Do you really believe everything you read when you parrot all these claims about venues being built on time and on budget? Do you know that the Auditor-General of Canada has ‘certified’ that every CANDU nuclear generating project built by AECL has been completed “on time and on budget”. If you know that industry, you can only conclude that if you follow the accepted procedures in the accounting and project management fields, you can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse!

Jette:
“academic experts who study mega-sports events in a dispassionate scientific fashion”.

I’d say good luck with finding academic experts who study and report anything in a dispassionate scientific fashion.

Comparing Vancouver with Montréal is obviously ridiculous, comparing it with Athens is also ridiculous, as it is with many others. Calgary comes close but they didn’t get a train from the city to the airport, which is immediately busy after the Games and the Sea to Sky highway to Whistler has had no complainers either. The security costs were incredibly high but most of that was paid by the federal government and 40% of what went to individual police and military staff will come back to them as income taxes.

Szymanski is based in London and with their projections of costs from $14 – 20 billion it is simply not comparable and that is what Szymanski is contemplating and anticipating.

Vancouver’s venues and infrastructure were built on-time and on-budget, another weird first perhaps. VANOC may well go down in history as the one to attempt to emulate – except, of course, by the tiny group of Negative-About-Everything ‘Naesayers’ that haunt a few crannies of BC.

I could go on but for those ideologues that have drunk the bathwater I’d be wasting my energy.

You might want to check out Clara Hughes. She was a troubled child that was into drugs and alcohol and, on seeing the Calgary Olympics, decided to change her life. Clara is from Winnipeg and she is is one of only five people who have won medals in both the Summer and Winter Games, and is the only person ever to have won multiple medals in both.

She keeps donating thousands of dollars (from the corporate nasties) that she wins to programmes for children and youth.

Much more inspiring and encouraging than the negative complaining from the anti-horde that keep going on about Vancouver Olympic costs, as though a transit system to the airport, an improved highway, a new and fully booked new convention centre and multiple community sports and cultural centres were not wanted.