By Lori Ewing
MILAN, Feb 5 (Reuters) – Canadian Olympic Committee CEO David Shoemaker says the desire to bring the Olympic Games back to Canada remains strong, suggesting the country could consider throwing its hat in the ring for the 2038 Games if Switzerland’s plan to bid falls through.
The International Olympic Committee said on Wednesday that a Swiss bid could be finalised by 2027 if the local political consultation process is successfully completed by the end of this year.
Should that deadline pass, however, the IOC would open up the bidding to other interested parties.
“If (Switzerland) want to do it, the Games are theirs,” Shoemaker said on Thursday. “But ‘want to do it’ means they have to sign all the commitments and guarantees and come up with the funding to do those Games in 2038.
“We certainly know that we’re a trusted organiser of Games, if those do not materialise, and so 2038 would very much be on the table for us.”
Shoemaker said Calgary, after rejecting a 2026 bid, may now be feeling a sense of what might have been.
The host of the 1988 Winter Olympics had been considered a favourite for the Games that ultimately went to Milano Cortina and officially begin with Friday’s Opening Ceremony.
But Calgary walked away in late 2018 after 56% of voters called for the bid to be abandoned in a city plebiscite.
“Maybe, because we’re in 2026 — these were the very Games that they turned down — perhaps that reaction is one sort of looking across the ocean and saying that could have been ours,” Shoemaker said.
“I haven’t done the science in polling of it, but we’ve certainly heard a lot from Albertans and Calgarians, including the current officials in place in Alberta, that they very much wish they’d had another chance at it.”
Canada, led by the Canadian Olympic Committee and four Host First Nations, also planned a bid for the 2030 Winter Olympics in Vancouver/Whistler, but the British Columbia provincial government in 2022 declined to support it.
Shoemaker said the COC is observing how dispersed Games can work in Milano Cortina, hosts of the most spread-out Winter Olympics ever staged, spanning over 22,000 square kilometres.
“We’re thinking about how that could work in Canada to our advantage, including using facilities in Western Canada and — dare I say it — even Lake Placid (New York),” he said.
“We know from some of the reactions what the benefits are, those are easy to come by, but we can also now see what some of the negative consequences of dispersing people around.”
(Reporting by Lori Ewing, editing by Ed Osmond)
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