The 2022 Winter Olympics may seem like a long way off, but any city that wants to host them enjoys a much shorter time frame in which to act.
The International Olympic Committee is expected to choose a site sometime in 2015, while the bids themselves are due two years earlier. If Denver intends to pursue a bid, it obviously can’t dally forever. So as The Post’s Caitlin Gibbons reported Sunday, Gov. John Hickenlooper and Denver Mayor Michael Hancock have wisely begun testing the waters to see if support exists with the public and business community for bringing the Olympics to Colorado.
We hope it does — at least for taking a serious look at the pros and cons of pursuing a bid. Not that we’ve forgotten the message of 1972, when Colorado voters emphatically rejected a bond issue that would have financed the 1976 Games. We just don’t think that message remains in force today.
As Hancock told The Denver Post, “Denver is a much different city today than it was in 1972.”
And it’s not just Colorado that has changed. The Olympics have as well, with most cities in recent decades expecting the Games to pay much of their own way through sponsorships and a variety of other commercial links. Still, the reality is that local and regional governments rarely get off scot-free.
Vancouver, for example, released a report last year concluding that it “expended $554.3 million in direct support of the 2010 Winter Games: $524.0 million for capital infrastructure and $30.3 million in Games related operational expenditures.” Critics argue that the public subsidy was far greater than that.
But the Vancouver city manager also made the case in the report that the investment was worthwhile because the “capital funding has been dedicated to build new infrastructure and civic facilities or to upgrade our existing capital assets, providing a sustainable legacy for the citizens of Vancouver.”
In addition, a PricewaterhouseCoopers study pegged the boost in British Columbia’s gross domestic product, in part because of the creation of more than 45,000 jobs, at $2 billion to $2.5 billion.
The trick for state and local officials is to make sure public investment goes mainly into infrastructure that was already desired. In Colorado’s case, that could mean improvements along Interstate 70, as the governor suggested. But of course not all Olympics construction — a bobsled/ luge facility comes to mind — meets the state’s long-term needs. So how would those facilities be financed?
Such questions need to be addressed as officials consider whether to go all in for a bid.
Fortunately, this state already boasts a number of first-rate venues for winter sports and would have to construct from scratch a relatively limited number of attractions. But is there the appetite even for that level of expenditure? We suspect the answer lies in part on how much the private sector would contribute.
As mayor of Denver, Hickenlooper was a master of assessing public opinion and building a consensus among private and public officials to work toward ambitious goals. Bagging the Olympics is a larger trophy than any he’s yet pursued, but hardly out of the question. We’d like to see the governor work with Hancock toward that goal.
