The news that Quebec and New York plan to launch a joint bid for a winter Olympic Games in 2014 or 2018 has even surprised Quebec City’s mayor. Mayor Jean-Paul L’Allier says he doubts the bid will work. Quebec City has recently had two failed Olympic bids and he doesn’t have high hopes for this one.
L’Allier said, “I know the Olympic movement very well. I know their organization. I know they’re capable of changes, but I know they’re a very conservative organization”.
He said the joint bid would require major changes to International Olympic Committee (IOC rules.
“At the moment you have to be one city, and you have to concentrate your Games in one city or around the city. What Governor Pataki is proposing is a split”.
But L’Allier says he’d be on board for the bid if he were asked, but wouldn’t spend money on it.
The Quebec government is aware that taxpayers would be concerned about the cost of holding the Olympics because of the experience of the 1976 Montreal Summer Games.
And IOC member Dick Pound said the success of such a bid was “highly unlikely. This thing hasn’t been though out very well”, said Pound.
“It’s obvious that neither side has talked to its respective Olympic committee”.
Pound said there was nothing in the IOC rules to prevent a multinational bid for the Winter Games but he pointed to a number of problems with the proposed New York-Quebec bid.
One of the major problems would a major border-security challenge, according to a Canada Customs official.
Everyone who crossed the border in either direction for the Games would have to report to Canada Customs, said spokesman Dominique McNeely. He said Customs officials might also have to create an entirely new screening process to pre-register Olympic athletes and officials to make frequent crossing during the two-week event.
“I don’t think any existing program right now could deal with this. It definitely poses challenges (but) we could surely meet that challenge”, he said.
Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for Vancouver’s 2010 bid said the possible joint bid was “not relevant to our race”.
Michele Penz of the Vancouver 2010 Bid Corp. said, “dual bids have not yet been approved by the IOC. In fact, all of the bids for the 2010 Winter Games originally had dual names. We had Vancouver-Whistler and we were all told they had to be a single-city bid.
“We have handed in our bid book, we are Canada’s bid for the 2010 Games and we are several steps ahead of the game that this proposed idea of a combined Quebec-New York bid”.
