VANCOUVER, British Columbia, 5 July 2003 — Still giddy over its selection to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, Vancouver faced the seven-year task on Thursday of fulfilling its expensive promises.
The western Canadian city must build several Olympic facilities and begin a massive upgrade of a major highway, but an academic expert on Olympic Games said most residents do not realize how much their community will be changed by the event.
“I think the main folks (in the bid) have a rough idea of what’s ahead, but the average person in the community knows nothing,” said Kevin Wamsley, director of the University of Western Ontario’s Center for Olympic Studies.
“It changes the whole future of the city, everything. Not just the next seven years but the way the city is going to market itself and exist as an entity over the next 20, 30 years,” Wamsley said.
Vancouver’s narrow victory on Wednesday over rivals Pyeongchang, South Korea, and Salzburg, Austria, brought cheers and a surge of Olympic fever to the Pacific coast city. The selection of its C$2 billion ($1.5 billion) Olympic bid was still the main topic of conversation a day later, with one newspaper headline reading: “It feels good, doesn’t it.”
The “Sea to Sky Games” proposal calls for holding ice events in the sea-level city, with skiing and other snow-based competitions in the surrounding mountains and at the resort community of Whistler, about 125 km (78 miles) north.
Venues for some events, such as hockey and the opening and closing ceremonies, are already in place, but others need to be constructed, including facilities for housing athletes. The federal and provincial governments have also promised to expand Vancouver’s convention center.
The province will spend C$600 million to upgrade the only highway between the city and Whistler. The project is designed to make the winding road safer and faster, but it will require blasting at least one tunnel through the mountains and will take six years to complete.
A rapid transit line is also proposed between the airport and downtown, but Ottawa and British Columbia are still haggling over how to fund the estimated C$1.7 billion project.
Prime Minister Jean Chretien has opposed local demands that Ottawa pay C$450 million. “You cannot relate that to the Games, it was outside the Games envelope,” he said in Prague where he helped lobby the International Olympic Committee.
Local officials maintain the spending on transportation and the convention center was needed regardless of the Games, which was why they were not included in the C$2 billion price tag.
Wamsley warned that most residents do not yet realize how much time and energy local officials will now have to put into preparing for the Olympics.
