Home Ethics Quebec City says No to Winter Olympics

Quebec City says No to Winter Olympics

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You can add Quebec City to the list of it’s nice to have the Olympics but let someone else host it. Quebec City municipal and business leaders thought about bidding for the 2026 Winter Games but Mayor Regis Lebeaume announced that Quebec City has pulled the plug on the bid before the bidding for the 2026 Games officially began. This time, local residents didn’t vote against funding the Games nor did local politicians see falling public support for the Olympics. Instead Lebeaume had different reasons for the decision. Something about mountains as in the Laurentians not comparing to the Swiss Alps and Switzerland’s rumored bid for the Games.

The official reasons seem to be Switzerland and mountains. You see the head of the international ski and the international hockey federations are from Switzerland and the insiders just might be enough to tip the bid Switzerland’s way because presumably the head of sports organizations who live in a bidding country know how to work the room, the International Olympic Committee’s main room not a side lounge. Quebec City backers thought that was too big an obstacle to overcome and then there is geography. Quebec City and Quebec don’t have the mountains needed for an Olympic event. Quebec City proponents thought about putting part of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York which is not that far from Quebec City but the United States Olympic Committee was uninterested and then there was the thought of having skiing events near Calgary or Vancouver but that was not practical. Left out of the decision was the actual cost of staging an Olympics. The International Olympic Committee had a rough time finding enough cities to bid. Beijing, China got the 2022 Winter Games and more cities could be scared off watching how many things have gone wrong with the upcoming Rio 2016 Summer Olympics.

This article was republished with permission from the original publisher, Evan Weiner

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