With the 1976 games only months away, ITN’s Michael Brunson was dispatched to Montreal, where a flight over the Olympic Stadium revealed huge gaps between sections of the building.
170 days before the beginning of the Olympics in Montreal, in January 1976, there was serious concern that the slow progress of Canadian preparations meant the start of the games would have to be delayed, writes Ian Searcey.
ITN sent Michael Brunson to a very snowy Quebec to report from the building site that was the Olympic Stadium. The mayor, Jean Drapeau, had confidently predicted that “the Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby”.
Quebec’s mayor, Jean Drapeau, had confidentaly predicted that ‘the Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby.
But the provincial government in Quebec had already been forced to take over responsibility for construction in late 1975, when it was clear the project was embarrassingly behind schedule.
With the press actively discouraged from visiting the site, there were rumours that the IOC had been warned the stadium would not be totally finished by the time of the opening ceremony – although how incomplete was still unknown.
Denied the chance to go inside the stadium, ITN managed to get a helicopter aloft to observe the construction work. Brunson outlines the details that have been made available to him, namely that the planned press centre would not be built and that athletes might have to change in prefabricated changing rooms rather than the ones originally intended inside the completed project.
Strikes and go-slows by workers were a factor in the delays, but there were also problems with the innovative design of “The Big O” by French architect Roger Tallibert. The ITN cameras show one of the serious “misalignments” (a huge gap to you and me) found by engineers when they came to join sections of the doughnut-shaped structure.
In the end, although the games were opened successfully by Queen Elizabeth II in July and passed off without major incident.
But the Olympic legacy was a poor one for Montreal. The city faced 30 years of debt after the games finished. The stadium became known as “The Big Owe”, and its astronomical costs were only finally paid in full in December 2006.