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Eve Lazarus considers the financial implications for the community when the Olympic gravy train rolls into town.
The bid process alone runs into tens of millions of dollars, but hosting an Olympic Games is the one party that every country seems to want. And no wonder. While national pride plays a part, politicians and corporate leaders have their eyes planted squarely on a gravy train that, they say, will result in everything from increased tourism to thousands of new jobs and millions of dollars worth of infrastructure.
When it was announced in July that Vancouver and Whistler would host the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, stocks in troubled Air Canada lifted 16%, Intrawest Corporation, the resort developer and operator behind Whistler, saw its share price jump 7% in heavy trading, while the Fairmont Hotels and Resorts, with five properties in the region, also enjoyed a modest rise. The next day, global marketers ran full-page ads congratulating Vancouver in national newspapers, and Coca-Cola came out with a special 'Congratulations Vancouver' can.
Mike Duggan, chair of Tourism British Columbia, was quoted as saying that the announcement alone was worth $10m in free publicity and various reports and government pundits projected that the economic fallout would be anywhere between $2bn and $10bn.
Vying for an Olympic Games is a relatively new economic sport. At the end of the 1970s, the games could financially ruin a city and it wasn't until the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games declared a US$200m surplus that the number of bid cities soared.
According to the Vancouver 2010 Bid Corporation, the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games had an operating surplus of CDN$160m, while Calgary's 1988 Winter Games produced a CDN$40m surplus.
What is certain is that, as a direct result of the games, Vancouver will see CDN$620m courtesy of the federal and provincial governments, to do everything from renovating tired stadiums to building a sustainable Olympic village that will later transform into an 80-acre development with low cost housing, retail, parks and trails. Just getting to the shortlist stage proved a catalyst for much needed infrastructure. Not connected to the actual bid, but items that probably would not have reached the finishing line otherwise, include the CDN$495m expansion to the Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre and CDN$600m worth of upgrades to the Sea to Sky Highway, the road that will carry athletes and visitors to Whistler from West Vancouver. 'We haven't seen a lot of federal money coming into British Columbia for a long time and, of course, half of the dollars are coming from the Government of Canada, so I think that's a real positive,' says David Podmore, President and CEO of Vancouver-based Concert Properties.
According to a study by Vancouver-based InterVISTAS Consulting earlier this year, the games could generate gross domestic product of CDN$2bn to CDN$4.2bn and expect 45,000 to 99,000 new jobs throughout British Columbia. Not surprisingly, games organisers are more optimistic, saying it will create up to 228,000 new positions and generate up to CDN$10bn in direct economic activity.
