The five ringed circus - here we go again.

First published on www.crew.org forum January 14th, 2009

It beats me why anyone would want a bar of the Olympic Games but the fact is that over the years cities have fought each other tooth and claw, and invested millions in wooing, smooching, and sometimes bribing the Olympic Committee for the right to hold the games.

Almost always they’ve ended up losing their’s or, more to the point, their citizens’ and sponsoring states’ shirts.

No case is more salutary than that of the City of Montreal who paid the last instalment on their now legendary stadium, The Big O, and other costs of their 1976 Olympic Games, in 2006.
The C$150M stadium had grown into a $900M stadium in the intervening 30 years, had partially burned down, and successive roofs had collapsed under the weight of snow and tempest.

Canadian Broadcasting has a good take on the stadium here:- http://archives.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/topics/1316-7926/

Montreal’s other architectural icon, the revolutionary Habitat games village had, in the same period, been declared decidedly un-habitat-able.

More to the point, had Montreal not had this dreadful Olympic monkey around its civic neck, this splendid city might have avoided much of its now very evident infrastructural dereliction and decay.

So, as all eyes turn towards the next Olympic event - Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Games - is it any surprise to learn that the troublemaking Olympic pixies are up to their old tricks?

A couple of years ago the Vancouver City Council sold a valuable piece of harbourside real estate to Millennium Development Corp (you’d be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at the sound of that name!) who in turn contracted to build a $750m games village.

The idea was that when the Olympic flame fluttered to glorious extinction the condominiumised units would be quickly sold, at vast profit, to an impatient and salivating market.
Ha!

It soon became clear that Millennium, who had borrowed $750m from a New York hedge fund called Fortress Investment Group (more raised eyebrows?), were in the sh*t. Costs were escalating (Hello!) and Fortress was withholding progress payments until the city guaranteed the whole shebang.

It gets very complicated here, not least because the city councillors then decided to advance $100M to the project, forgetting to tell anyone that they were spending their citizens’ hard earned moolah.

As we speak, the project is approaching the $1B mark with some hope still being held that it will be ready to host the winter athletes in January.

What is certain is that (given the recessionary times we live in) the good burghers of Vancouver have been landed with the real estate f*ck-up of the century.

Make that millennium.