Olympic Hosting in Canada

Promotional Ambitions, Political Challenges

David Whitson

The Olympic Games have arguably become, along with the FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup, the most global media events of our times, with television audiences of unprecedented size and reaching into every corner of the world.1 As viewer numbers have increased exponentially, moreover, so too have the sums that some of the world's largest corporations have been willing to spend in order to advertise on Olympic broadcasts, or to associate themselves with the Olympic brand either through the TOP (The Olympic Partners) sponsorship program (for the most global of companies) or through national sponsorship programs (for large national brands like banks and telecom companies)2 This influx of corporate money into the Olympics, which took off in earnest with Los Angeles 1984, has effectively transformed the economic calculus associated with hosting the Games, making being a host city once again an attractive - indeed, much sought-after - proposition. It is, indeed, sometimes forgotten that in the immediate aftermath of Montreal's deficits and debts, when revenues from television and visitors came nowhere close to covering what Montreal had spent on facilities, few cities were interested in hosting an Olympiad. In fact, Los Angeles was the only serious bidder for the 1984 Games.

However, Los Angeles' well-profiled success in turning a profit has rekindled interest in hosting and since the International Olympic Committee (IOC) instituted the practice in the 19905 of selling TV rights to a packaged set of Winter and Summer Games covering an eight year period (thus providing predictable budget figures for prospective host cities), recent competitions to host Games have seen cities from every continent aspiring to be Olympic hosts. Successful applicants in recent years have included the capitals or major metropolitan centres of several nations outside the G7 (e.g., Sydney, Athens, Beijing). They also include wealthy regional centres in countries like the United States, Canada, and Spain (Salt Lake and Atlanta in the US, Calgary and Vancouver in Canada, and Barcelona). It might be argued that some recent unsuccessful bidders - including smaller and more peripheral European winter resorts (e.g. Jaca, Falun), as well as major cities in developing countries (e.g., Istanbul, Capetown) - would still have found the infrastructure and security costs associated with staging an Olympics to be dauntingly expensive, even in the new revenue environment However, the larger point is that the revenues now available to host cities have made hosting an Olympics appear to be a financially attractive proposition, and this has led to a "new phase" in the competition to host both Winter and (especially) Summer Olympics - for 2008, 2010, and 2012, for example - involving bids from some of the world's leading cities.3

This paper considers the phenomenon of Olympic hosting from several different perspectives. The first section explores the significance of the Olympic Games as a media event, and asks how it is that the Olympics have become such a widely recognized symbol of internationalism and progress, as well as the highly potent commercial draw that they are today. It will be proposed here that the Olympics have succeeded in making themselves central to "circuits of promotion,"4 in which the aspiration to excellence associated with sport is articulated with broader human aspirations and made part of narratives of progress that can variously be associated with national and civic ambitions, as well as with commercial products. The next two sections examine the ways that hosting the Olympics can be a transformative event in the life of cities: the aspirations and agendas of the local and regional leaders who organize bids, the political and financial challenges associated with staging the Games, and the material and other legacies that being a host city can leave behind. These issues are explored through the experiences of the two Canadian cities that have hosted Olympiads in recent decades: Montreal (1976) and Calgary (1988 Winter Games), as well as Vancouver's early preparations to host the 2010 Winter Olympics. In the final section, the paper raises some political questions about whether hosting an Olympic Games is the unproblematic `public good' that it is often portrayed as. Specifically, it asks what groups in a city typically benefit most from hosting events like an Olympics, and whether there are `opportunity costs' that fall most heavily on other sectors of the population.

Olympics as Global Media Events: Internationalism Gives Way to Globalism
I have alluded above to the extent to which the Olympic Games have become a global media event. This is not a new observation, of course; but it is worth setting out in somewhat more detail what is usually meant by it.5 At the simplest level, it almost always refers to the size and the global nature of the audiences, to the fact that people in every corner of the world - including people of vastly different economic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds - watch at least parts of the Olympic Games. At a more material level, it refers to the technological infrastructure and the behind-flee-scenes media organization necessary to bring the Olympic broadcasts to these international audiences. Huge numbers of journalists and other media personnel now come to host cities to cover the Games (8500 in Montreal, twice this number 20 years later in Atlanta), so that host cities must provide ever greater and more sophisticated telecommunications capacity to enable them to do their work. Accommodating media personnel, providing them with necessary information (on the events, the athletes, the city, etc.), and providing facilities capable of disseminating their stories and pictures around the world now requires the building of "Olympic media cities" that are not unlike Athletes Villages, but with much more complex technical requirements. However, this up-to-date telecommunications infrastructure has become one of the most important legacies' - potentially, at least - that hosting an Olympics can leave a city.

This leads to a final sense (or level of analysis) in which we need to think of the Olympic Games as a global media event, namely its financial and commercial significance. It is widely recognized that it is now television revenues, along with revenues from Olympic sponsorship programs (the TOP sponsorship program, as well as sponsorship programs run by national Olympic Committees and host city organizing committees), that would both be radically reduced without the global audiences that worldwide television guarantees, that provide the funds for most Olympic infrastructure. It is the International Olympic Committee's ability to sell television rights packages for sums in the billions of dollars, and in turn the capacity of broadcasters to sell advertising at prices that enable them to project profits despite these costs, that have made the Olympics since Los Angeles an event that cities can stage without amassing enormous debts.7 It is also the recent history of the Olympics as an event watched by audiences around the world that has made associations with the Olympics attractive to potential sponsors and advertisers, and in turn has made the purchase of these associations (whether by broadcasters, advertisers, or sponsors) of immense commercial value. Simply put, it is the volume and the global reach of Olympic media coverage that have made tine Olympics into a huge commercial event, and made the Olympic `brand' into a hugely valued (and valuable) property.

I want to ask how this came about, though, because the summer Olympics features sports (e.g., athletics, swimming gymnastics) that are not widely followed as spectator events outside Europe, and even have trouble getting on television outside of Olympic Games and World Championships. Moreover, although other sports events - the NFL's Super Bowl, golf's Masters, the FIFA World Cup - have also become international media events in their own right - none of them (with the possible exception of the World Cup) have become global events in quite the same way as the Olympics. In order to bring into focus some of the special meanings and associations that attach to the Olympic Games, a brief historical excursus is in order.

Historians of the modem Olympic movement typically agree that in Pierre de Coubertin's vision, the Olympic Games were seen as more than mere sports championships.8 They were intended to promote contact and friendship among the peoples of the world, and to play an important institutional role in promoting a particular set of ideals that would come to be known as Olympism. These included amateurism (i.e., the value of participation in sport for its own sake), fair play (i.e., the pursuit of excellence within a rule bound framework), and especially, the value of international sporting competition in the promotion of peace and international understanding. As Paul Gillen has noted, the Olympic movement has often been attacked for failing to live up to these ideals, but seldom if ever for having them9, and it is proposed here that this longstanding association with idealism has come to be a central - yet at the same time, polysemic - aspect of the popular meaning of both the Olympic Games and Olympic movement.

It can also be suggested that if the specific content given to Olympic idealism has varied with the times and with the spokesman, and has evolved considerably over the 20th century, (with the once important emphasis given to amateurism, in particular, now largely relegated to history's dustbin), the emphasis on internationalism has remained a constant - certainly a central theme in Olympic rhetoric and symbolism - and this commitment to internationalism has been crucial to making the Olympic Games into the global institution they are today. In proposing this, I fully recognize that Olympic Games in the early 20th, century were effectively restricted to upper-class European men, prompting accusations that the Olympic movement stood for a specifically bourgeois kind of internationalism, and leading at one point to the organization of `alternative' international sport events in the 1920s and 1930s: the Workers' Olympics, and the Women's World Games.10 Indeed, even into the 1950s, participation in the Olympic Games and membership in the IOC was still largely restricted to Europe and the Americas.

However, it is also important to recall that the IOC actively promoted international sport during the interwar years, and associated its efforts in this regard with the broader project of creating international institutions (most significantly, the League of Nations). Moreover, de Coubertin's vision of the Olympic ceremonies (both opening and closing) was that they serve as symbolic reminders of the importance of international understanding. It should further be acknowledged that since the 1960s, the IOC has actively encouraged postcolonial nations in Africa and Asia to join the Olympic movement, has taken the Games themselves to Asia (several times) and to Mexico, and has financially supported sport participation (in however limited a way) in smaller developing countries. This has meant that an Olympic Games now includes participants from almost every nation in the world, a claim that even FIFA cannot make (for reasons having to do with the restricted format of the final tournament). Thus, despite the fact that the IOC's commitments to internationalist ideals have often seemed to be largely rhetorical - and diminished, in practice, by the displays of nationalism that are part of every Games - the Olympic movement has successfully identified itself with popular aspirations to internationalism.11 It has also, despite its history of elitism, constructed itself as an international institution that many people identify with more readily than the UN, for example, let alone the World Bank.

The other important idea that warrants exploration here is that of `excellence'. The Olympics have always celebrated pushing back the frontiers of human performance, and Olympic champions in most sports (individual sports, at least) have been universally acclaimed as the best in the world in their disciplines. It is no surprise, then, that at least since 1960, the makers of athletic shoes have vied to sponsor Olympic contenders, so that their products would be seen by millions of television viewers being used by the world's best athletes. But, as the Olympic Games have become ever more a media event, and as advertising has become less literal and more associative, the makers of many other kinds of products (from timing devices to soft drinks) have also sought to associate their brands and logos with the tireless quest for excellence that is now one of the prime connotations of the Olympics. The TOP sponsors, in particular, have invested heavily in associating themselves with the Olympic brand, and the IOC actively promotes the idea that TOP sponsors are among the leading companies in the world in their respective fields, quite literally "world class" companies.12

In another familiar version of this `branding by association,' cities bidding to host an Olympic Games now believe that among the most important benefits will be media exposure that establishes them as "world class" cities.13 This exemplifies what Andrew Wemick has called "circuits of promotion," in which global publicity and the recursive circulation of symbolic associations with excellence are believed to add value to a whole series of branded products, whether these are manufactured products (e.g. autos or cameras), imaged products like cities, athletes-as-products (Olympic champions in major events), or the spectacle-as-product that is the Olympic Games itself. In the circuits of promotion that now surround an Olympic Games, it can be proposed, the meanings of the Olympic brand are believed to build brand value for every company, every place, and every service provider that can associate themselves with the Games.14 Yet this whole circuit of valorization is sustainable only so long as the Olympic brand itself remains unassailable, hence the zeal with which the IOC now guards the brand, as well as the risk to the whole enterprise should the core ideals and meanings of Olympism become sullied.

However, I want to raise the possibility at this juncture that the intensive pursuit of commercial funding that has so transformed Olympic financing since Los Angeles 1984, and the resultant increase in commercial discourse that now surrounds the Games in the early 21st century, has (at least for critics of commercialism) threatened this historical connection with idealism. Los Angeles was a watershed in at least two important ways. First, there were significant increases in television revenues. The improvement of satellite technology to a point where prolonged commercial quality programming could be transmitted instantly around the wood, the beginnings of real growth in pay-tv, the advent of private competition for public broadcasters in Europe and Australia, and the determination of Peter Ueberroth and the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee (LAOOC) to seek "market value" for Olympic television rights outside the U.S. all contributed to driving up the prices of television rights dramatically, for Los Angeles and for subsequent Games.15 The other important change followed from the commercially driven way that the Los Angeles Games were (of necessity) funded. Once it was shown that a Games could be funded from commercial sources, without resorting to the levels of public expenditure that had so indebted Montreal, the stage was set for an unprecedented commercialisation of both the live event itself, and of Olympic TV programming Under the leadership of Juan Antonio Samaranch and Richard Pound, the IOC undertook the strategic pursuit of commercial sponsorships, and sought to maximize revenues from television rights and licensed merchandising. All of this provided a greatly-expanded revenue base, but also required a larger Games.16 The live event now had to provide multiple opportunities for advertising and for corporate hospitality, while Olympic television became an extended platform for commercial messages - and not just messages from individual advertisers, but a cumulative celebration of the opportunities afforded by the global marketplace.

Following Michael Real, it can be proposed that Olympic broadcasting in the last two decades has become a prime-time showcase for global consumer culture, with the modernist ideals of the postwar Olympic movement not exactly disappearing but taking on new and more commercial inflections.17 By the late 20th century, the Olympics were dearly articulated more with "globalism" than with 1960s discourses of internationalism, while celebrations of "world class" performances and products had supplanted more humanistic visions of excellence. Now, it can be granted that globalism, in the eyes of its supporters, also represents a set of ideals as well as a purely commercial agenda18 However, these have more to do with the virtues of markets, and especially global markets, than with the kinds of inter-national institutions that were the core carriers of interwar and postwar ideals. Likewise, in considering the different connotations of "excellent" and "world class," we should recognize the competitive edge implied by the latter, as well as the difficulties of defining `the best' in categories where criteria of excellence may not be universally recognized. "World class" first came into common usage in the context of sports like athletics, where performances recorded in different parts of the world could easily be measured and compared. Now, though, the term is used in so many contexts where comparative excellence is problematic to measure - cities, notably, but also many kinds of commercial goods and services - that it has become a "sign without a referent," denoting little more than promotional rhetoric.19

The Olympics as a Civic Event: Montreal and Its Aftermath
Against this background, I turn now to discussing hosting the Olympics as a major event in the life of a host city. For the same factors that have transformed the Olympics as a media event since 1984 have also made the Games a highly sought after platform for showcasing the host city, for putting it on a stage that the whole world is watching, and (in some cases, at least) for staking new claims to be considered as a global city. Agendas of "place promotion," in which host cities (and nations) have attempted to re-position themselves in continental and global hierarchies of cities, certainly pre-dated 1984.20 However, the attractions of hosting an Olympic Games have taken on new lustre now that the revenues from television and sponsorship can be expected to cover a major portion of the costs. Indeed, promotional and ideological ambitions aside, cities that have bid to be hosts in the last twenty years have also envisaged the Olympics as a finandal opportunity, especially for the funding of major urban renewal projects21 These have included major sports facilities, obviously, but also airport and port district renovations, new highways and rapid transit systems, and new telecommunications infrastructure (such as fibre optic and satellite teleport capacities). The latter, in particular, are seen to lay foundations for the new kinds of economic roles envisaged by local elites (n Barcelona, for example, or in Seoul).

I will focus my discussion on the hosting experiences of Canadian cities, partly to illustrate how much has changed since the 1980s, but also to make the point that much still depends on local political and economic conditions. I will devote most attention to the Montreal Games, because they remain Canada's only experience of hosting the summer Olympic Games, and because it is widely remembered as a fiscal debacle that left the City of Montreal with debts that will not be retired until 2006. As noted above, Los Angeles 1984 marked the first effort to finance the Olympics primarily from commercial sources, as opposed to public funds, and this was at least partly a response to the well-known problems of Montreal. One must also recall here that 1976 was a time before the Internet, and before satellite television was a retail, direct-to-home, product; thus the media revenues available to the Montreal authorities were far smaller than they would very soon become. Indeed, where television rights for Montreal sold for less than $30 million, only eight years Later the rights for the Los Angeles Games brought in more than $240 million, and by Sydney 200 this had risen to over $1 billion.22 It is also germane to note that, although the Montreal Olympics saw the introduction of mobile camera units that facilitated unprecedented coverage of mad and water events, and although Radio Canada/CBC built a state-of-the-art production and editing Facility near the Olympic site, the state of media technology ran 1976 did not require the wholesale modernization of telecommunications infrastructure that would become obligatory only a few years later. Not only did Montreal get much smaller revenues, then, but the massive transformation of telecom capacity that within ten years would be one of the most important legacies of staging an Olympics was still below the horizon.

This is not to suggest that there were no positive benefits for the city, or no material legacies. The rapid transit system (the Metro) was extended into the East End, an old and poor part of Montreal where the Olympic Stadium and other facilities were sited in an (only partly successful) attempt to stimulate redevelopment Yet this must be qualified by pointing out that the Olympics came to Montreal less than ten years after Expo `67, which had itself been an occasion for major new infrastructure projects (highways, bridges, and the initial Metro system). Expo had also been the catalyst for public and private investments in la ville souterraine (or underground city), a network of subterranean walkways and shops that linked major downtown office towers, shopping complexes and cultural facilities23 In short, these features of Montreal's civic infrastructure were still new enough to be impressive, even though both the Metro and the ville souterraine underwent significant expansion for the Olympics. In addition, with the important exception of the Olympic Stadium, many of the sports facilities that were built for the Olympics - aquatic facilities, for example, as well as gymnastics and judo - have been well used since, both for public recreation and as training and competitive facilities. This, in turn, has contributed to Montreal-area, and indeed Quebec, athletes being well represented on Canadian international teams in these sports. Despite these benefits, though, it is nonetheless the legacy of debt that looms largest in most assessments:

The Olympics were a fiscal fiasco for Montreal almost beyond belief. Initially budgeted at $120 million and planned to be self-financed by revenues from the Games themselves, corruption, fiscal mismanagement, union troubles, construction delays, and architectural design flaws on the Olympic Stadium raised the cost of staging the Games to a staggering $922 million.24

Moreover, since 1976, more than $462 million more has been poured into the Olympic facilities, much of this on repairs to the ill-fated Olympic Stadium. A monument of experimental design, intended by Mayor Drapeau to stand as a lasting symbol of Montreal's technological and creative capacities, the `Big O' is instead remembered as a multi-billion dollar fiasco. Once envisaged as a state-of-the-art home for Montreal's professional football and baseball teams, the stadium proved unsuited to either sport, and the roof has needed repeated repairs. The Montreal Alouettes football team folded in the late 1980s, later to resume operations in a smaller downtown venue where it now draws much larger crowds. Major League Baseball's Montreal Expos, meanwhile, finally moved to Washington, DC at the end of 2004, after many years of poor attendance.

How did this debacle occur? How did these dreams and plans for place promotion go so wrong? According to the report of a provincially appointed Commission:

the principal causes of the considerable discrepancy between the original estimates and costs of the Olympic Games stem from the administrative irresponsibility of the authorities of the City and of COJO [the Olympic Organizing Committee] in choosing unique or unusual designs (and) abandoning the idea of a Games on a modest scale.25

In the most comprehensive account of jean Drapeau's long tenure as Mayor of Montreal (from 1960-1986), Guy Morin suggests that hosting global events like Expo '67 and tile Olympic Games - and signifying them with grands projects like Habitat (at Expo and the Olympic Stadium - were integral to a grand strategy whereby Montreal would step out onto the world stage (from the shadow of a Canada that had a reputation as somewhat dull), -and establish its place as a dynamic and vibrant "world city."26 Drapeau was obsessed with the importance of the Olympic Games for showcasing Montreal, Morin suggests, and he was prepared to pay almost any price to achieve the desired effects. Yet despite the hubris of these obsessions, Morin also argues (and his assessment here is supported by others) that both Drapeau's ambitions for Montreal and the responses of the Canadian government need to be seen in the political context of their times.

The 1970s were a period of unprecedented political tension in Canada, when the strength of Quebec nationalism and the prospect that Quebec might separate from Canada (a spectre or a dream, depending on one's position in this debate), influenced many kinds of political decisions. Among other things, it made the Canadian government very reluctant to commit funds to the Montreal Olympics. The government of Canada had contributed substantially to the funding of Expo `67, which despite its success from every other standpoint had accumulated a $210 million deficit; and it had formally supported a bid by Vancouver to host the 1976 Winter Olympics, promising to pay 33% of Vancouver's costs27 In so doing, Kidd proposes that although the federal government of Pierre Trudeau was committed to doing what it could to keep Quebec in Canada, it was also well aware of popular opinion in the rest of the country that Quebec was already the beneficiary of too much federal largesse. Thus, he interprets its support for Vancouver's bid as an attempt to balance - and be seen to balance - what it had given to Montreal for Expo `67.

Kidd also remarks that when the Vancouver bid failed and Montreal was awarded the summer Games instead, the Canadian government could in principle have committed to Montreal the funding it had promised to Vancouver. However, the early 1970s saw a series of political crises in Quebec: the FLQ kidnappings and the War Measures Act in 1970, a general strike in 1972, and steadily rising support for the separatist Parti Québécois. In this context, the Trudeau government was suspicious of the political agenda it attributed to Drapeau and others. It was also afraid of a backlash in the rest of Canada - a not unfounded fear, given that they lost most of their western seats in the 1972 election - if they were seen to give more `handouts' to Quebec. They belatedly agreed to give Montreal the revenues from a special Olympic lottery. However, by this time almost three years of precious construction time was lost, leading to problems with contractors, labour disputes and overtime demands, and construction safety issues - all factors that would contribute to the cost over-runs that blew budget estimates out the window.

There is, in my view, considerable substance to Kidd's claim that the costs and debts associated with the Montreal Olympics can be blamed in different ways on internal Canadian politics: on Mayor Drapeaau's grand ambitions for Montreal, mid on the federal government's reluctance to properly fund all event it feared could wind up sharpening political divisions in the country. In any, event, the end result was that almost all the costs were ultimately borne by the city of Montreal, with modest assistance from the province of Quebec. This distinguishes Montreal from the noun - illustrated in Korea, Spain, and Australia, later Canadian Olympics in Calgary and Vancouver - in which hosting the Games has been from the outset a shared project of national, regional, and city governments, with national governments bearing a major portion of the costs?' The issue here is that if spending on Olympic-related infrastructure is not to result in crippling debts for the host city, the majority of the costs need to be covered by outside money: notably television revenues that otherwise would have gone to some other country, and money from senior levels of government that might otherwise have been invested in other regions or for other purposes. The latter raises important political questions concerning `opportunity costs' (opportunities foregone, when money is spent on Olympic infrastructure rather than other public goods or services), an issue we shall return to later. Here, though, the point I wish to make is simply that Montreal suffered from getting much less outside money - both public and private - than subsequent host cities have enjoyed.

As a final point about Montreal, it is also relevant that the same political tensions would continue to affect the economy of Montreal for almost two decades. I noted in the introduction the widely shared assumption that an Olympic Games affords a city a rare opportunity to showcase its attractions to potential investors and tourists, thereby laying the foundations at least for an enhanced tourist industry, and more ambitiously for general and sustained economic growth. In Montreal's case, though, it is hard to find evidence that the Olympic Games benefited the economy of the city in any enduring way. In 1974-76, contractors and others in building supplies and the construction trades made more money than normal (most of it at public expense), and in 1976, all sectors of the hospitality industry enjoyed a banner year. However, far from experiencing a post-Olympic boom, the Montreal economy went into a period of decline shortly after the Olympics that would last for the best part of two decades. Unemployment more than doubled between 1975 and 1982, property prices dropped dramatically, and by 1985 the number of hotel rooms in downtown Montreal had declined to pre-1976 levels.29

A primary factor in this, almost certainly, was the persistence of political uncertainty over the place of Quebec in Canada. In November of 1976, only a few months after the Olympic Games, Quebec elected a Parti Québécois government committed to the independence of Quebec, and even though a mandate to negotiate for sovereignty was defeated in a subsequent referendum, the PQ quite properly proceeded to implement other parts of its platform, most importantly those designed to make French the working language of commerce and of public life. This led to a flight of affluent English-speakers and a glut of `For Sale' signs that depressed property prices in Montreal for more than a decade. More seriously, it also led to a flight of capital, including the relocation to Toronto of the head offices of several banks, insurance companies, and other financial services institutions that historically had been headquartered in Montreal. Whether this, too, reflected the politics of language, or simply capital's fears about economic consequences should Quebec separate, the consequences for Montreal were immediate and serious: a loss of many professional head office jobs, and the establishment of Toronto as Canada's centre of financial services.

Montreal has rebounded strongly since the mid-1990s, when a climate of greater political stability contributed to a surge in `knowledge industry' jobs (in pharmaceuticals and biotech, in computer software, and in media production), a development that also owes much to the city's well-educated and multilingual workforce. However, my purpose in recounting this here is simply to emphasize that it would be remiss to attribute either the late 1970s decline or the 1990s recovery to the Olympics. At the same time, the prolonged downturn almost certainly meant that paying off the Olympic debt, recently estimated at well over $2 billion including capital and interest payments, became a more difficult and prolonged task than it might otherwise have been.

Calgary and Vancouver: The Olympics Business (Post-LA) and the 'Business' Olympics
At this point, I will turn to some briefer observations about Calgary and Vancouver. With respect to Calgary, perhaps the most important point to make is that hosting the 1988 Winter Olympics is widely regarded - at least in the city's substantial business and professional communities (and Calgary is an affluent white-collar city) - as a success. This opinion is not unanimously shared; in the 1980s, there were city councillors and community activists who opposed spending large sums of public money on Olympic facilities while social spending was being cut, and also opposed the authoritarian way that the Province of Alberta and the Calgary Olympic Organizing Committee circumvented normal channels of debate (especially about the location of facilities)30 In addition, there is research on the economic impacts of the Calgary Olympics that suggests that even though the Games themselves made a profit, and indeed produced a legacy fund' that has contributed to the subsequent upkeep of Games facilities, the impacts for the small business (as opposed to the corporate) sector were somewhat less than pro-Olympic rhetoric often implies.

In one study, for example, it was found that among small or medium-sized businesses that had opened up or added capacity in Calgary in the year before the Olympics, very few (less than 10%) had done so specifically because of the Olympics, and only a few more (14%) - typically, suppliers of goods or services to facilities built for the Games - considered that the Olympics had led to continuing opportunities for their businesses." Another study, this time focussing on destination image, found that the impacts of the Olympics on awareness of Calgary in US tourist markets (the largest audience for the Olympic telecasts, and the most important audience for Calgary's 'place-promotion' activities) had diminished within a very few years, and were less than that of the [annual] Calgary Stampede32 Neither of these findings is completely negative, however, together they suggest that even when a Games is highly successful in the year of the event, this does not necessarily translate into sustained economic growth, even in the tourism industry itself.

If this is so, why then are the Calgary Olympics thought of in such positive terms? To begin with, the Calgary Organizing Committee made a significant profit ($130 million). This was a product of a `business' approach that built directly on tbe Los Angeles model. They negotiated what was at that time the largest deal for television rights in the history of the Olympics, Winter or Summer. They secured substantial additional revenues from Canadian corporate sponsors, and they received major financial contributions from both the Canadian and Alberta governments. It has also helped that the Olympics left a legacy of top-notch winter sports facilities - including downhill and Nordic ski facilities that are intensively used by the public, as well as a speed skating oval and luge and bobsled tracks that are still outstanding competitive and training venues. Moreover, Games profits (the Legacy Fund) have helped to ensure that these facilities are maintained in top condition.33

Less tangible but no less important, some have suggested, was the success of the volunteer program, which involved more than 10,000 Calgarians in an experience that developed new skills and left lasting memories, not least of which were memories of what could be accomplished - both individually and collectively - by "thinking big."34 As with many volunteer programs, it was the Calgary business and professional classes that volunteered in the greatest numbers, and so experienced these benefits most directly. However, if one of the legacies of an Olympics is people whose outlooks are altered by the experience, the then-Premier of Alberta Peter Lougheed may have been astute in predicting that the most important impact of the 1988 Olympics would be that it got Calgarians thinking about what they could achieve in the wider world, and that over time this would make Calgary into a less provincial and more globally-oriented city. Burdened, in some ways, by the city's history as a "cowboy town," civic and provincial leaders (like Lougheed) saw the Olympics as a perfect stage on which to demonstrate that Calgary was a vibrant and forward looking metropolis, as opposed to stuck in its agricultural past35 Today, Calgary has a reputation as Canada's fastest growing and most business-oriented city, though how much this can be attributed to the Olympics and how much to the fact that the city is headquarters to Alberta's booming oil industry is almost impossible to gauge.

As far as Vancouver is concerned, it is too early to predict very much. The euphoria of the bid success has subsided, and the organizing committee is still putting senior staff in place. However, there are some issues that can be flagged for future attention, as 2010 draws inexorably closer. First as an event that will be staged in a world-famous ski resort (Whistler) and a cosmopolitan Pacific coast city, Vancouver 2010 promises almost matchless 'background' opportunities for television producers. Commensurate with this, the revenues from television will be unprecedented for a Winter Olympics. NBC has contracted to pay US$820 million for American rights, while the price for Canadian rights (from the private CTV network, rather than the public broadcaster, CBC) was CAN$90 million.36 Some predict that Vancouver may be the first Winter Games to be broadcast in high-definition television (depending on how rapidly the market grows for HDTV sets). In addition, NBC's purchase price includes US Internet rights, opening up the prospect of live webcasts, as well as potential `rights' conflicts with the holders of television rights in other countries.37 It is also noteworthy that according to budget documents, Games organizers aim to raise $255 million from local' sponsorships (major Canadian companies, as distinct from the IOC's TOP sponsors), and that the Games are already being marketed to corporate Canada as an extra-ordinary marketing opportunity 38 Thus, if one can safely predict anything, it is that Vancouver will offer unprecedented commercial opportunities to corporate Canada

At the same time, there are storm clouds on the horizon. Already, there are reports that some of the cost estimates in the official bid document are being described by Games organizers as unrealistically low. Thus, given that the government of British Columbia is legally committed to covering any shortfall should revenues not match costs (the contribution of the federal government is fixed at $310 million), there are some people in BC who are getting nervous.39 The context here is that the current BC government has over the last three years pursued a draconian `rationalization' of British Columbia's public services that has hit hardest at the province's poor, especially in rural communities. These are people who mostly live a long way from Vancouver and who are unlikely to enjoy much benefit from the presence of the Olympics in their province. This promises to reproduce what British Columbia experienced in the early 1980s, when an "austerity program" hit hard at provincial public services at the very time that no expense was spared to make Expo `86 a showcase40 Likewise, even though the Sydney Olympics were officially judged a great success, critics point out that New South Wales imposed sweeping cutbacks in social services in order to find its share of the money for Olympic infrastructure, and that these cuts hit hardest at groups who enjoyed few benefits from the Olympics: Aboriginals, the urban poor, and people living in rural districts a long way from the excitement of Sydney.41

What is highlighted here is that even though the invitation to identify with the civic triumphs that hosting Expositions and Olympics are said to represent is extended rhetorically to the collective "we," the reality is that some groups are much better positioned to experience the benefits than others. More pointedly, some sectors of the population may actually be hurt when public spending is reallocated to Olympic infrastructure, while lower profile community facilities and public services have their funding cut. In British Columbia, it is also germane that Olympic expenditures will be concentrated in what is already the most prosperous corner of the province - West Vancouver and Whistler - while schools and hospitals are being dosed in rural communities, and services cut in poorer parts of Vancouver that most visitors will never see.

It is not insignificant here that the biggest boosters of the Vancouver bid were the local corporate community - precisely the interest group that stands to benefit most from the money spent on construction, from the money that will be spent on promotion, from increases in property values in Vancouver and Whistler, and from whatever subsequent investment boom Vancouver may enjoy as a result of the Olympics. For these people and their allies in the government of Premier Gordon Campbell, it may not be going too far to say that the 2010 Olympics are envisaged as the crowning event on a decade of neo-liberalism, an event that will celebrate the benefits of what is now BC's low-tax, pro-business environment. The Bid Committee and their allies in government were strongly opposed, even frightened, when a newly elected (in late 2002) Vancouver Mayor went ahead with an election promise to hold a referendum on the Olympic bid in February 2003. After a campaign in which the `Yes' side had far more money to spend than their opponents and enjoyed the support of all the local media, voters in Vancouver wound up supporting the hosting the Games by a margin of about 2/1. However social democrats on the council worry that other social needs will be pre-empted by the need to get facilities built on time, and that it will be difficult to hold the Organizing Committee (which is structured as a corporation) accountable to public concerns.

Concluding Remarks: Promotional Culture and Public Culture
In trying to sum up the issues raised in this paper, I want to be clear that I am cautious about drawing `lessons' for today from the Montreal Olympic experience. The political circumstances that I have outlined above (and it must be read as no more than an outline, distilled by an English Canadian) are very historically specific, though one might make comparisons with how the Spanish government responded less defensively towards Catalan aspirations that were not dissimilar to Quebec's and were very much part of Barcelona's preparations for hosting the 1992 Olympiad.42 In addition, the economic circumstances of hosting an Olympic Games are very different now than they were in 1976. The worlds of telecommunications and marketing and the Olympic movement itself have all changed dramatically, and the commercialization of the Olympics has brought so much corporate money as to make public indebtedness on the scale of Montreal highly unlikely (though the experience of Athens suggests that there are still valid grounds for caution here). This is something that most people concerned about public expenditures, including those who would broadly prefer to see public monies spent on socially redistributive kinds of projects, would likely applaud. I will not comment here on the question of whether the Olympics have become `too commercial' in the process (too commercial for what?), except to reiterate that there may be some risk to the whole Olympic enterprise if Olympism's historical connections with idealism were to become completely tarnished. The Olympic Games could then seem just like a particularly big `world championships,' a scenario that de Coubertin worked very hard to avoid.

At the same time, I want to suggest that there are more general issues that follow from the growth of promotional culture - a culture in which almost every public communication now has some promotional content, and a culture in which the Olympics have now become a pre-eminent marketing opportunity. Marketing actively seeks to change the way people think, and not just about the merits of individual products but more generally about the positive role of markets (and marketing) in the satisfaction of human needs. In the now familiar language of global marketing, Kevin Robins suggests, we are encouraged to equate excellence with the global brand names we see and hear so much about, and to become `global citizens' precisely through our consumption of `world class' products. As an extension of this, moreover, we are encouraged to think of `world class' cities as those that offer access to the greatest choice of world-class products, including world class entertainment43

However, we need to recognize this is self-interested (and self-serving) discourse, and to remember that not everyone who lives in a `world class' city benefits from the kinds of developments (like mega-events) that are framed as markers of this status. For even though political and business elites regularly promote as `common sense' the idea that global events and the urban transformations they bring with them are good for the entire community, all too often the result has been social polarization, with business opportunities for the corporate sector accompanied by cutbacks to the social infrastructure on which others depend for the quality of their lives.44 This polarization appears especially likely, it must be said, when mega-projects are being promoted, as they have been in British Columbia, by pro-business governments that are simultaneously committed to cutting taxes and rationalizing social services. It is quite possible, I might suggest, that this analysis may be more applicable in English-speaking countries (i.e, in Britain, America, and parts of Australia and Canada), and less so in Spain and other European countries with stronger social democratic traditions.45
However, Saskia Sassen has argued that one of the significant results of neo-liberal politics in North America in the 1990s was a social polarization in which we find the hardening of two different kinds of claims on public resources.46 In one camp, transnational businesses and investors align themselves with local political and business elites in pressing the case that downtown business districts need major capital investments, including `world class' sporting and cultural facilities, if the city is to attract new investment and talent. In the other camp, community groups and less affluent citizens make claims about their needs for labour-intensive public services, and for low profile "community-use" facilities of the sort that elites (and visitors to the city) seldom use, but can make real differences in the lives of lower income families. Advocates for capital spending on major downtown developments that are aimed primarily at the "visitor class" (wealthy suburbanites, as well as tourists) routinely claim that the projects they propose will benefit the city as a whole.47 Against this, Zygmunt Bauman and others (including Sassen) have argued that the "socio-cultural bubble" in which many affluent business and professional people now exist has insulated them from any real awareness of how people on wages (let alone social assistance) actually live, and of the impact of neo-liberal social policies on those lives. Bauman proposes that neo-liberalism represents a "secession of the successful" from society, in which elites have sufficiently detached their own fates from those of communities around them that they no longer know or care much about the state of public services, except insofar as these make claims on their taxes.48

It is therefore necessary to challenge the discourse in which business and professional elites have been able to equate their own needs and interests (even their leisure interests) with the needs of the city as a whole (as if there were such a thing), and to define for us what we understand by `world class.' It is also necessary to recognize and name the social polarization that follows from many kinds of developments associated with the `world class' city, and to make the opportunity costs of these developments - the neighbourhood services that are closed or curtailed, and the public servants that are laid off as a result - the subject of vigorous public debates. Olympic bids have been catalysts for such debates in Canada - in Toronto, as well as in the cities that have actually won the right to host an Olympic Games. However, the global publicity that attends keenly fought contests to host a Games (such as the 2012 Summer Olympics), can reinforce the popular notion that hosting an Olympics is automatically `good' for a city. It is salutary, in this context, to recall Canadian Olympian Bruce Kidd's suggestion that Canadian debates about whether and how to host an Olympics have also been debates over "competing notions of the public good."49 In a time when social and environmental objectives can all too easily be subordinated to civic and corporate ambitions, the IOC must do more than it has in recent years to assure that Games bids serve public purposes, if the Olympic movement is to sustain a credible connection to the ideals of its past

Endnotes

1. Paul Gillen, "The Olympic Games and Global Society," Arena Journal, Vol.4, 1994/95, pp. 5-15; Maurice Roche, Mega-Events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture (London: Roudedge, 2000).
2. See Robert K. Barney, Stephen Wenn, & Scott Martyn, Selling the Five Rings: The International Olympic Committee and the Rise of Olympic Commercialism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002), esp. chs. 7-10.
3. Noam Shoval, "A New Phase in the Competition for the Olympic Gold: The London and New York Bids for the 2012 Games," Journal of Urban Affairs, Vol.24, No.5, 2002, pp. 583-599.
4. The term comes from Andrew Wernick, Promotional Culture (London: Routledge, 1995).
5. For useful discussions of this phenomenon, see Roche, esp. chs. 5-6, and Miguel de Moragas Spa, N. Rivenburgh & J. Larson, Television in the Olympics (London: John Libbey, 1995).
6. Roche, p. 148.
7. See Barney, Wenn & Martyn, also Holger Preuss, Economics of the Olympic Games (Sydney: Walla Walla Press), 2000.
8. John MacAloon, This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); John Lucas, The Modem Olympic Games (New York: A.S. Barnes & Co., 1980).
9. Gillen, p. 6
10. See Jennifer Hargreaves, Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women's Sports (London: Roudedge, 1994); Jim Riordan, "The Workers' Olympics," in A. Tomlinson & G. Whannel, Five Ring Circus: Money, Power and Politics at the Olympic Game (London: Pluto, 1984).
11. Roche, pp. 102-112. John Hoberman offers a slightly different take on the IOC's internationalism than the one offered here; however, he concurs in suggesting that "The moral reputation of the Olympic movement is one of the public relations phenomena of this century." See his The Olympic Crisis (New Rochelle, NY: Caratzas, 1986), p. 29.
12. "The Power of the Olympic Brand," International Olympic Committee, 1999.
13. David Whitson & Donald Macintosh, "The Global Circus: International Sport, Tourism, and the Marketing of Cities," Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Vol.20, No.3, 1996, pp. 278-295.
14. Wernick, pp.149-150. See also Preuss, pp. 136-150.
15. Barney, Wenn, & Martyn point out that satellite technology was first used in the early 1960s. However, this early satellite technology was far from what we know today. Transmissions were not direct-to-home but rather to receiving stations for conventional free-to-air broadcasters, and were "limited to ten minutes in duration and picture quality was substandard" (p. 81, p. 90). Moreover, consumers could not receive satellite television directly in their homes. Full technological development, and, crucially, development of the commercial potential of direct-to-home transmission and pay-tv would take another two decades. On Ueberroth, and the issues in the negotiations of television rights for Los Angeles 1984, see the discussion in Barney, Wenn, & Martyr, ch. 8.
16. Ibid., chs. 9, 10, 13. The authors make the point that "without the infusion of corporate sector support and the careful nurturing of the Olympic brand, there would be fewer athletes at Olympic festivals, fewer events on the Olympic program, fewer bid cities, and greater public debt in cities staging the Games" (pp. 277-278).
17. Michael Real, "The Televised Olympics from Atlanta: A Look Back - and Ahead," Television ,Quarterly, 1996 (Autumn), pp. 9-12.
18. See, for example, Theodore Levitt, The Marketing Imagination (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1983).
19. John Hartley, "A State of Excitement: Western Australia and the America's Cup," Cultural Studies, Vol.2, No. 1, 1988, pp. 117-126.
20. Whitson & Macintosh.
21. Shoval.
22. Roche p. 183.
23. Marc Levine, "Tourism, Urban Redevelopment, and the `World Class City:' the Cases of Baltimore and Montreal," in C. Andrew, P. Armstrong, & A. Lapierre (Eds.), World Class Cities. Can Canada Play? (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1999), pp. 421-450.
24. Ibid., p. 433.
25. Report of the Commission of Inquiry Into the Cost of the 21st Olympiad Volume 1 (Albert Malouf, Commissioner), Quebec: Government of Quebec, 1980, pp. 31-32.
26. Guy Morin, La cathédrale inachievée (Montreal: XYZ Editeur). I am indebted here to Marc Levine's discussion of Morin, (see Note 23), pp. 431-433. See also Nick Auf der Maur, The Billion Dollar Gave: Jeta Drapeau and the 1976 Olympics (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1976).
27. Bruce Kidd, "The Culture Wars of the Montreal Olympics," International Reviev for the Sociology ofSport," Vol.27, No.2, 1992, pp. 151-161.
28. In Canada, mega-events have regularly been used by local governments to secure funding from senior levels of government for major sports facilities that were planned from the outset as venues for subsequent use by professional sports franchises (see Whitson & Macintosh, p.282; also D. Whitson & D. Macintosh, "Becoming a `World Class' City: Hallmark Events and Sports Franchises in the Growth Strategies of Western Canadian Cities," Sociology of Sport Journal, Vol. 10, 1993, pp. 221-240.
29. Yvon Martineau et Paul Rioux, Le marché du travail dans la région métropolitaine de Montréal (Montréal: INRS-Urbanis ation, 1994); Paul Bodson, Marcel Samson, et jean Stafford, L'Hotellerie dans l'arrondissement centre de Montreal Situation etperspecves d'avenir (Montréal : INRS-Urbanisation, 1988) each cited in Levine, p. 434, p. 446.
30. Chuck Reasons, "It's Just a Game? The 1988 Winter Olympics" in Stampede City: Power and Pohtics in the West C. Reasons, Ed. (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 1984).
31. C. Leroux & J. Mount, "Assessing the Effects of a Mega-Event: A Retrospective Study of the Impact of the Olympic Games on the Calgary Business Sector," Festival Management and Event Tourism," Vol.2, 1994, pp. 15-23.
32. B. Ritchie & J. Smith, "The Impact of a Mega-Event on Host Region Awareness: A Longitudinal Study," Journal of Travel Research, Vol.30, 1991, pp. 3-10.
33. Dawn Walton, "For advice, trail leads to Calgary," Globe & Mail, March 31, 2004.
34. Harry Hiller, "Impact and Image: The Convergence of Urban Factors in Preparing for the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics," in The Planning and Evaluation of Hallmark Events, G. Syme et al., Eds. (London: Avebury Press, 1989), pp. 119-131.
35. Kevin B. Wamsley & Michael K. Heine, "Tradition, Modernity, and the Construction of Civic Identity. The Calgary Olympics," OLYMPIKA: The International Journal of Olympic Studies, Vol. V, 1996, pp. 81-90.
36. http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Olympics/201OVancouver/2005/02/08/924083.htm1 The Vancouver rights fees were part of a package of $150 million that included the Canadian rights to broadcast the 2012 Summer Olympics from London. In countries other than Canada, of course, the rights to broadcast from London will be seen as much more valuable than the Vancouver rights; in Canada, however, the rights to be associated with Vancouver are perceived as more valuable by Canadian advertisers.
37. William Houston, "TV rights could spur a bonanza," Globe & Mail Olympic Supplement, March 31, 2004.
38. Richard Bloom, "Corporate Canada keen to be involved," Globe & Mail Olympic Supplement, March 31, 2004; Keith McArthur, "Squaring off over sponsorships," Globe & Mail Report on Business, August 21, 2004, p. B4.
39. Daphne Bramham, Ottawa Citi en, April 8, 2004, p. A17.
40. David Ley & Kris Olds, "Landscape as Spectacle: World's Fairs and the Culture of Heroic Consumption," Society and Space, Vol.6, 1988, pp. 191-212.
41. Doug Booth & Colin Tatz, "Swimming With the Big Boys" The Politics of Sydney's 2000 Olympic Bid," Sporting Traditions, Vol. 11, 1994, pp. 3-23.
42. See John Hargreaves, Freedom for Catalonia? Catalan Nationalism, Spanish Identity, and the Barcelona Olympic Games (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
43. Kevin Robins, "Prisoners of the City: Whatever Could a Postmodern City Be?" New Formations, Vol. 15, 1991, pp. 1-22.
44. David Whitson, "World Class Leisure and Consumption: Social Polarization and the Politics of Place," in World Class Cities: Can Canada Play? C. Andrew et al, Eds. (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1999), pp. 303-320.
45. On Britain, see Robins. On Australia, see Booth & Tatz, and Helen Wilson, "What is an Olympic City? Visions of Sydney 2000," Media, Culture & Society, Vo1.18, 1996, pp. 603-618.
46. Saskia Sassen, "Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims," Public Culture, Vol.8, No.2, 1996, pp. 205-223.
47. The term comes from Peter Eisinger. "The Politics of Bread and Circuses: Building the City for the Visitor Class," Urban Affairs Review, Vol.35, No.3, 2000, pp. 316-333.
48. Zygmunt Bauman, Community Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
49. Bruce Kidd, "The Toronto Olympic Commitment: Toward a Social Contract for the Olympic Games," OLYMPIKA: The International Journal of Olyzzpic Studies, Vol. I, 1992, pp. 154-167.

David Whitson is a Professer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta, Canada

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