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Montréal Photo Gallery - 1976 Olympic Facilities

Montreal beat out Los Angeles and Moscow to host the Olympics in 1976. The games had costed 13x the $120 million original estimate, especially with an expensive stadium, leaving the city in a massive debt that took 30 years to pay off. The inclined tower for the stadium was space-age at the time, the tallest such structure in the world to hold up a retractable roof. However, strikes, spiralling steel costs, and a corruption scandal mired construction. With terrorism at the Munich games, security had to be beefed up as well.

The huge tower became a symbol of what went wrong ith the games. It caught fire and chunks fell off since the games, but tearing it down would have been extremely costly as well.

Curious about this mammoth white elephant stadium, I went up the tower for a view of the city.

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