Nobody wants to host the Olympics: Calgary balking at 2026 bid is emblematic of wider trend

CALGARY – The sun hangs low in the southern sky on a frigid Thursday in January, shining through the cloud cover, visible just above the peak of the big ski hill at WinSport Canada Olympic Park.

School-age kids on ski day field trips troop toward the lifts that will shuttle them up the slope. By 10 a.m. the big hill is buzzing with activity, but the park, which attracts roughly 1.2 million visitors a year, will be even busier tonight, when kids get out of school and adults finish work.

In an alternate timeline, if local residents had voted to bid for it, the entire city would have been in countdown mode, prepping for the opening ceremonies of the 2026 Winter Olympics.

That gala would have unfolded at McMahon Stadium, which would have received a renovation as part of a $900-million plan to refurbish existing facilities.

Back at WinSport, the slopestyle and courses are already top-tier, and ready to host world-class competition, while an Olympic Games would have meant a sorely needed upgrade to the bobsled track. It was decommissioned in 2019, and bringing it back online could have helped Canada’s proud but cash-strapped bobsled program dodge the cost of hauling athletes and sleds from their base in Calgary to Whistler, B.C., for full-course training runs. Maybe they could have parlayed home-track advantage into a few medals, and extended a streak of Olympic podium finishes that stretched back to 2006.

In real life, it doesn’t matter how those hypotheticals would have panned out. At the west end of Canada Olympic Park, the bobsled track sits derelict, and at the east end the ski jump towers stand abandoned, while the 2026 Games headed to Italy.

It’s not that Calgary bid on the Games and lost out to an Italian proposal. The city famously declined to bid at all, putting the idea to a plebiscite in November 2018 that saw more than half of voters opt against even trying to bring the Olympics back to the city that hosted the 1988 Winter Games.

Calgary isn’t an outlier. It’s emblematic of a wider trend.

When residents in potential host cities clue into the financial, social, and opportunity costs of hosting an Olympic Games, the idea of bidding becomes a tougher sell for Games advocates. Calgary is a case in point, but so are Paris and Los Angeles, the final two cities in the running for the 2024 Summer Games after every other prospective host — a list that includes Rome, Budapest, and Hamburg – had dropped out of the bid process. Facing a paucity of long-term options, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded two Summer Games at once – 2024 to Paris and 2028 to Los Angeles.

Factor in climate change, which threatens to limit future Winter Olympics to a handful of cities cold enough to host them and the new reality becomes clear. Any city mounting an Olympic bid will face thin competition, boosting its chances by default. Increasingly, the toughest task for potential host cities is convincing skeptical local residents that the long-term benefits of an Olympic Games outweigh the steep up-front costs.

“For countries that require government investment, the balance sheet is never going to look good unless you pull out the capital investments,” said Norm O’Reilly, dean of the college of business at the University of New England, and co-author of a study analyzing the failure of Calgary’s bid campaign.

“If we were organizing the Games in Canada as our own private company, it would be very hard to find a rationale that would work. But if we all of a sudden had city benefits and province benefits and federal benefits, you can make a really, really strong case.”

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A study published in 2020 by professors at Oxford University found that the average cost of hosting an Olympic Games had reached $12 billion, that every Olympic Games since 1960 had exceeded its original budget, and that the average budget overrun was 172 per cent. So if you’re wondering why cities are increasingly squeamish about hosting the Olympics, you can start with those numbers.