Nobody wants to host the Olympics: Calgary balking at 2026 bid is emblematic of wider trend

CALGARY – The sun hangs low in the southern sky on a frigid Thursday in January, shining through the cloud cover, visible just above the peak of the big ski hill at WinSport Canada Olympic Park.

School-age kids on ski day field trips troop toward the lifts that will shuttle them up the slope. By 10 a.m. the big hill is buzzing with activity, but the park, which attracts roughly 1.2 million visitors a year, will be even busier tonight, when kids get out of school and adults finish work.

In an alternate timeline, if local residents had voted to bid for it, the entire city would have been in countdown mode, prepping for the opening ceremonies of the 2026 Winter Olympics.

That gala would have unfolded at McMahon Stadium, which would have received a renovation as part of a $900-million plan to refurbish existing facilities.

Back at WinSport, the slopestyle and courses are already top-tier, and ready to host world-class competition, while an Olympic Games would have meant a sorely needed upgrade to the bobsled track. It was decommissioned in 2019, and bringing it back online could have helped Canada’s proud but cash-strapped bobsled program dodge the cost of hauling athletes and sleds from their base in Calgary to Whistler, B.C., for full-course training runs. Maybe they could have parlayed home-track advantage into a few medals, and extended a streak of Olympic podium finishes that stretched back to 2006.

In real life, it doesn’t matter how those hypotheticals would have panned out. At the west end of Canada Olympic Park, the bobsled track sits derelict, and at the east end the ski jump towers stand abandoned, while the 2026 Games headed to Italy.

It’s not that Calgary bid on the Games and lost out to an Italian proposal. The