Cesare Vaciago, the chief executive officer for the Turin Olympic Organizing Committee, said at a news conference in Vancouver Friday that Vancouver’s budget for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games appeared to be too low. Calling Vancouver’s $518 million (Can.) construction budget “extremely strict” Vaciago said, “even if Vancouver already has many of the structures I found that the Vancouver budget is…a bit too small. They cannot take one dollar away from it”.
In comparison Turin’s venue construction budget was about 1.4 billion (Can.) said officials.
Vaciago’s comments came at the end of a five-day meeting in which the Turin organizing committee shared its experience with Vancouver.
John Furlong, chief executive officer for Vancouver 2010, defended the proposed costs and said the Turin organizers had more venues to build, reports the Associated Press. “We have a lot less to build than they did. When you look at their program, we have a stadium that is built, two major arenas that are built. They had to build a lot more”.
Gilbert Feli, the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) executive director for Olympic Games, told the news conference that it’s not possible to compare the budgets of any two Olympics.
Turin 2006 President Valentino Castellani added that Turin also needed to build three villages, compared with two in Vancouver and nearby Whistler. Turin also had to build a media village, he said, whereas much of the media in Vancouver will be based in a convention centre now being built by the province of British Columbia.
Vancouver 2010 spokesman Chris Brumwell said the 2010 Games operating budget is set at $1.2 billion, but as the result of this week’s meetings, it might be pushed higher.
