Montreal mayor, John Dradeau, famously stated that “the Olympics can no more run a deficit than a man can have a baby”. Despite an original estimate that the games would cost the city C$120m, Montreal was left with a bill of C$1.6bn, more than a 13-fold increase from the original estimate.
Olympic Games offer the host city a rare opportunity to show off on the global stage, financially, athletically, artistically, and politically. Spurred by the overwhelming success of the city’s World Fair in 1967 and their new major league baseball team’s triumph against the St Louis Cardinals two years later, Montreal sought another global sporting title: host of the XXI Olympiad. In 1970, Montreal won the 69th International Olympic Committee bid to host the 1976 Olympic Games, winning out over Moscow and Los Angeles. Montreal thus secured the opportunity to appear on the global stage as a North American financial hub with as much sophistication and culture as Europe.
The games were sold to the Montreal public as an inexpensive project from which the benefits would by far outweigh the drawbacks. Indeed, the estimated cost of C$120m seemed a generally modest amount for the alluring financial benefits the games offered. However, following the tragedy at the Munich games four years prior, Montreal increased security measures to a previously unprecedented level. At a grand total of C$100m, security for the 1976 Olympic games already took up over 80 per cent of the original estimate. With C$70m set aside in the original estimate for the stadium alone, the games started to seem more like a financial burden than the thing that would launch up-and-coming Montreal onto the global stage as a major player.
With 22 African countries boycotting the games, dozens of East German athletes accused of participating in a state-run doping campaign, and an abysmal performance by Canadian athletes, the ensuing political and economic disaster in Montreal wasn’t shocking. During the games, these misfortunes were overshadowed by performances from athletes such media star and decathlon gold medallist, Bruce Jenner, Vasily Alekseyev who set an Olympic record lifting 440kg in the snatch, and, the unquestioned individual start of the games, 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci of Romania who earned a perfect 10 on the uneven bars. However, when the athletes and fans returned home, and the excitement of the games wore off, Montreal was left with a bill it would not pay off until 2006, three decades later. Originally called the ‘Big O’, Montreal city-goers are now more likely to refer to the Olympic stadium as the ‘Big Owe’.
This is just a bit of my research proposal that didn’t make the word count. A bit of a teaser trailer for the rest of the paper.