The rinks, trails and jumps are ready, but will the weather cooperate?
By Douglas Leighton
ON FEBRUARY 13, 1988, the XV Winter Olympic Games, the first to be held in Canada, will open in Calgary. For 16 days, while athletes, visitors and 1.5 billion television viewers marvel at the feats of the best winter athletes from 60 nations, organizers will be continually casting wary glances at the sky, crossing their fingers and silently praying for winter weather. Contrary to the popular vision of Canada as a land of harsh winters, this corner of the country possesses a fickle mid-winter phenomenon called a chinook. In just a few hours, a chinook's warm wind can turn a carefully groomed downhill ski run into muddy slush.
Given that Calgary's average February snow cover is only 6.8 centimetres to begin with, officials could hardly ignore the potentially disastrous effect of a chinook. Thus much of the massive $1-billion investment -- more than five times the cost at Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, in 1984 and 10 times that of Lake Placid, N.Y., in 1980 -- has been devoted to weatherproofing the games. For the first time in Winter Olympic history, all event sites, from the downhill slopes of Mount Allan to the cross-country ski trails of Canmore, will have a battery of snow-making equipment and vast stockpiles of snow assembled weeks before the games actually begin.
From the start, the Olympic Organizing Committee -- or OCO, for Olympiques Calgary Olympics, as it is universally called -- sought what it calls an Olympic legacy. Seeking to avoid the spectre of municipal debt, taxpayer anguish and corruption like that of the 1976 Montreal Summer Games, it skilfully lined up generous financing and support from Ottawa, the Alberta government and, to a lesser extent, the City of Calgary.
All the sites were built specially for the 1988 games, with two exceptions: McMahon Stadium on the University of Calgary campus and the nearby Foothills Arena. The stadium, the longtime home of the Calgary Stampeders football team, will be used for the opening and closing ceremonies To accommodate these events, $15.7 million was spent on renovations and seating expansion to a temporary capacity of 60,000 for the games, with 38,000 permanent seats to remain. The arena, renamed Father David Bauer Olympic Arena in honour of the coach of Canada's first national hockey team, is the official home of Canada's current national team; it will be used for shorttrack speed skating. This is a demonstration event, along with curling and freestyle skiing, but the legacy for the city is an upgraded hockey arena. It received $2.9 million in renovations.
Perhaps the best example of Olympic legacy is the new enclosed speedskating oval, a five-minute walk from McMahon Stadium. Financed to the tune of $40 million by the federal government, the 26,000-square-metre building is about the size of four soccer fields (220 metres by 90 metres), houses a 400-metre speed-skating track and two hockey rinks, and seats 4,000 spectators. While it has been described as looking like "a great grey slug on the landscape", architect Graham McCourt has softened its profile by covering the roof with sheet metal sections coated with baked white porcelain enamel, similar to material used on the space shuttle. After the Olympics, it will be used for hockey, figure skating and public skating, as well as for track and field, field hockey and other indoor sports that can make use of its artificial turf. Several Olympic speed-skating records are expected to be set on its windless, super-smooth ice surface.
The Olympic Saddledome is already an accepted feature of Calgary's skyline. With a sprawling saddle-shaped concrete roof, it was rushed to completion three years ago for the Calgary Flames hockey team. But the Olympics were the real catalyst for the $97.3 million in funding from three levels of government. For figure skating and hockey, the Saddledome's rink will be expanded to international size and 2,300 seats added for a total capacity of about 19,300.
The biggest surprise for visitors -- and almost 400,000 people have toured it to date -- will be Canada Olympic Park located just off the Trans-Canada Highway on Calgary's western outskirts. Site of the ski jumping, bobsled and luge events, as well as freestyle skiing demonstrations, the park is cut from the northeast-facing bank of the Bow River, which itself cuts into a plateau 200 metres higher than downtown Calgary's 1,050-metre elevation. First developed in 1961 as Paskapoo, a beginners' ski slope, it pioneered snow making in the area. Today the 70- and 90-metre concrete ski-jump towers, dominant and instant landmarks, stand starkly above Calgary Olympic Park's still-gentle slopes that the ski runs share with the refrigerated luge and bobsled course.
Although the ski jumps face northeast to minimize the melting effect of direct sunlight, the gusting chinooks caused two problems during tests last winter: they dissipated the snow from the ramps, and they tended to blow jumpers off course. The solution for the snow was simply to truck more in from the mountains 100 kilometres west in Kananaskis Country. As for the winds, organizers rejected a proposal to build a windbreak, opting instead to gamble on statistics showing that wind conditions would permit jumping from both 90- and 70-metre towers during 67 percent and 88 percent of daylight hours respectively during the 16-day Games.
Construction of the jumps involved a major earth-moving project. To minimize what would have presented an ugly intrusion on the treeless skyline, their height was lowered by excavating a giant landing bowl, creating in the process a huge amphitheatre for 50,000 spectators. (Designing the bowl required some trial and error: on an early test jump, Canadian Horst Bulau proved that the outrun was too short when he overshot the counterslope and flew completely out of the bowl.) Soil and sandstone removed from the ski-jump bowl were hauled up to the top of the neighbouring ski run, adding 15 metres of vertical drop to it.
The weather causes less concern at the sun-shaded luge and bobsled track. Both events are run on the same icy course, with luge, in which racers lie face up on a sled, starting lower on the track than bobsled competitors. The latter reach speeds of up to 150 kilometres an hour. The $18.6-million track includes a giant refrigeration plant that pumps coolant through 80 kilometres of pipe embedded in almost 2,000 metres of zig-zagging ice-encased cement. The plant can produce 1,250 tonnes of ice a day (six times the icemaking capability of the Olympic Saddledome).
But best-laid plans can still go awry. Last winter's record warm spell caused dust from surrounding snow-free hills to sully the ice surface. A complete deicing was required. Despite this, no events were cancelled and about 20,000 training runs were made before season's end. Part of the Olympic budget includes a $30-million trust fund which will be used after the Games to operate Canada Olympic Park as a sports training centre and a tourist stop.
The two remaining venues for Calgary's Winter Olympics are on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains about 100 kilometres west of the city. At the Canmore Nordic Centre, cross-country skiing, the biathlon (in which skiers with rifles race along a crosscountry course, stopping to shoot at targets along the way) and the crosscountry portion of the nordic combined (ski jumping is the other portion) will be held. The $14.4-million centre built by the provincial government, is situated on a forested bench above the town of Canmore just east of Buff National Park. With an elevation of 1,420 metres and sheltered from the wind by Mount Rundle's east wall, the Canmore site is considered chinook proof; nevertheless, snow-making cannons have been installed to cover 10 of the 58 kilometres of groomed trails that loop out through a pine forest from the centre's lodge. They are undulating, demanding trails with intimidating pitches, considered "very tough" by international standards. The site, along with other major Olympic facilities, was tested last winter with a World Cup event and, according to top competitors, passed with flying colours. It is ideal for spectators too. Because of its compact, looping layout and system of trail overpasses, racing action can be viewed clearly from a variety of prospects. Again, it offers a considerable post-Olympic legacy: night skiing on a 2.5-kilometre trail and easy adaptability in summer for hikers and mountain bikers.
The still-controversial site of the downhill ski events remains most vulnerable to the weather. Nakiska, at Mount Allan, was not included in Calgary's bid to the international Olympic Organizing Committee in 1981. The original choice, the Mount Sparrowhawk-Tent Ridge area near Canmore, was subsequently rejected because the slopes were considered dangerously steep and road-building costs would have been excessive. When Mount Allan was proposed, a storm of protest ensued. "Two on a scale of 10" was the initial assessment of former Olympic skier Ken Read. Cited were problems ranging from low snowfall, high winds and poor slopes to disturbance of the winter range of bighorn sheep herds. The provincial government, which had agreed to pay for an Olympic mountain, had already invested $30 million in roads and tourism to promote Mount Allan as the jewel of its $506-million development of Kananaskis Country.
The government won the day. Mount Allan was selected and $25.3 million spent to create an Olympic-standard ski run from the mountain's 256-metre vertical drop. Workers moved tonnes of earth to modify the slopes, installed a $5-million snowmaking system to cover almost all the competition runs, and built lifts (including an extra $3.9-million quadruple chairlift demanded by the international Organizing Committee to carry 2,500 spectators an hour to the slalom courses halfway up the mountain).
Nakiska -- meaning "meeting place" in Cree -- was put to the test last year when nature provided the warmest winter of the century. Throughout the season, Mount Allan's snow cover was substantially less than neighbouring ski areas, including Mount Sparrowhawk. To make matters worse, problems developed with the snowmaking equipment, and ice and wind made the top pitch of the men's downhill run dangerous. In the face of a rising chorus of "I-told-you-sos", and with the help of hundreds of snow-shovelling volunteers and some very timely cold snaps, only one of eight preview events (prerequisites to running Olympic races at the site) was cancelled -- ironically, because the snow-making system put too much snow on part of the course.
The ski slope eventually satisfied Read and competitors at the World Cup. "It's a test worthy of the Olympics -- a gutwrencher closer to Kitzbuhel than the ease of Sarajevo," said the former Olympian. Swiss World Cup ace Peter Mueller declared that, with good snow conditions, Nakiska ranks with the greatest courses in the world. And just to prove that "good snow conditions" could occur naturally, there was a major snowfall just after the last scheduled race!
The bold optimism of Nakiska's proponents notwithstanding, Mount Allan's weather record is not encouraging: it has had almost no snow in February for the past 16 consecutive years.
The weather remains the imponderable. On a final pre-Games visit to Calgary in September, International Ski Federation president Marc Hodler surprised officials by telling them the best way to organize a Winter Olympics is without snow. "It's easier to put snow on the ski slopes than it is to have a lot of snow and have to take it off highways, parking lots, roads and streets."
Climatologists at Future Weather Inc., of Lakefield, Ont., sent predictions in September. Their forecast: a jet-stream blockage now forming over Siberia will pump cold air and above-average snowfalls into Western Canada from October to December. Balmy weather should follow for the Games in February. Olympic Organizing Committee chairman Frank King welcomed the prediction: "If you had asked me to write the ideal forecast, it couldn't have been better than that. That is precisely what we want: a lot of cold well before the Games so you can make all the snow you want. We don't want to make snow during the Games."
Still, many Calgarians will look beyond formal weather projections and tie their hopes to a more traditional prognosis: the 1988 Farmer's Almanac predicts cold weather, snow and just enough chinooks to keep everyone comfortable.
