THE CALGARY OLYMPICS : A STAMPEDE ON THIN ICE : The City--Really a Cow Town--Took the Bull by the Horns When It Won the Right to Stage the Winter Games

One year before the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, there was more talk about smog, traffic and terrorism than Lewis, Moses and Decker.

As Frank King recently said, “The Olympics are a controversy waiting to happen.”

King has become an expert on the subject. He’s chairman of the 1988 Winter Olympics organizing committee, Olympiques Calgary Olympics (OCO ‘88).

In Calgary’s case, the controversies began the day the organizing committee returned home in September of 1981 from Baden Baden, West Germany, where the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the Winter Games to the Western Canadian city with a population of 640,000.

In the United States, the most publicized incident involved the former OCO ’88 ticket manager, who was arrested and charged with two counts of theft, two counts of fraud and one count of mischief for an alleged attempt to profit by overcharging American ticket buyers.

But for the man on the street in Calgary, tickets for the Americans are the least of his concerns.

He’s worried about his own tickets; he’s worried about the cost of the Games; he’s even worried about the weather.

King said that during the Games, Feb. 13-28, Calgarians will put their worries behind them and celebrate the Olympics, just as the people of Los Angeles did in 1984.

“Right now, it’s like driving down the road,,” he said. “At some point, we’ll stop focusing on the hood ornament and start seeing the big picture.”

THE WEATHER

Legend has it that when Calgary was nothing more than a frontier outpost late in the 19th Century, a man rode into town one winter’s day and hitched his horse to a post.

While he was attending to business, a Chinook wind blew through town, causing the temperature to rise dramatically and melting all of the snow.

When the man returned, he discovered the post where he had hitched his unlucky horse actually was a church steeple.

The story, of course, is fictional.

The Chinook winds are not.

Bill Pratt, OCO ‘88’s president, recalls one time when the temperature rose from 29 degrees below zero to 72 degrees above within a matter of hours.

When the Chinook winds have come to call this year, however, they have found no snow to melt.

Since the start of the year, Calgary has received 1 1/2 inches of snow. The winter sport of choice here this year has been golf. The Australian luge team recently arrived at the track wearing shorts and Hawaiian shirts.

But OCO ’88 officials haven’t just talked about the weather. They’ve tried to do something about it, installing state-of-the art snow-making equipment at the skiing venues and running 62 miles of refrigerated pipe under the bobsled and luge tracks.

Even if the weather remains balmy next winter, King said the Games will suffer only aesthetically.

For the $309 million in U.S. dollars it spent for television rights to the Games, ABC may not be able to show American viewers a winter wonderland. It might look more like Death Valley Days.

“It may not be pretty, but it’s do-able,” King said.

Considering, however, that practice portions of the women’s World Cup downhill earlier this month at Mt. Allan were canceled because of mild weather, malfunctions in the snow-making equipment and the organizers’ ineptitude, many people in Calgary wonder if OCO ’88 is not giving them another snow job.

THE TICKETS

Another ill wind has blown through Calgary that has nothing to do with the Chinook.

While OCO ’88 has earned praise from the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne, Switzerland, it has bewildered Calgarians.

“The committee is loved in Switzerland and hated in Calgary,” Mayor Ralph Klein said.

To discover the problem, one only has to ask the most convenient citizen.

“Everybody’s ticked off because they didn’t get tickets,” a cab driver said.

Not everyone failed to receive the tickets they ordered, but enough did to fill the letters-to-the-editor columns in both daily newspapers.

“Like the disillusioned child who believed in the spirit of Santa Claus, I, who believed in the spirit of the Olympics, no longer believe there ever was any intention of a fair distribution of Olympic tickets,” Annie B. Barnes of Calgary wrote to the Calgary Herald.

OCO ’88 officials invited trouble last October, when they announced that 90% of the 1.6 million tickets would be available to the public, the other 10% having been reserved for the Olympic family and corporate sponsors.

Less than one month later, it was revealed that only 77% of the tickets actually were available to the public, about 50% for the ice hockey medal games and figure skating finals.

That was almost twice as many tickets as were available to the public at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid and the 1984 Winter Games in Sarajevo, but it was less than had been promised.

While admitting OCO ’88 made public relations mistakes, King did not apologize.

“These are international games,” he said. “They are not a local ice hockey tournament or something like that. You can harangue us all you want about the Olympic family being there, but it’s not going to change anything.”

With 11 months remaining before the Games begin, 43 of the 128 events are sold out. That includes opening and closing ceremonies, all of the figure skating competition, ice hockey medal games and speed skating, the men’s downhill, slalom and giant slalom, the 90-meter ski jumping and curling semifinals and finals.

“I don’t want to sound cute, but we don’t have a ticket problem,” King said. “We have a space problem.”

OCO ’88 is working on that, announcing the expansion of several venues so that 300,000 more spectators can be accommodated. The 17,000-seat Olympic Saddledome, the site of the primary ice hockey and figure skating competitions, soon will have an additional 2,600 seats.

“Even before we expand our venues, we have 700,000 tickets available,” King said.

“Come right down and order tickets for the biathlon, and you’ll get your confirmation today. What people are saying is that they can’t get tickets for the gold medal hockey game.”

THE MONEY

It says something either for the resiliency of the Olympic movement or the short memories of Canadians, but, only five years after the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal ended $1 billion in the red, much of the burden of which was passed on to Quebec taxpayers, Calgary won the IOC nod for the 1988 Winter Games.

Not only was the bid endorsed by the governments of Canada, Alberta and Calgary, they have contributed $380 million Canadian toward the effort, including $250 million for facilities.

Of that, $180 million will be passed on to the people of Calgary and Alberta in the form of a tax bill.

“We’re not philosophically opposed to the way L.A. did it, using no public funds,” King said. “But L.A. had 90% of its facilities in place. We had zero.”

Considering that the city’s three primary sources of income, oil and gas, agriculture and tourism, are depressed, it is no wonder that people here are focused on the bottom line.

Responding to OCO ’88 criticism of the local media’s adversary role, the Calgary Herald’s Olympic reporter, Crosbie Cotton, said, “In the wake of Canada’s only other Olympic experience, Montreal’s $1 billion deficit, ours is to question why.”

That sentiment was seconded by Ron Wood, editorial director of a Calgary radio station.

“I say more power to Coca-Cola and ABC and all the people who come in here to make money,” Wood said.

“I say more power to the Olympic movement. Just don’t leave us with the debt you left Montreal.”

King said he shares the concern.

“People here are like the people in L.A.,” he said. “They’re going to love the Olympics. But somebody’s going to be hanging from the Centre Street Bridge if there’s a deficit.”

King said he believes there is no chance of that.

OCO ’88 received an unprecedented windfall when ABC paid $309 million U.S. for the rights, $84 million more than the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee received for the rights to the 1984 Summer Games.

“We signed our contract with ABC one month before the Sarajevo Games,” said Dr. Roger Jackson, director of the Canadian Olympic Assn.

“If we’d waited until the day after Sarajevo, we would have gotten half what we ended up with. It was so obvious the U.S. network bubble was about to burst.”

Yet, Albertville, France, which won the rights for the 1992 Winter Games, is anticipating $400 million from a U.S. network.

“They should be careful not to rely on big television money,” King said when asked what advice he would give Albertville organizers when they begin negotiations.

Besides money from government grants and television contracts, OCO ’88 also has received $76 million from corporate sponsors. King said OCO ’88 is operating with a $48 million contingency fund.

When the Games end, he said he expects to have $100 million to leave to the Canadian Olympic Assn. and to the Canadian Olympic Development Assn. for the continued maintenance of the facilities.

“According to our estimates, the ripple effect of the Olympics is going to create more than $1 billion in economic benefits for Calgary,” King said.

“Compared to what they will have to pay in taxes, the people of Calgary will benefit by two to one. They’re going to be better off than if we didn’t have the Olympics.”

THE SPIRIT

For 11 years, Ralph Klein was a Calgary television reporter whose beat was city hall. When he criticized the local government, the politicians told him that if he was so smart he should run for mayor.

No one can accuse Calgary of not knowing how to throw a party.

The Stampede, a rodeo that is known here as “The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth, “ attracts 1.2 million visitors to Calgary each July.

Some people here believe it’s simply not possible to have as much fun during the Winter Olympics as they have during the Stampede. “Then why not have the Stampede during the Olympics,” a Chamber of Commerce official was asked recently.

“You can’t have the Stampede during the winter,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because you couldn’t have the chuck wagon races,” he said.

“Then have the Stampede without the chuck wagon races.”

The official acted as if he couldn’t believe anyone could be so stupid.

“You can’t have the Stampede without the chuck wagon races,” he said.

Hoping to present Calgary to the world as a cosmopolitan city, some OCO ’88 officials talk openly of changing the city’s cow town image.

Klein is outraged when he hears such talk.

“There’s no bloody way I want to shed our image as a cow town,” Klein said.

“Do you know how long it takes to acquire an image? We’re built on that image. It’s our western heritage. If we start to lose it, we’ll never get it back.”

Calgary is what it is.

Right now, what its citizens are is unhappy.

That won’t last, King said.

“I’m not sure I understand what the people are Calgary are feeling,” he said. “It’s been up and down, up and down.

“But at the end, I’m quite sure there will be an emotional peak like the city has never seen. When the flame is lit, we’re going to have unbounded enthusiasm.”