Montreal 1976 Olympics: Financial Disaster
A cautionary tale for all future host cities
Show Me The Money!
Montreal - On July 17, 1976, with Queen Elizabeth, Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau and 73,000 people looking on, the Greek athletes who traditionally led the Parade of Nations came up the ramp toward the Olympic stadium to find their way almost blocked by construction workers.
The 1976 Montreal Olympics, which initially had a $300 million budget, ended up with a staggering $1.5 billion deficit, mainly due to poor planning and corruption. It saddled the Canadian city with a debt that was not paid off until 2006. That is thirty (30) years. To make matters even worse, the Olympic Stadium was not completed on time.
Out of sight of the cameras and the throng inside the stadium, the staff were frantically wielding shovels and brooms to clear away the building debris left from the manic push to complete the facility on time. In the final scrambling months before the Games, 3,000 laborers had worked in teams 24 hours a day to make it possible for the Olympics to begin at all.
They barely succeeded.
Mayor Drapeau, the Labor Unions and “men having babies”
The Olympics were sold to the Montreal public as being modest in design and, above all, inexpensive to stage. The mayor, Jean Drapeau declared: “The Olympics can no more run a deficit than a man can have a baby.”
There is no evidence, however, that either the project architect Roger Taillibert or Mayor Drapeau ever had a handle on the management of the various construction sites. There were delays from the very beginning, and construction on the Olympic Park complex (including the Velodrome and Big O) began 18 months late, on 28 April 1973.
This put Mayor Drapeau right where the powerful and militant Quebec labour unions (the Quebec Federation of Labour and the Confederation of National Trade Unions) wanted him: paying extravagant overtime bills.
Inflation Nation
From the beginning, oversight was utterly inadequate on every aspect of the project. During the inflationary 1970s, the price of structural steel alone tripled. In 1973, contractor Regis Trudeau, who had been awarded $6.9m in Olympic construction contracts, built a luxurious chalet costing $163,000 ($900,894 in today’s currency) for Gerard Niding, who was Drapeau’s right-hand man and head of Montreal city council’s powerful executive committee. Only when a corruption commission forced his hand, five years later, did Trudeau finally produce a bill charging Niding for the house.
Drapeau himself was never charged or even suspected of personal corruption, but his remark about men having babies came back to haunt him.
Decades later Tailllibert would be interviewed and quoted as saying: “The construction of the Olympic Park and stadium showed me a level of organized corruption, theft, mediocrity, sabotage and indifference that I had never witnessed before and have never witnessed since. The system failed completely and every civil engineering firm involved knew they could just open this veritable cash register and serve themselves.”
Montreal would become a cautionary tale for other cities bidding to host future Olympic games.
An (Imperfect) 10
For all the financial and political problems the 1976 Games were well organized and featured a number of memorable moments. These included Romania's Nadia Comaneci becoming the first gymnast to score a perfect 10. She ended the Olympics with three gold medals, one silver and a bronze.
The glow began to fade with the closing ceremonies on 1 August. The final tally of the cost for the Olympics was $1.6bn ($5,489,138.84 in today’s currency), a more than 13-fold increase, including at least $1.1bn for the stadium alone.
A Silver Lining
Because Montreal was such a financial bust no other cities even wanted the games heading into the 1984 Olympics. Except Los Angeles.
The sole candidate to stage the 1984 Olympic Summer Games, Los Angeles was confirmed as the host city at the 80th IOC Session on 18 May 1978. Los Angeles would be the first city to host the Games without any state funding, since the first games in 1896. The Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee (LAOOC), under the direction of Peter Ueberroth was therefore induced to make use of existing facilities and secure financial support from the private sector.
In the end as a result of these new ground rules, the 1984 Games would generate a profit of $223 million, setting a positive example and benchmark for all future Games.
I am enjoying your posts. The 1976 Olympics were the first ones I watched. (Still remember the commercials too.)