Fifty years since the 1976 games
This year will see the 50th anniversary of the Montreal Olympics.
TVA looks back to the construction of the Olympic stadium as a great achievement, with no criticism of the choice of architect or the expense and difficulty of its construction and maintenance. Even Quebec’s takeover of the project from the city (and its tendency, ever since, to keep the city on a short leash) is mentioned without comment.
Le Devoir’s looking at the cultural and sports events planned to celebrate (?) the anniversary. At least Marco Fortier is more forthright about the problems, noting the $870 million being spent on renovations, and dryly adding that the work being done means that no anniversary parties will be held in the stadium itself, because it’s closed till 2028.
The recent news that not a single Quebec‑born player was selected for the Canadian hockey team set for the 2026 Winter Olympics might be making some in Quebec City brood about funding for sports again, although I’m not confident about the CAQ’s ability to organize a pickup game, let alone a province‑wide hockey training strategy.
Kevin 15:13 on 2026-01-03 Permalink
I just read How Big Things Get Done, and it repeatedly cites Montreal’s Olympics as an example of how to guarantee a project will go off the rails. (New tech! New designer! Never-before-seen design! Unexperienced team building design!)
While reading I kept thinking of the Troisieme Lien and how the idea of the biggest tunnel in the world is guaranteed to fail.
bob 17:39 on 2026-01-03 Permalink
We forget what a miracle of wealth redistribution the Big Owe has been. All that money that we paid and continue to pay has to go somewhere. So think of the mandarins and mafiosi and sundry grifters and pols and carpetbaggers who bought new boats, or swimming pools, or brand new Cadillacs. Fifty years later, and it sits empty and unused – and *still generates cash flow*! An economic cornucopia, just not for you.
Ephraim 09:43 on 2026-01-04 Permalink
Kevin – People also seem to forget that the 1976 Olympics followed the 1972 Munich Olympics disaster, which also meant that the costs of security and buildings with high security were also a concern.
But of course, we constantly dismiss the costs of terrorism in our society. We spend billions to avoid terrorism, rather than actually attack the problem at the root and stop it. And allow countries to support it with no sanctions. (Countries like Qatar that serve as safe havens)
Kevin 15:00 on 2026-01-05 Permalink
Ephraim
The security costs were minimal compared to the explosion of the construction budget. The ’76 Games were more than 700% over budget and the tower was only finished 11 years after the games ended.
And we still spend ludicrous amounts of money on this useless stadium because of misplaced pride.
Joey 20:00 on 2026-01-05 Permalink
@Kevin I think it’s more sunk-cost fallacy than misplaced pride (or to save face) – we’ve *already* spent XX billions on this thing, what’s a few hundred million more is just a rounding error and besides, if we don’t pony for more, the investments to date will turn worthless.
Anyway, $870 million today would have been worth about $475 million in 1997, when the Expos were seeking about $250 million for a new stadium downtown. Obviously the province’s finances and the context were different then, but it’s interesting to think that for what we are paying now to extend the life of a terrible stadium that nobody uses (or event wants) that occupies an enormous footprint, we could have built a new park, kept our team around and probably had enough leftover to demolish the Big O (don’t start with the BS demolition estimates the OIB floated to forego an honest discussion about what to do with the stadium). Not to mention the amounts we would have saved in repairs and renovations during the past 20 years.
Ephraim 20:15 on 2026-01-05 Permalink
The construction budget had to include security spaces that didn’t exist in earlier Olympic builds.
GC 10:28 on 2026-01-06 Permalink
Joey, you seem to be suggesting that the Expos baseball team would still exist here if we had just built them a downtown stadium thirty years ago. Do you really believe that?
Joey 14:48 on 2026-01-06 Permalink
@GC I think there’s a decent chance. When the Expos proposed a new park in, I think, 1997, they had already lined up about $60-100M in naming rights and sponsorships from Labatt. It’s reasonable to think that with that revenue and some kind of public investment in a stadium they would’ve found a rich local owner who could have bridged them to the next era in baseball economics, which has been much more focused on TV rights than ticket sales, IIRC. They weren’t a disaster of a team at that point and still had a fan base in Montreal. A new stadium/ownership would have meant (a) more money to field a team, and (b) a signal that better days were ahead. Instead we had a slow death over six or seven years.
So – new stadium + new ownership around the end of the 1990s would’ve been necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) conditions to keep the Expos around. Keep in mind that the assholes at Major League Baseball would not have signed off on any kind of ‘save the Expos’ plan at that time that did not include a significant government contribution.
All this being said, even if it might have made more sense in the long run, there’s no way in hell the Quebec government would’ve spent a dime on a baseball stadium in the late 1990s.
Bill 08:42 on 2026-01-07 Permalink
Go watch the Netflix documentary https://www.netflix.com/title/81748607 the Expos were doomed as soon as Claude Brochu became president.in 1989, and then bought the team in 1991.