pulled out, and none of them just had the political support or the popular support to pull off a bid. And the Olympics were down to Beijing or Kazakhstan. I was told by one IOC member was an extremely disorganized bid. They only had Beijing. IOC to provide it during the games.

We have money. I would like to spend it for sport. We like to bring it to the world society. This is a clear answer and you've seen that also in 2024 some some countries i think it was hamburg dropped out and rome 2026 uh switzerland two different referendums ended two different possible bids there another one in austria and also it helps if you have an autocracy again like china and China and Russia can have Olympics because they're not accountable to anybody. There's no elections that are going to throw Vladimir Putin out, that are going to throw the Chinese Communist Party out. It's they can do what they want.

And one of the messy things about democracy, this is kind of what we saw in Calgary. It was really, I think, a positive experience for democracy. But it's messy. It's messy and it's difficult. And you wind up with an 8-7 vote to kill the bid and that they need 10 votes so it doesn't kill it. And some of this can explain why we're seeing an increasing number of autocratic countries winning Olympic bids. The question again, and the question it always will be, is, is it a good investment of public money? And for a lot

of countries, the answer has been no. For Canada, I suspect they're going to get to the plebiscite and they're going to wind up, again, split down the middle. I don't think that's enough to carry a bid. I think you need a municipal and provincial and federal enthusiasm to carry off something this big. And it's really, really hard. And the Olympic movement in this country, as much as it's stronger, I don't think it's strong enough necessarily to repel something this big through the hurdles, over the hurdles. It's kind of got to take it through. So who else would be up for 2026?

Well, let's see. There's a two-city Italian bid, Milan, and another one whose name I can't pronounce right now. They had three cities until the day before the bids were due. So one of them's already dropped out. Bit of a problem. OK. And so that's rickety. The other one is Stockholm, which has no political support at any level, which is also rickety. So the smart betting is Salt Lake City 2026 as an emergency superpower rescue.

It's not impossible because they are already looking at bidding for 2030 and maybe they just have to move up the schedule a little bit. If you watch the IOC meeting, it was a couple of weeks ago now, they said, I think these are all good bids. They're solid bids. We feel great about them. And anyone who knew anything knew that that wasn't true. They just they have nothing solid here. You just need so much to get a bid through and you have such a narrow field to choose from. The IOC is running out of bidders and they've tried to reform themselves. I will say the IOC has actually made some changes where they give you more money.

They try to encourage a more sustainable plan. It's based on a new, fully transparent partnership model, which includes an even greater financial and operational contribution from the IOC. And they they try to make it so that you don't wind up with white elephant structures. And then take a look at South Korea. They built a $100 million Olympic stadium and used it twice and then tore it down. That still happens. It used to be that the Olympics were kind of a song of innocence. You know what I mean? Like people didn't really realize. And the party was so great that you didn't think about what happened afterwards. And now they're songs of experience.

Right. It's like a hangover. Yeah. So for Western liberal democracies, this is a much more difficult situation than it used to be. Yeah. The IOC clearly knows it has a problem. I was watching this commercial that they had made recently. And the tone is very like, oh, hey, guys, the Olympics isn't so bad.

The amount a host city chooses to invest is based on what it wants the games to achieve, from community pride and more kids doing sports to sustainable development or economic regeneration. They talk about how you can make good examples for your kids to help them be healthy. And the video talks about trickle- down economics, you know, bring the Olympics here and people will spend money in your stores and then you can hire local people. But you don't really make a video like that unless you're trying to sell something. It's a sales job, right? It's like they're selling condominiums. 100%. Yeah, that's what it feels like. Because everything is soft, focused, animated and simple.

It's so simple to host the Olympics. This will pay for this. This will pay for this. One of the ways the Olympic movement has responded to this, again, they have made some really positive movement towards making it a better deal for cities. But the other thing they've done is they've changed the terms of the argument and said, what you're spending on the Olympics itself is all that matters. And that's what they do in that video is it's just operating costs.

And they try to make the terms of the argument just that. But that's not how the Olympics works, because one, cities are, again, trying to bid because it spurs infrastructure projects. And the other is that for a lot of countries, they don't have that self-restraint. So anytime you invest your government with the ability to do this, you don't have meaningful controls on what they're going to spend. And that's why every single Olympic bid eventually goes over budget by a little or a lot. So where do you see this ending? As fewer and fewer democracies at least are interested in hosting the Olympics, what's the solution? I mean, do we continue to put these games in autocratic countries or

do we build like an olympic island and just host like disney world but like for the olympics like imagine the cost overruns on an olympic island imagine what we do no every once in a while people will come up with a suggestion which which is a rotating cast of cities. So for the Winter Olympics especially, you could put it on a track of five or six countries. Let's say you put it in Norway. There's one. There's U.S. There's Canada.

So let's say it's Calgary or Vancouver. It's Salt Lake City. It's Oslo or Lillehammer. It's maybe a Swedish country and maybe you put it somewhere. I don't know where else. Maybe you put one in Russia because the autocrats have to get some. But let's say you do it like the Super Bowl used to be and you just rotate it among certain reliable places. And that way, your infrastructure costs are much more minimal. You're not using it to spur big

infrastructure projects. You're just putting it back where it's been before. I don't know if the IOC wants to do that. They've never shown any indication they do. And the one thing I will say, the summer games haven't had the same bidding problems yet. But even then, in 2024 and 2028, they're doing Paris and then LA. They announced them at the same time. They didn't have as many bidders as they kind of thought they would. It used to be countries would line up.

And the IOC doesn't have endless money. I will say that if you look at the IOC's books, they do not have so much money that they can pay you to do this. At some point, you're probably going to have to figure out an Olympics, which is either smaller and easier, or you put it in the same five or six cities and you rotate that over every two, every four years for as long as you go.

Or you do start pursuing autocracies. Maybe they can just live with that because it's a great television show and they get to keep talking about their morals and they don't actually have to do anything about it. Bruce, I really want to thank you for this enlightening conversation in between trick-or-treaters. I really appreciate it. We'll catch up soon. I appreciate that the technology allowed me to answer the door, help the trick-or-treaters of Toronto, and still have this great conversation with you, Jamie, about the Olympics. Thank you so much. I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. See you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger.

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