Should Vancouver win the bid for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, $268-million would be spent on new sports facilities and another $75-million to upgrade existing venues.
But more money would have to be allocated to improve transportation routes and to construct a showcase trade and convention centre on the Vancouver waterfront.
Two Olympic Villages would be constructed near downtown Vancouver and Whistler within 40 minutes from their competition venues and both would house about 4,500 athletes.
There are existing venues for the opening and closing ceremonies, medals ceremonies, (to be held at the 55,000-seat B.C. Place in downtown Vancouver), a nightly cultural festival, ice hockey, figure skating, alpine, snowboarding and freestyle events.
New venues are proposed for curling, speed skating, Nordic events, bobsleigh, skeleton and luge.
All the sites have been selected based on their proximity to the Athletes’ Village and access to public transport.
More than 20,000 hotel rooms are located within 20 minutes of the city centres and Athletes’ Villages.
Twenty ferries would be used to transport people from Vancouver to Squamish at a cost of $20 million (U.S.). They would then ride trains or buses to Whistler. A new light rail line to connect downtown with the Vancouver Airport could cost $1.2 billion (U.S.).
The biggest cost for new venues would be nearly $100-million to develop sites in the Whistler area north of Vancouver for biathlon, ski jumping and cross-country skiing. Another $60-million would be spent for a speed-skating oval on the campus of Simon Fraser University in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby.
A $30-million hockey area would be located at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver that would be used as a secondary sheet of ice. But financing for the rink would be a joint venture with private investors.
And $96 million would be spent for cross-country, ski jumping and bobsled facilities at Whistler.
John Furlong, president and chief executive of the bid said, “there are eight countries bidding and it’s hard to know how it will shake down. The roots for the bid are deep and well supported”.
He added that the bid was made public because he hopes it will encourage Canadians to get behind the push to bring the Olympics and the Winter Paralympic Games to British Columbia.
According to the Toronto Star, bid spokesman Sam Corea said he doesn’t know but that Berne and Salburg’s bid budgets might be so much lower because Vancouver is paying for a lot of different studies on the impact of the Games. “It may be that other agencies outside the bid are paying for those things” in Austria and Switzerland, he said.
