(ATR) The Calgary 2026 Olympic bid is officially dead.
The 15-person Calgary City Council voted unanimously to kill the effort on Monday and wind up the Calgary 2026 bid corporation.
The vote follows on the results of last week’s non-binding plebiscite where 56.4 percent of voters went against hosting the 2026 Winter Games. About 43.6 percent were in favor of the pursuing the bid.
The Council voted 8-7 in favor of a motion seeking to end the bid late last month, two votes short of the two-thirds majority needed. Some of those who voted to keep the bid alive then said they did so only to allow Calgarians to have their say in the plebiscite.
Calgary is the fourth 2026 bid to have failed to win a public vote on the Olympics. A bid from Innsbruck, Austria was torpedoed in a referendum last October. The 2026 bid cycle has also featured bids from Graubünden and Sion in Switzerland being ended by voters in referendums.
The last successful Olympic referendum came in 2013 when Oslo voters backed a 2022 Winter Games bid. However, the country dropped the bid midway through the process.
Vancouver 2010 passed a public referendum during its bid process, before winning the right to host the Olympics at the 2003 IOC Session.
The remaining two bidders for 2026, Milan-Cortina d'Ampezzo and Stockholm, do not face a public vote but both have had issues in gaining full government support.
On November 8, the IOC gave its approval for the joint Milan-Cortina bid to move forward without financial support from the Italian federal government, saying the current financial support from the regional governments involved in the bid was enough. A week later the Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said the federal government would "make the final push" to pay any remaining costs not already covered by other means. The announcement signaled an about face for the Rome government from the month before.
A new center-right government in the city of Stockholm has said it opposes the Olympic project, although Stockholm 2026 says it intends to convince them of the merits of the bid.
Written by Gerard Farek
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