Olympics: The Games that Montreal want to forget

By PATRICK SMITH

It takes a while to find John Walker's name in the columns of athletes that make up the "Golden Memorial" outside Montreal's Olympic Stadium.

But, finally, there it is - sandwiched between Cuba's Alberto Juantorena (400m, 800m) and the great Lasse Viren, of Finland (5000m, 10,000m) - "1500m: Walker, John, NZL."

The memorial, a circle of flags fluttering wanly above an unspectacular collection of brass plaques, seems a miserly nod towards the finest achievements of the XXI Olympiad - an after-thought put up a full 10 years after the 1976 Games at which Walker (together with the New Zealand hockey team), brought home gold.

I had expected something more: a hall of fame perhaps, with photos and sporting memorabilia. Maybe even a shot of Walker breaking the tape 0.1s ahead of Belgium's Ivo van Damme. Certainly a pin-up of gymnast Nadia Comaneci.

But Walker himself is not surprised at this half-hearted acknowledgment.

"I would say that it's been a nightmare for the Quebec Government and I think they wish they had never done it [hosted the Games], because they're still paying for it today."

That is true. The futuristic stadium, once proudly hailed as the Big O, has become the Big Owe, damned privately and publicly for its ongoing legacy of debt (the Games had been slated to cost $310 million when Canada won the hosting rights in 1970, but wound up as a $1.5 billion albatross) and as a sporting venue.

Home these days to Montreal's hapless Expos baseball team, the Olympic Stadium was recently described by one local sportswriter as "arguably the coldest, least hospitable venue in North American professional sports."

Walker remembers it with affection, though - but mainly because he won there.

Futurist and high-tech, the "Stade Olympique" was a marvel of early 70s architecture and engineering. But industrial disputes and lack of money meant it did not meet its potential. Its much-vaunted retractable kevlar roof, for example, never really worked and today the stad-ium is permanently covered.

"It could have been awesome, because it was so far ahead of its time. But it all just ended up as a nightmare of financial debt for the city," Walker says.

While he recalls the stadium with a certain amount of affection, Walker has nothing good to say about the Olympic Village, another victim of financial blowout and these days used for pensioner housing.

"The accommodation was diabolical," he remembers. "We had two apartments, 13 to an apartment. No athlete today would put up with accommodation like that."

The Olympic Park is a 20-minute Metro ride from the centre of Montreal and still draws several million people a year to its various attractions. When the Expos are not at the stadium, for instance, the Astroturf diamond can be "unzipped" to make way for trade shows, car expos, rock concerts, even SuperMotocross.

Standing now in the middle of the concrete behemoth under the 55m-high roof and a scoreboard the size of an American football field, it is hard to picture the scene a quarter-century ago: 80,000 people rising in ranks above a red 400m running track and a sparkling oval of natural grass. Now the track is gone, lying somewhere beneath the tiers of seats, and there's not a blade of real grass in sight.

Looming over the stadium and holding up the blue Teflon roof on cables, is the Montreal Tower, a 190m-high icon of the city completed in 1987 and billed as the world's tallest inclined tower.

You can take the cablecar to the top and gaze for kilometres over Montreal, or down on to Olympic Park: the vast Sports Centre with its six pools, gymnasium, badminton and volleyball courts; the Biodome - once the velodrome - an eco-complex; the Botanical Gardens and the Insectarium.

I never did discover the scene of our Olympic hockey triumph.

Walker says he did not enjoy the Montreal Olympics - but he wasn't there to enjoy himself, only to win, "and I had to make sure that I concentrated and did that."

He left before the closing ceremony on August 1 to run in New York, and this turned out to be the other memorable part of his trip.

On his flight from Montreal was Rose Kennedy, mother of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy. She had been at the Olympics and had watched Walker win gold that very day.

"She gave me a two-hour tour around New York in a limousine that night," he says. "So I watched the closing ceremony in the back of Mrs Kennedy's limousine."

Walker has been back to Montreal just once since 1976, but not to the Olympic Stadium. In 1979 he ran an indoor mile against Filbert Bayi. The Kenyan had been among African athletes who boycotted the 76 Games because of our rugby contacts with South Africa.

"I beat him over the mile and no one cared," Walker says matter-of-factly. "The era had passed and the time had passed. It was all over."

So don't go to Montreal looking for traces of past glories. But wouldn't it be nice to think that, somewhere around Sydney in the year 2025, there will be a more suitable memorial to the Olympians of 2000. Nothing much - just a small shrine at Homebush bearing the words "Single Sculls: Waddell, Robert, NZL" ...