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<\/p>\nFifty years ago this summer, Montreal marked one of its biggest milestones on the world stage, hosting the 21st Olympiad \u2014 the country\u2019s first Olympic Games.<\/p>\n
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For Bruny Surin, a child at the time who would go on to compete in future Games, July 1976 was significant.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery time I go past Olympic Stadium, I have feelings,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re feelings of greatness and of what\u2019s possible, because of one event in particular that helped motivate him to push for greatness as an Olympian.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only thing I remember from the 1976 Olympics in Montreal is Nadia Comaneci,\u201d he said. \u201cOh, she got a 10! People thought it was impossible and everything. And from that time, for me, that was greatness. She got a 10, so it is possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Romanian 14-year-old became the first gymnast to ever record a perfect 10.<\/p>\n
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Those Games also helped open doors in the city for other kids to become Olympians, like former Olympic diver and now coach David B\u00e9dard, who participated in four Games from 1984 to 1996.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m pretty sure that\u2019s why my mom signed me up,\u201d he told Global News. \u201cShe didn\u2019t know what diving was prior to the [Montreal] Olympics and she saw it and went, \u2018Well, why not try Dave in that?\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
There are fond memories, too, for Montreal Gazette editorial cartoonist Terry Mosher, who works under the pen name Aislin. He documented the city\u2019s response to the Games and the events around them.<\/p>\n
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He said the Montreal Games were \u201chugely significant, because I think that Montreal reached an apex in terms of its possibilities or becoming an international city. But also, because of it, we lost it.\u201d<\/p>\n
He just published a book to mark the 50th anniversary, titled Jean Drapeau\u2019s Baby, a reference to the then-mayor who famously said that \u201cthe Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby\u201d \u2014 words that would come back to haunt him.<\/p>\n
For Mosher and many others, the Games signalled the start of Montreal\u2019s decline as an international city, because of cost overruns, corruption and the Malouf Commission that, years later, led to criminal convictions.<\/p>\n
Mosher argues that all these tarnished the Games\u2019 success.<\/p>\n
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\u201cBecause of it backfiring,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Games were very special for spectators \u2014 all of us. There were no problems with the Games. It was just all the stuff that went into it and came after.\u201d<\/p>\n
He points to the stadium, which took 30 years to pay off at more than $1.5 billion and is still costing taxpayers, as an example.<\/p>\n
Daniel B\u00e9land of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada agrees and notes that the Montreal Games also came at a time when other things were happening in the mid-1970s.<\/p>\n
\u201cMontreal was declining vis-\u00e0-vis Toronto,\u201d he said. \u201cToronto actually, in the mid-\u201970s, became the largest city in Canada ahead of Montreal for the first time. There was a sense of economic decline.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, there was politics \u2014 talk of Quebec separation and the Parti Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois election win that fall discouraged many, particularly anglophones.<\/p>\n
But B\u00e9land also observes that after the success of Expo \u201967 that put Montreal on the world map, it\u2019s the Games that stand as a symbol of failure for many Montrealers, coming at a time when Montreal was thriving.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it hurt the image of Montreal and Quebec more generally in terms of, not the Olympics itself, but the legacy of all this discussion about corruption,\u201d he said. \u201cMontreal became the poster child of what not to do when you organize a major sporting event.\u201d<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s a complicated legacy that Monteralers continue to grapple with.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fifty years ago this summer, Montreal marked one of its biggest milestones on the world stage, hosting the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":531995,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194292],"tags":[208598,49,48,205350,2338,4963],"class_list":{"0":"post-531994","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-montreal","8":"tag-1976-montreal-olympics","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-jean-drapeau","12":"tag-montreal","13":"tag-olympics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=531994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/531995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=531994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=531994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=531994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}