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By almost every metric, Calgary’s grand plan to recapture Olympic glory is a stunningly bad idea.

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For starters, Olympics have become blisteringly expensive since the 1980s.

Calgary’s 1988 Olympics cost $829 million — $1.5 billion in 2017 dollars. Now, the estimate is $4.6 billion. And given the recent history of Olympic cost overruns, that figure is virtually guaranteed to swell by at least 20 per cent.

For context, Calgary’s entire municipal operating budget for 2015 was $3.5 billion. If divided equally among Canadians, $4.6 billion is about $131 apiece— enough to give a free off-season Calgary hotel stay to every man, woman and child in the country.

Photo by Dean Bicknell/Calgary Herald

But one reason for the Olympics’ ballooning cost is that the International Olympic Committee keeps grabbing an ever-increasing share of revenues for itself.

In 1988, Calgary’s organizing committee had to hand over roughly a third of broadcasting revenues to the IOC. Nowadays, the IOC claims more than 70 per cent.

IOC avarice, in fact, appears to have been a major reason behind Norway’s decision to abandon a bid to hold the 2022 Winter Olympics games in Oslo.

A leaked 2014 report to a Norwegian newspaper outlined the obscene requests made by IOC officials, including demanding smiles at their hotels, free booze paid for by the King of Norway and a separate Oslo road system.