One hundred million is a big number. Oh, it’s not as big as one billion or one trillion or one bazillion but it’s definitely bigger than eleven million or twenty-five million or, for that matter, ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven other numbers.
One hundred million looks a lot bigger when you write it out in numerals. 100,000,000. See what I mean? Add a dollar sign to it and it looks even bigger: $100,000,000. How would you like to open your bank statement and see that as your account balance? How about your Visa bill? Obviously the former would make you a lot happier than the latter.
You could do a lot of things with one hundred million dollars. Hell, you could do just about anything you could think of with one hundred million dollars. You could buy every home advertised on the back page of Pique and still have enough dough left over to buy the most outlandishly over-priced furniture you could find to fill each one… and still have more left over than you’ve ever really dreamed of having to start with.
You could invite all your friends to dinner at La Rúa every night for a year, pay Mario to keep the rest of the riff-raff out so you could have the place to yourselves, drink the best wine he has in his cellar, fill the finger bowls with Dom, light cigars with thousand dollar bills and at the end of the year you’d still have almost one hundred million dollars left because you’d have barely spent more than the interest you’d made on it if you invested it in Government of Canada bonds.
You could buy 333 average Canadian homes. Which would raise serious questions about your sanity since you’d be the only hundred millionaire buying average Canadian homes.
Since you’d want to live on the Left Coast, you could buy 192 average Vancouver homes… or the most expensive home available in British Columbia, which would be more in keeping with your profligate lifestlye.
You could buy almost 400 Whistler Housing Authority houses, which you might have to if they keep going up in price to the point where the people on the wait list can’t afford to buy them.
If you were burdened with a monk’s distrust of wealth and a heart of gold, you could keep one of those starving orphans – the ones that only cost $20 a day to feed, clothe and shelter – alive for 13,698 years. Of course, it would make more sense to keep 13,698 of them alive for one year, although that would seem a bit cruel when the anniversary date rolls around.
Or, if you couldn’t think of anything really worth doing with one hundred million dollars, you could build Whistler’s Olympic™ Sliding Centre.
Oh dear, I’m sorry. It appears I’ve overstated the case. If you built the Olympic™ Sliding Centre you’d have one hundred large left over, ironically, more or less the cost of a bobsleigh.
According to the latest Real World Budget, Whistler’s Olympic™ Sliding Centre – White Elephant for short – is going to cost $99,900,000 to build, not the $55,000,000 estimated using the official IOC-Sanctioned, Sleight-of-Hand, Lie to the Public and Politicians, Budgetary Guidelines.
Since VANOC is obviously a betting kind of agency – betting the public will continue to fall for the same gag right up to, and most likely long after, the 2010 Olympics™ – I’d be willing to bet them the leftover hundred grand that the final numbers for the White Elephant top the one hundred million mark their beancounters laboured so obviously to avoid. Whaddya say, John?
Just to give you some kind of perspective on what a hosing we’re – the collective, tax-paying, Canadian we – taking on this White Elephant, it only cost $11,000,000 to build the Calgary Sliding Centre for the 1988 Olympics™. So here we are, 22 years older and wiser, and it’s costing nine times as much to build a White Elephant as it did back in the day.
Twenty-two years ago I was beavering away at a large Canadian financial institution. I was making around sixty grand a year loaning your money to someone else and trying my hardest to get it back… with interest. According to Olympic™ Math, if I was still there, I’d be making $540,000 a year and livin’ large.
I didn’t have a chance to call any of my old colleagues at the bank to ask them if they were pullin’ down half a million a year, seeing as how I’m sitting in a marina in Syracusa, Sicily wondering why, in a world so small I could have traveled 3,000 nautical miles by boat and accidentally pulled into a slip next to former Whistleratic Matthew Cote – he of the 19-Mile Creek Affordable Skid WHA project – it costs so much to make a satellite phone call, but I’m pretty sure none of them are. Of course, none of them are members of the Olympic™ Family.
Olympic™ Math is just like that. The 2002 Salt Lake Sliding Centre cost $25,000,000 to build. Those were American dollars, naturally, and they may or may not have factored in the Sliding Centre’s share of the bribe money paid to the IOC to win the Games™ bid. Since the Canadian dollar’s been on a tear against the US dollar, let’s be generous and say the Salt Lake facility cost $33 million Canadian. That’s still a tripling of cost in eight years. Any of you making three times what you made in 2002… or have any real prospects of making three times more by 2010? I didn’t think so.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting any hanky-panky. I’m not saying there’s any wrongdoing behind the inexplicable rise in cost of Olympic™ facilities. I’m not suggesting the New Improved Graft-Free IOC has simply gone from taking outright bribes to taking construction kickbacks or anything like that.
What I am saying is, this White Elephant is an abomination. It’s an embarrassment. It’s a socially unconscionable waste of money. And it’s the antithesis of any tortured meanings of the words "green" or "sustainable" when used in close proximity to the words Olympic™ Games.
For $100,000,000 we get a scar on the side of Blackcomb Mountain some future council will have to dig into their pocket to dismantle. We get an unnecessary training centre for a handful of "athletes" indulging their dreams of personal glory in the fringest of "sports". We get a further excuse for the perpetuation of the institutions and people who make their living administering – read seeking funding for – those sports.
But oh, baby, for two weeks in 2010 the glazed eyes of the sports-watching world will be fixed on Whistler. You can’t buy PR like that.
Well, you can. You just have to sell your principles, your soul and, quite possibly, your future to get it.
