Polls say Calgarians loved it. Canadian politicians want it back. International sports leaders say it was the best ever.
Indeed, the 1988 Winter Olympics were considered so successful in Canada's northern latitudes that its people are still basking in the glow of the Olympic flame more than a year later.Olympic skepticism persists, but Calgary polls charting the popularity of the Winter Olympics show support steadily growing from more than 84 percent in 1983 to nearly unanimous approval in 1988 when the city hosted the games.
One mayoral candidate in this fall's Calgary elections, perhaps recognizing a bandwagon brimming with enthusiasm, has made returning the Winter Games to Calgary a major tenet of his campaign.
International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch, overlord of the world's Olympic movement, dubbed the 1988 Winter Olympics the most successful Winter Games in history.
Finally, even cynical observers acknowledge the city is better off for having hosted the winter sporting world for 16 blustery days in February 1988.
"The benefits are highly overestimated. But what you do get is a heck of a lot more than what you had," said Crosby Cotton, who covered the Games for the Calgary Herald and is now its assistant managing editor.
While enthusiasm for the Games still runs high, spilling over to tourism, business and other economic opportunities that Olympic boosters are quick to point out, the Games were not without heavy baggage.
"The Olympics are a controversy looking for a place to happen," Cotton said in a Deseret News interview.
Foremost among the long list of controversies associated with the Games is the cost of assembling and staging the world's greatest winter sporting event.
Calgary organizers, when they first unveiled their bid for the Games in 1980, said the event would cost some $215 million. Now, however, the Games by some estimates cost $660 million.
Those figures evoke another Cotton quip: "The Olympics are a kingdom that go looking for a country to pay its bill.
"But financially, the Olympics can be worthwhile," he continued. "There's a lot of money for the Olympics out there and there's going to be more and more."
Revenues from the sale of rights to broadcast the 1988 Games on television provided a great deal of the fuel for Calgary's Olympic engine. ABC paid organizers $325 million to air the Games - far more than they originally expected.
Further, much of the funding for Calgary's Games came from the three levels of Government in Canada - federal, provincial and city governments contributed nearly $300 million ($370 million Canadian dollars) for the Games or ancillary uses.
Unlike Utah, Calgary organizers received government support with little opposition from the public, according to pollster Brent Ritchie, of the World Tourism Education and Research Center at the University of Calgary.
"There is a philosophy across the country that each major city is occasionally entitled to government support," he said. Government contributions were essentially volunteered to organizers, he said.
The Canadian federal government contributed $156 million raised from a federal lottery and an Olympic coin program. The Alberta province threw $101 million Calgary's way, money raised from the Heritage Oil and Gas Trust Fund.
Finally, Calgary citizens kicked in $33 million - much of that in the form of a land donation.
Giant infusions of sums of money like that - not huge cost escalations - pushed the price tag for the 1988 Winter Olympics skyward, Cotton reported.
"It's not that costs soared; it's that revenues soared," he said.
Government contributions to the Games and the balance of costs incurred by private sources brought a huge economic return to the state, boosters said.
By the end of dramatic closing ceremonies at Olympic Plaza in Calgary, the Games had brought a $2 billion economic impact to Canada, according to Bill Pratt, President of the Canadian Olympic Association.
"It was damn good stuff," he reported, recalling also that the Games left a surplus of some $36.1 million ($42.5 million Canadian) - money distributed to various endowment funds, interest from which helps support facilities built for the Games.
Cotton, however, disputes Pratt's claims of surplus, pointing to substantial government contributions.
"The only way Calgary could technically declare that it made a profit is if it made money. That did not occur," he said.
On the other hand, Calgary successfully could have hosted the Games without a handout from the Government, Cotton said.
"I really think that they could have done these Games without government support. But since they had it, they weren't going to give it back," he said.
Preparing for the Olympics brought needed job activity in the roughneck town of Calgary in the early '80s when the city was suffering from a slump in oil prices. The job growth filled a void in the construction industry.
"What the Olympics did was keep a lot of major construction companies in business through a very weak period," Cotton said.
Edmonton and Calgary, similarly sized oil towns in the province of Alberta, bottomed out in an early-1980's mini oil crisis. Unemployment in the cities jumped to 12 percent in 1983, according to the Alberta Statistical Review.
But while Edmonton's unemployment lines continued to grow, Calgary's declined as Olympic year neared, the Alberta Statistical Review said. Now, Calgary's unemployment rate stands a full percentage point below Edmonton's.
The Games also catapulted tourism (see related story) in Western Canada to new heights, according to Pratt, and put Calgary on the international business map.
"Calgary used to be a little cow town, and now everyone knows we're a metropolitan city," Pratt said, adding that Calgary and Salt Lake City, bidding for the 1998 Winter Games, have something in common in that respect.
"There's a parallel between us and Salt Lake: Nobody knows how nice Salt Lake is until you get there," he said.
Twenty thousand volunteers from Calgary and other parts of western Canada donned warm clothing to help pull off the 1988 Winter Olympics. The volunteer showing for the Games was perhaps the most rewarding aspect of the Olympics, Pratt said.
Those volunteers still carry with them today - and have distributed to others - a sense of community nurtured by the Games, former Calgary Mayor Ralph Klein told city leaders in Salt Lake City last month.
"The final and most enduring legacy is a new spirit in the community," Klein told the Utah League of Cities and Towns. "It is the new way that Calgarians feel about Calgary."
Other legacies left by the Games include a plethora of Olympic sporting facilities - five ski jumps, bobsled and luge runs, a nordic center, speedskating rink and other facilities .
Additionally, 19,000 fans of the International Hockey League's Calgary Flames sell out the $130 million Saddledome 85 percent of their season. The Saddledome was built to host hockey events for the 1988 Winter Olympics.
While Calgarians speak favorably of the 1988 Winter Olympics, Cotton offers a few cautionary words.
"The local people often get left behind. The corporate sponsors take all the tickets for figure skating, for example. It's something you really have to guard against," he said.
And, in another favorite quip, Cotton said "the Olympics is an ego looking for a place to inflate," cautioning against optimistic do-gooders jumping on the Olympics bandwagon.