Montreal Gets 1976 Games

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32296, 14 May 1970, Page 19

Montreal Gets 1976 Games

(N.Z.P.A. -Reuter—Copyright) AMSTERDAM. There was jubilation in Canada, angry reactions from Russia, after it was announced yesterday that Montreal had beaten Moscow on the second ballot to hold the 1976 Olympic Games.

At a meeting of the International Olympic Committee, Montreal got 41 votes, Moscow 28, and one paper was left blank.

Los Angeles, the other city seeking the Games, was eliminated in the first vote. None of the three candidates had an over-all majority in the first ballot Moscow led with 28 votes to 25 from Montreal and 17 for Los Angeles, and Montreal reaped all the advantage from the elimination of Los Angeles. Sixteen of the 17 delegates who had voted for Los Angeles in the first ballot transferred their votes to Montreal in the second ballot, and

(the remaining voter abstained. I Montreal’s success is considered a personal triumph for Mr Jean Drapeau, the Mayor who would not give up. Rejected in his earlier bid for the 1972 Games, which went to Munich, and almost counted out by observers and rivals in the pre-vote speculation this year, Mr Drapeau went to Amsterdam still convinced that he could pull it off.

It was a big disappointment for the Russian representatives, who had been confident the Games would go to Moscow.

Before the voting even started, Tass, the official Soviet news agency, announced in its overseas services that Moscow had been chosen for the Games. A Tass spokesman explained in Moscow that the story had been issued “prematurely by mistake.” In a dispatch from Amsterdam, Tass commented: "There is the impression that some 1.0. C. members were guided when voting not by the principle of expansion and consolidation of the Olympic movement, but proceeded from their personal sympathies and antipathies. “The conclusion may be drawn that there are people in the 1.0. C. who think that the holding of the Olympic Games is the privilege of Western countries only.” Tass added that the decision in favour of Montreal was “contrary to elementary logic and common sense since Moscow had quite clear and irrefutable sporting, economic and political arguments in its favour.”

Denver (United States) was chosen to hold the 1976 Winter Games. Denver received 39 votes, nine more than its nearest challenger, Sion (Switzerland).