Let me add a few things to what Mnemosyne said about the “Big Owe”, aka the Montreal Olympic stadium. It was used for baseball from 1977 till whenever the Expos decamped, maybe 2004. It was a terrible venue for baseball. All the seats were a zillion miles from the field. It was, in anything worse for football and now the CFL Allouettes play nearly all their games at McGill’s Molson stadium, which has sold out every game since they moved there.
The retractible roof did work for a couple years, then became too fragile to retract and they replaced it with a fixed roof. But the whole thing was a financial disaster. They paid off the $2 billion or so over 30 years and for 30 years nearly all maintenance was deferred. Over the last three years, they have been trying to catch up, but it will take a long time before maintenance is caught up. Say fifty years from 1976. The stadium is used so little and is in such bad shape that they really ought to dynamite it to save on operating costs.
The velodrome was turned into an extemely successful biodome with, I think three different habitats and flora and, to a limited extent, fauna, to match. There is a tropical rain forest, featuring a sloth if you can find it high up in a tree, an arctic environment featuring penguins, and a temperate environment, essentially the local climate. That is an asset.
Then there is the Olympic village. It was designed by an architect from Nice and, while it worked well enough during the games, does not work well as an apartment complex. All outdoor walkways to get to the elevators, for example. This is totally unsatisfactory for Montreal’s winter. I guess architects from Nice don’t understand. The same guy, Roger Taillebert, designed the retractible roof on the stadium and that was pretty much a disaster.
Anyone wanting to host these games needs a brain transplant. One of my favorite pols, the late Nick Auf der Mauer, said it best: “We paid for a giant party and none of us were invited.”