The Welcome Mat Is Out in Quebec City : Olympics: The mistakes of Montreal are history and the province wants the 2002 Winter Games.

Brown and green with the growth of early spring, the Laurentian Mountains tower over field-stone churches and empty roads beyond the outskirts of Quebec City.

Where now there are slumbering peaks, Rene Paquet sees chair lifts climbing snowy slopes. He envisions those highways filled with buses carrying athletes to events of the 2002 Olympics and transporting tourists to fine restaurants in the historic Old City.

“Quebec is a very unique city,” says Paquet, president and chairman of Quebec 2002, the organization promoting Quebec City’s bid to serve as host for the Games. “For anyone who visits for the first time, they will find Quebec City is a bit like a new city in the old world with its European atmosphere.”

International Olympic Committee officials liked its atmosphere enough to rank its bid among the top four proposals for the 2002 Winter Games. The other finalists are Salt Lake City; Oestersund, Sweden, and Sion, Switzerland. The IOC will announce its decision Friday in Budapest, Hungary.

Paquet says Quebec City can stage the Olympics at no cost to residents, using government and private funding. That may be possible because corporate financing has played a major role in underwriting the Games since the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and because television rights fees are substantial. But looming higher than the Laurentians over Quebec City’s bid is the specter of the province of Quebec’s first Olympic venture.

When Montreal was awarded the 1976 Summer Games, its mayor, Jean Drapeau, said he could pull it off for $120 million and not lose money.

“The Olympic Games can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby,” he said.

Drapeau gave birth to a baby that, at last estimate, has cost Quebeckers more than $3 billion. The province owes about $300 million on a debt that probably won’t be retired until sometime after 2005. The city paid off its $150-million debt only last year.

Olympic Stadium, built for the Games and to house the Expos baseball team, was budgeted to cost $30 million but has consumed more than $800 million in labor costs, overruns and repairs on its retractable roof.

However, methods of financing the Olympics have changed greatly since 1976. Worldwide television rights for the Montreal Games sold for $35 million, but American and European rights to the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, have sold for $450 million.

“You can look for a hit from outside sources of $500 million,” said Dick Pound of Canada, a member of the IOC’s executive board and secretary of the Canadian Olympic Assn. during the Montreal Games.

Quebec City already has many of the roads and venues Montreal had to build at great expense. Also, Montreal’s Olympic village cost an unexpected $90 million after federal funds organizers had counted on failed to materialize. The village in Quebec City would be built in cooperation with Laval University on the campus and would become dormitories.

Another reason Quebec 2002 officials say they can avoid the financial traps that ensnared Montreal is the smaller scale of the Winter Games. In addition, nine of 11 competition sites already exist in and around Quebec City, and the farthest is an hour away from the proposed Olympic village. Multilane highways can carry traffic around the region and to the airport, which is 20 minutes from downtown.

Perhaps most important, Quebec City has Montreal as an example of what to do artistically and what not to do financially.

The Montreal Games were a triumph athletically, thanks at least in part to Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci and her perfect 10s. Quebec 2002 officials say their experience in staging more than 75 international winter sports competitions will help them match Montreal’s festive spirit, and careful financial planning will produce a profit of $20 million (in U.S. dollars) on a total budget of $550 million U.S.

The Calgary Games, also held in the winter, had a surplus of $125 million.

“Montreal is old history, and Calgary is more recent,” Pound said. “The myth of the Montreal disaster is one that has been created largely in [the media]. In looking at the numbers, nobody separated the Olympic budget from the infrastructure budget. They think everything was built for a two-week event, but the roads are still being used and the stadium is still being used.”

But the Montreal Games’ bad economic taste lingers.

“I don’t think in the economic situation that we live in, we can afford to take the risk for the Games,” said Andree Boucher, mayor of Ste. Foy, second-largest of the three municipalities that comprise the Urban Community of Quebec. “It is not essential. It is an accessory.”

Boucher circulated a petition that opposed a tax increase to fund the Games and sent it to IOC headquarters in Switzerland. She says she collected 40,000 signatures, an impressive number in a metropolitan area of about 500,000.

According to Paquet of Quebec 2002, however, two-thirds of the general financing would come from corporate backing, TV rights, sponsorship programs, marketing and sales of tickets. The remaining third would come from guaranteed contributions from the city of Quebec, the province and the Canadian government. The province also agreed to honor the federal government’s obligations should Quebec carry out its long-discussed threats to secede from Canada.

A referendum on secession was postponed this spring and rescheduled for autumn after polls showed sentiment running 55-60% against separation. When some of the 60 IOC members who have toured Quebec City asked Paquet about Quebec’s future, he told them secession is unlikely. “We have two national sports in Canada: hockey and talking about the constitution,” he said.

Quebec 2002 has devoted 20% of its budget to infrastructure, compared with 60% of Montreal’s budget. Two ski jumps and the bobsled and luge courses must be built, at a cost of about $29 million. The site for all three events is Mont Hibou, which is within the Stoneham Ski Resort. The resort would also be the site of Nordic combined events and the men’s and women’s combined slalom ski events.

Stoneham’s proximity to Quebec City is a selling point for Quebec 2002. Its backers emphasize that Sion, Switzerland, proposes using bobsled and luge tracks in St. Moritz, 90 minutes away by air.

“We have a major winter sports area that’s near an area of 500,000 people and is 20 minutes from downtown,” said Marc Blondeau, Stoneham’s owner. “Nobody else can say that.”

The men’s and women’s downhill, combined downhill and super-G events would be at Cap Maillard, one of three peaks making up Le Massif de la Petite-Riviere Saint-Francois. It’s the most distant venue, 60 miles away.

Much work must be done there, including the addition of 100 meters to the top of the men’s downhill course.

Another major project is renovation of the Pavilion de Jeunesse in Quebec City’s Exhibition Park. The site of short-track speed skating and figure skating, it’s now an exhibition hall but has refrigeration systems in place beneath the floor. It must be expanded to seat 9,000 and an adjacent practice rink must be built. About $13 million has been budgeted for that work.

Women’s hockey would be played in a 3,000-seat rink on the Laval University campus. The men’s tournament would be at Le Colisee, recently deserted by the NHL’s Quebec Nordiques.

The mountains offer ample snow and skiing into early May. And although sub-zero temperatures and stiff winds off the St. Lawrence River are common during the winter, Quebec 2002 officials say the weather was colder in Lillehammer during the 1994 Games than in Quebec City during the same period. Besides, they’re counting on the city’s hospitality to warm visitors.

“Some of those who have visited came here thinking they would find a village constructed of ice and snow,” Paquet said. “They came here and found a wonderful, unique city and an infrastructure that is already in place. . . .

“Will that translate into votes [Friday]? Your guess is as good as mine.”