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The Olympics are just nine days away. It took seven years of planning and preparation to get ready for 17 days in February, then the Paralympics to follow. But people involved with the Games are hoping the Olympic glow will last a lot longer than just a few weeks. Their rosiest projection: A flawless Games will bring in an extra 4 million visitors to British Columbia over the span of two decades. Jason Margolis has more. Download MP3 (Photo credit: © VANOC/COVAN)

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MARCO WERMAN: The Vancouver Winter Olympics are just nine days away. Opening ceremonies are scheduled for February 12th.  Many world leaders will attend.  Vice President Joe Biden will head the U.S. Delegation that day.  Vancouver’s time in the Olympic spotlight will last 17 days. But organizers hope the Games will help attract tourists to Vancouver and British Columbia for much longer.  It’s a hope that’s become a reality, at least for some past Olympic hosts, as The World’s Jason Margolis tells us.

JASON MARGOLIS: Fifty years ago, few people had heard of Squaw Valley.  At the time, the infant ski resort near Lake Tahoe, California had just one chairlift. Then, Squaw Valley hosted the 1960 Winter Olympics.  A half century later, the Olympic rings and Olympic flame still greet visitors at the entrance, says Squaw Valley’s Amelia Richmond.

AMELIA RICHMOND: The 1960 Olympics is deeply engrained in our heritage, in our publicity, in our marketing, and I think in the feeling you get when you come here and you’re part of something bigger. So I think it’s something that we’ll always benefit from and it’s always going to be a big part of us.

MARGOLIS: Hosting the Olympics helped transform the tiny resort into a world renowned ski destination, growing from one chairlift to 33. Squaw Valley benefited from the so-called post-Olympic “halo effects.”

JAMES BRANDER: The halo effects consist of things like increased tourism, increased investments.

MARGOLIS: Economist James Brander at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business says catching that halo is what enticed British Columbia’s leaders to bid for the Olympics in the first place.

BRANDER: You know, we get on the world stage, people are going to see the city, they’re going to see it’s great.  At the very minimum we’re going to get a lot of free advertising.

MARGOLIS: But here’s the catch with this Winter Olympics. Vancouver and Whistler, the two main venues, are not Squaw Valley in 1960.  Whistler is already considered one of North America’s top ski resorts. And Vancouver regularly tops lists as one of the world’s best cities.  When well known places host the Games, there’s a lot of potential downside. Take a moment and think about the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.  What’s your lasting memory? Many people remember the bombing or the transportation snarls, not the glory of the Games.  Economist Maurice Levi at the University of British Columbia offers this perspective on the upcoming Winter Olympics.

MAURICE LEVI: It’s a bit of a gamble, you know, you’ve got to hope that the Games go better than what people think, that the weather is at least as good as what you’d like, and it’s risky.

MARGOLIS: In the Pacific Northwest, chances of an overcast day with showers during a two-week winter window, 100%.

BRANDER: Of course, you’ve always got other horrible things that can happen like terrorism and so on, but let’s assume that doesn’t happen.

MARGOLIS: The nightmare scenario is Munich 1972.  Athletes were killed.  Munich didn’t get the halo effect. But on the other side of the coin, there’s the Lillehammer Winter Olympics in 1994. Images of the picture-perfect village were broadcast to the world. Many Olympic buffs consider Lillehammer the greatest Winter Games ever. Ove Gjestdal with the Lillehammer Olympia Park says they recently surveyed Europeans about Lillehammer.  Sixteen years after the Games, people not only know about the tiny Norwegian village, most think highly of it, and they visit.

OVE GJESTDAL: The ski jump is the kind of jewel in the city, in the middle of the city and we have about 200,000 visitors there every year.

MARGOLIS: That’s 200,000 people who visit a ski jump.  Nearby towns also continue to benefit from tourism.  Coming back to British Columbia, Mayor Jordan Sturdy of Pemberton, the village just up the road from Whistler, says hosting the Olympics is a gamble worth taking.

MAYOR STURDY: If Whistler is successful, it’s going to generate more employment, it’s going to generate more media attention. You know we have a tourism business, an economy here as well. There’s some of the greatest mountain biking in the world right here in this Valley. We have access to snow mobiling.  I mean, there’s hundreds and hundreds of square kilometers of glacier, right on the other side of that hill there.

MARGOLIS: If the Games go well, research suggests tourism increases for about five years after the Olympics.  Amelia Richmond at Squaw Valley and Ove Gjestdal in Lillehammer say they really have no way of measuring how many people have chosen to visit them because of their Olympic past.   At minimum, though, hosting the Olympics does provide a degree of credibility.  If a mountain was good enough to challenge the world’s best, it’s probably good enough for you and me.  And hey, how cool is it to bomb down the same run that the Olympians once did?  For the World, I’m Jason Margolis, Vancouver, British Columbia

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