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But because the Saddledome is an Olympics legacy, some of its seating can be removed to create a larger, “Olympic-sized” ice surface. This will certainly not be true of the Flames’ future home. The Olympics now allow Olympic hockey to be played on NHL-sized ice, but short-track speed skating, which was only a demonstration sport at the ’88 Games, needs the larger surface so that the competitors don’t kill each other. And in Olympic schedules, short-track speed skating is now sort of married to figure skating, venue-wise—so you need an Olympic surface with enough seating to hold the huge figure-skating crowds.

All this skating activity has elbowed curling aside. Remember curling? That wasn't a thing at the 1988 Olympics either

Calgary, in other words, needs both the Saddledome (with $10 million in upgrades) and the Future Flames Barn to make a Winter Olympics happen. And it gets even funnier. Although the Calgary Stampede has been preparing to knock down the musty old 6,500-seat Stampede Corral to make room for more conference and exhibition space, the Corral, and not the Saddledome, is actually envisioned in the 2026 plan as the city’s secondary hockey venue. Other local rinks don’t have enough seating to satisfy the International Olympic Committee, so the Corral, with $19 million in upgrades, is still needed. It would, the plan notes, “be demolished soon after the Games.” An anti-legacy!

Eventually you remember that all of this skating activity kind of elbows aside curling—remember curling? That wasn’t a thing at the 1988 Olympics either. The bid committee’s proposal is to stick the curling into a yet-to-be-funded-let-alone-built new fieldhouse at Foothills Athletic Park; this is a temporary repurposing of a building that doesn’t exist even as a drawing yet. But other legacy buildings, like the Oval and the WinSport bobsled track, are ready to rock! Except, er, the Oval kinda needs about $50 million worth of work, including a new ice plant, and the sled track needs $20 million on top of the $20 million Calgary is investing in it already…

I could go on, and the bid committee’s plan does. Read long enough, and you begin to regard the whole thing as a sort of admirable triumph. Not of planning or logistics: there is too much imagination and presumption for that. Mostly it is a triumph of interpreting and negotiating ever-evolving “Olympic standards.” When you add these up, and factor in all the new sports added to the Olympic diet since 1988, it is almost as if Calgary—from an infrastructure standpoint—never had a Winter Olympics at all.

National Post