Hello Tim! Well, depends on who’s doing the bragging. The official office of Tourism Vancouver tends towards ‘selective outcome reporting”, although even Walt Judas, their VP of marketing communications agreed that “hopes for a significant post-Olympics spike in tourism have yet to be realized. There’s been no big Olympic bump. We had certainly wished for higher figures,” as he told our national newspaper, The Globe and Mail one year after the Games here, when the number of overnight international visitors to our province of British Columbia was actually down compared with a similar period for 2009, the year before the Olympics. So yes – tourism stats are still down.

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.