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THE CALGARY OLYMPICS: A YEAR TO GO

THE CALGARY OLYMPICS: A YEAR TO GO; Enthusiasm Prevails, but Concerns Remain

THE CALGARY OLYMPICS: A YEAR TO GO; Enthusiasm Prevails, but Concerns Remain
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February 22, 1987, Section 5, Page 1Buy Reprints
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WINNING the right to play host to the Winter Olympic Games required four bids and nearly 30 years on the part of enthusiasts in this oil, grain and cattle city hard by the Rocky Mountains.

A year from now, from Feb 13 to 28, 1988, the prize will be won with the staging of the 15th Olympic Winter Games, which promise to be the most elaborate in the series that began at Chamonix, France, in 1924. The organizers are predicting between 1,500 and 2,000 athletes, a record number of spectators, 1.5 billion television viewers and total costs, including government-financed facilities, of at least $700 million.

For a city hit by an oil slump and its worst recession since the 1940's, the Games will be a financial shot in the arm. To hear Calgarians talk about it, they also offer an opportunity to show the world - and eastern Canada, often accused of lording it over Westerners in national affairs - the talent that is nurtured beyond the Prairies. Cowboy hats and sweaters bearing the five-ringed Olympic symbol have become an affirmation of local pride.

It was not always so. Since the city was awarded the Games in 1981, organizers have been subjected to heavy criticism inside Canada, particularly by Albertans concerned that Olympic crowds would damage the environment in the Rocky Mountain skiing venues, or would leave the city of Calgary, like Montreal, host for the 1976 Summer Olympics, with a crippling debt. Aside from these concerns, there has been a series of management crises and a heavy turnover in top Games personnel.

Now, organizers say, the worst of the concerns are behind them. ''The doomsayers told us it shouldn't be done, it couldn't be done, and it would drive us into bankruptcy,'' Ralph Klein, Calgary's Mayor, said. But the 44-year-old Klein said that barring ''some virtually unimaginable catastrophe,'' the city, which has accepted ultimate responsibility for a profit or loss, expects to come out about even.

''From the outset, our mission has been to hold the best-ever games, and Juan Antonio Samaranch himself has said that we are heading towards that,'' Frank King, chairman of the organizing body, OCO '88 - the name, using French and English, stands for Olympiques Calgary Olympics - told reporters on a telephone hookup from Lausanne, Switzerland, last week. Samaranch is president of the International Olympic Committee.

All the same, there have been some jarring notes. Last fall, shortly after OCO '88 began taking orders for the 1.7 million tickets available for the 127 events, organizers were hit by allegations of a ticket-skimming scandal and were forced to suspend, and later dismiss, the committee's ticketing chief. After an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the dismissed official, James McGregor, was charged with five felony counts of fraud, theft and public mischief. He has pleaded not guilty and will have a preliminary hearing next month.

Reporting to the I.O.C. in Lausanne, King said that an associated problem, the commitment of too many seats to Olympic and government officials, corporate sponsors and television executives, was ''in the process of being resolved'' by cutting back allocations. Although 77 percent of the tickets over all are reserved for public sale, the proportion is barely 50 percent in some of the most popular events, and 43 of these, including medal-round ice hockey, men's speedskating, and some figure-skating, are sold out. For other events, 800,000 tickets remain.

Another worry has been weather. When a parade marking the ''12-month countdown'' wound through downtown streets nine days ago, it did so in on the 72d consecutive day of above-average temperatures, a streak that has reached more than 80 days in the mildest winter since another mounted troop established a fort at Calgary in 1875.

With daytime temperatures in the city reaching as high as 62 degrees, shirtsleeved office workers have been out playing badminton during their lunch breaks near the modernistic City Hall, which serves as OCO '88 headquarters. At two Rocky Mountain skiing venues an hour's drive away, bare patches have poked through Olympic runs. Millions of dollars of new snow-making equipment has been idled when nighttime temperatures have exceeded the equipment's maximum operating temperature of 23 degrees.

At OCO '88, officials have reviewed contingency plans that would include moving tons of snow by truck, as occurred at the 1984 Winter Games at Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, or ''blowing'' it from one spot to another with the aid of specially built ''vacuum cleaners'' that feed into plastic pipes. Calgary officials have been consulted on the possibility of ''stockpiling'' any snow swept from city streets in the weeks before the Games. Alex Cummings, OCO '88's general manager for the Olympic venues, said more exotic means may have to be considered.

''Even if we have to helicopter snow in, we'll do it,'' he said.

Ever since Calgary was awarded the Games in 1981 over competing bids from Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, and Falun, Sweden, there has been a pattern of mild weather. At least four of the seven winters have been unusually warm, and snowfall has been light every year.

Still, OCO '88 officials said their anxieties were more esthetic than operational. ''If I have any concern it would be more about the television panorama than the events themselves,'' said Jerry Joynt, OCO '88's vice president for communications. ''I'm sure everybody would prefer to see a snowy scene.'' He gestured out of the picture window of his City Hall office toward the brown grass of Fort Calgary, the original military encampment, and to bare hillsides beyond.

In any event, OCO '88 officials said that venues have been designed with warm weather in mind. ''It seems that we're weather-proof, at least on the warm side,'' King said in his remarks from Lausanne. He cited the refrigeration and snowmaking equipment that have been installed at every venue that may need them, part of a $370 million capital spending program that benefited the Games, most of it by local, provincial and national governments.

After protests that hurt earlier Calgary bids for the Games - Calgary has been seeking the Winter Games since the late 1950's when it bid on the Squaw Valley Olympics - the backers of the successful 1981 campaign notified the I.O.C. that they would move Alpine skiing events from Lake Louise, a long-established venue in a national park 120 miles from Calgary. The provincial government of Alberta paid $18.5 million to construct an entirely new ski center, Nakiska, at Mount Allan, 60 miles from the city. The center's name is taken from a Cree Indian word meaning ''to meet.''

Nakiska has its critics. To begin with, it lies in the Kananaskis Valley, known for light snowfalls. Then there were those who said that the 11-degree slope at the midpoint of the men's downhill course was too shallow. That complaint faded after an international meeting, the center's first, in December. Several of Canada's Olympic hopefuls reported that the courses were fine. The downhill, with a top speed of about 56 miles per hour, is now being touted as one of the fastest in international racing.

Because of constraints that mild weather has placed on snowmaking, the Nakiska slopes have been showing numerous patches of rock and grass. But there are plans to close the center to the public six weeks before the Games to allow a buildup of the snow base. Watching weekenders skiing in shirtsleeves last week, Mark Grabowski, OCO '88's chief Nakiska representative, was sanguine. ''You won't be seeing any bare spots here next year,'' he said.

Cranmore, a town farther up into the Rockies that will host the Nordic skiing events, has been equipped with snow-making equipment on sections of the cross-country courses not sheltered by trees. A recent round of the cross-country World Cup was completed in 60-degree weather without major complaints. Competitive tests have been equally successful at Canada Olympic Park in the Calgary suburbs, where the national Government funded construction of new 70- and 90-meter ski jumps and a refrigerated course, Canada's first, for the bobsled and luge.

Several events will be guaranteed by being held indoors. Ice hockey and figure-skating will be held at the 19,500-seat Saddledome, completed at a cost of $60 million in 1983 and used by the National Hockey League's Flames. For the first time at a Winter Games, speedskating will move under cover, at the Olympic Oval, a 4,000-seat, $30 million facility at the University of Calgary. The Oval, with a 400-meter track, will be the last of the venues to be completed, probably in May.

The early completion of facilities has cheered officials comparing Calgary's progress with the 1984 Summer Games at Los Angeles, considered as the benchmark of Olympic efficiency. Veterans of the Los Angeles Games have helped their Calgary counterparts on matters as diverse as finance, media relations and co-operation with the I.O.C.. Even though approaches are different -the Los Angeles Games were run as a commercial venture and ended with a profit, and Calgary has relied heavily on government participation - OCO '88 finds comparisons encouraging.

One headache that Calgary may never solve is housing. OCO '88 has blocked out 60 percent of the 13,000 hotel rooms in the ''Bow River corridor'' stretching from Calgary to Banff, 90 miles west. Additional accommodation has been set aside in two athletes' ''villages,'' in Calgary and Cranmore, and for the 4,500 newsmen to be accredited, most of them to be quartered in private homes and apartments.

But 225,000 spectators are expected from outside Calgary, a third of them Americans, and many seem as likely to find last-minute beds as they are to find blue-line seats for the gold medal hockey. There have been reports of companies paying $15,000 to rent private homes in Mount Royal, an exclusive Calgary suburb, for the 16-day duration of the games. King, the OCO '88 chairman, has cited the squeeze in resisting I.O.C. pressures for an increase in the number of accredited newsmen, already much higher than the number in Sarajevo.

Unlike the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, which left Canadian taxpayers with a massive deficit, the Calgary Games are expected to generate a modest ''profit'' of about $35 million. But officials acknowledge that the figures tell only part of the story, since they cover only OCO '88's expected costs of $365 million, ignoring the $377 million in ''stimulative capital projects,'' including key games venues, listed in an economic impact statement prepared by the national Government last year. The bulk of these funds were provided by the various levels of government.

The fact that taxpayers contributed so heavily has contributed to the uproar over the ticketing. OCO '88 spokesmen acknowledged that poor supervision opened the door to the irregularities now before the courts. Charges against McGregor, the former ticketing chief, involve a private company, World Tickets Inc., which is alleged to have mailed ticket application forms to 8,000 American residents that requested payment in United States dollars instead of the Canadian currency in which the tickets are denominated. At the time, the United States dollar was selling at a premium of about 38 per cent against the Canadian note. The American orders have been rerouted and Joynt, the OCO '88 news media chief, said that no would-be spectators have lost money.

Still, some of the backwash from the scandal remains. When it set out to explain McGregor's dismissal in October, OCO '88 revealed that orders from the public for some events had been limited to 50 percent of the seats. Organizers say that limit was precautionary while requirements for sponsors, Olympic officials and others were calculated. A subsequent decision to limit ''nonpublic'' spectators to 23 percent of all seats has calmed some of the furor. But resentments still fester over the large bloc excluded from public sale at events like the gold medal hockey, where 47 percent of Saddledome seats will be reserved for priority clients.

OCO '88 officials called the dispute ''a bump in the road'' and said that if private financial contributions were the determining factor, a higher proportion of seats would be set aside. The largest single chunk of the OCO '88 budget, $240 million, comes from television rights, with an additional $56 million from corporate sponsors, suppliers and licensees. Of the television budget, more than 90 percent comes from OCO '88's share of the $309 million paid by ABC, which outbid rival networks for exclusive United States rights to as much as 180 hours of live broadcasting.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 5, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: THE CALGARY OLYMPICS: A YEAR TO GO; Enthusiasm Prevails, but Concerns Remain. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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