This is the second post in the Winter Olympics & Their Environments series edited by Jesse Ritner and M. Blake Butler.
The Olympic Winter Games played out in Calgary in 1988, yet skiing tells a longer story of the contested politics and Olympic memory inscribed as sporting landscapes in the Canadian Rockies. Calgary’s successful bid led to hosting Canada’s first Olympic Winter Games. But it followed three failed bids to host the Olympics in 1964, 1968, and 1972. The saga unfolded over decades and ultimately led to Olympic ski venues in Kananaskis Country on the eastern slopes and in Calgary in 1988. These sites emerged through contestation, public policy, and design at the crossroads of sport and environmental history.
Lake Louise in Banff National Park
Banff is Canada’s premier national park where skiing on Mount Whitehorn is a reminder of early Olympic ambitions. The Lake Louise ski operators cut two new ski runs down the face of Mount Whitehorn in 1962 to 1963, showing off the spectacular hill and potential as a powder perfect venue for the 1968 Olympics. Calgary bid for the 1968 Games and lost to Grenoble by two votes decided by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1964. A Calgary-Banff Olympic bid for the 1972 Games came next but met controversy when conservationists objected to venues proposed within Banff National Park. Letter-writing campaigns and advocacy calls for Canada’s national park protection lobbied as far as the IOC in Switzerland. Amid complex politics and competing pressures in 1966, the IOC gave Sapporo the 1972 Winter Games.1
Meanwhile, National Parks planning aimed to facilitate more tourist services in Lake Louise through the sixties. Ottawa accepted the 1971 Village Lake Louise proposal for an expansive luxury ski resort put forward by Lake Louise Lifts and Imperial Oil. Rebuked at public hearings, the development proposal failed. Sixty percent of formal submissions opposed it while forty percent approved. Media coverage heralded the civic protest against the Village concept. Opponents called for more emphasis on wildlife and protecting the park, indicative of organized park advocates and the emerging environmental movement. Federal parks Minister Jean Chrétien hit the brakes in 1972, and subsequent national park master plans turned toward environmental protection.2
The successful Calgary bid for 1988 proposed Olympic venues located outside the boundary of Banff National Park. It is easy to forget that Nakiska and Canmore were not predestined as sites for Olympic venues. The 1988 Olympic bid book imagined West Bragg Creek as the site for a Nordic skiing venue and Spray Lakes for the Alpine skiing venue on Alberta provincial lands.3
Nakiska in Kananaskis Country
Environmental controversy erupted over site selection for the Olympic Alpine ski venue. Several sites considered included Mount Whitehorn at Lake Louise (again) and various places on the eastern slopes of the Alberta Rockies, such as Mount Sparrowhawk. Issues raised by environmentalists and nature lovers included national park constraints and wildlife impacts; in particular, the Sierra Club was keen to avoid Lake Louise in Banff Park. In 1982, despite concerns about bighorn sheep and grizzly bear populations, and lower snowfalls prone to ice up, Olympic planners chose Mount Allan in the Kananaskis.
The Government of Alberta built the Nakiska ski area on provincial lands an hour’s drive west of Calgary yet east of Banff National Park. Alberta aimed to develop a multi-sport complex and resort destination for all-season tourism. Nakiska prepared with a $5 million snowmaking machine and a “Snowmax” system with a bacteria additive for ice crystallization to enhance snow conditions if needed for Alpine events in 1988.4 (Even Chamonix needed the French army to manage snow in the Alps for the first Winter Olympics in 1924—a January thaw melted the ice rink then a huge snowfall buried the rink and stadium). Today skiers drive south from the TransCanada Highway, past a casino near Mînî Thnî (Morley) on the Stoney Nakoda First Nation lands, to Nakiska’s hotels, golf, and ski resort. Massive flash floods at the resort washed out Kananaskis Country golf course, campgrounds, and trails in 2013, public infrastructure later restored by the Province to renew tourism at this node built for the 1988 Games.
Canmore Nordic Centre in Canmore
Site selection for the Nordic venue concentrated on snow conditions and avoiding yet more public controversy. Snow at West Bragg Creek melts during warm Chinook winds while Mount Rundle produces katabatic winds that churn cold downward into the forest above Canmore, acting like a natural refrigeration system on a north-facing slope. A local expert pointed out these facts to officials and argued Canmore was the better site for a venue. Moreover, the busted mining town—Canmore’s last coal mines closed in 1979—might transform into a mountain community of Nordic skiers.
Informed persuasion by mountain experts and a senior advisor to the premier led politicians and planners to relocate Nordic skiing events to Canmore. Consequently, an old coal mining landscape at “Georgetown” repurposed with new Nordic ski trails for cross country racers and biathletes, completing the Canmore Nordic Centre Olympic venue in 1987. Canmore facility planning anticipated competitions for men, women, and youth at its biathlon stadium, despite the IOC permitting only men’s Olympic biathlon events in 1988. Today the Canmore venue hosts televised World Cups and popular recreation along with the Olympic Trail and Chandra Crawford Hut named after the Canadian gold medal sprinter from Canmore.5 Frozen Thunder—the snow cache system added in 2009—stockpiles machine-made snow from one winter to the next and provides advantageous early-season fall training on a two-kilometer trackset loop for cross country skiers and biathletes, amid weather and climate variables.6
Canada Olympic Park in Calgary
The world’s Nordic skiers clustered in Canmore for the Olympics while ski jumpers (and sliding sports) competed in Calgary at Canada Olympic Park. The ski jumping towers were located at Paskapoo on the outskirts of Calgary, not in the mountains, to ensure a spectacular urban Olympic venue for the 1988 Games. Only men competed as women were excluded from Olympic ski jumping. Chinook winds buffeted ski jumpers, and the ski towers later shuttered. Still, young women made a mark for equality in sport while training as ski jumpers onsite after 1988 and jumping competing at Sochi 2014.7
A sidebar of the Government of Alberta’s push to host the Olympics was regional investment in winter tourism and more public recreation facilities for cross country ski trails, notably east of Edmonton and west of Hinton. The renowned Canadian Birkebeiner ski loppet makes use of this provincial trail system today in the UNESCO-designated Beaver Hills Biosphere near Edmonton, and Hinton Nordic Centre offers cross country skiing in William A. Switzer Provincial Park.8 Both grew from public policy planning.
Looking Back and Forward
Nakiska and Canmore Nordic Centre acted as design mechanisms for outdoor sport and recreation that contributed to the post-Olympic transformation of Kananaskis and Canmore, amid broader shifts of population, urban growth, gentrification, wildlife movement, and ecological pressures. Lake Louise emerged as a year-round destination in a national park with intense tourism and international profile. The impacts of these sites were both local and regional, with implications for skiing and mountain sport internationally.
Memory is connected to landscapes and sporting events. Contrasting these sites reveals how the Olympics were imagined, reimagined, and took shape as sporting landscapes. Lake Louise, Nakiska, and Canmore Nordic Centre, along with Canada Olympic Park, illustrate that site selection for venues was fluid and political, influenced by actors, politics, and public works. Olympic athletes and the public skied at these venues, embodying human movement in landscapes hybridized as mountain snow machines.
A larger arc of transformation in the mountain region was a complex change and freighted as Olympic legacy. Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed, a Progressive Conservative (also a skier and former professional Canadian Football League player), participated in Olympic bids and envisioned a destination on provincial crown lands on the eastern slopes after public outcry damped down Calgary’s Olympic dreams for Banff.9 Olympic venues, to serve both elite and recreational skiing, were “dual purpose” as conceived in planning for Alpine and Nordic skiing. Prospects for the Olympics influenced both recreation development policies for public sport venues as Olympic legacy sites and evolving policies for conservation management. The Alberta government was the hand of the state that built the Canmore Nordic Centre and Nakiska Olympic legacy sites as public sector investments in Kananaskis County.
The voices of conservation protection and their influence linger in policy outcomes in landscapes where the Olympics were never held, like Banff National Park, but Olympic legacy venues at Nakiska and Canmore also endure in environmental memory and land use in Kananaskis Country. Venues had outcomes for elite sport and recreational enjoyment as well as tourism growth. Present day multi-use management takes place amid ongoing debates and ever-changing circumstances—such as international travel, floods, wildfire, and a global pandemic—and calls for sustainability. These Alberta’s skiing landscapes are inscribed memories of the Olympic Winter Games.
[1] Qi Chen and Pearl Ann Reichwein, “The Village Lake Louise Controversy: Ski Resort Planning, Civil Activism, and the Environmental Politics of Banff National Park, 1964–1979,” Sport History Review 47, 1 (2016): 90-110, accessed Jan. 20, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1123/shr.2015-0015. For more about the Banff and Calgary bids, see Russell Field, “Banff 1972: Sportsmen, Conservationists, and the Debate over Banff National Park,” Winters of Discontent: The Winter Olympics and a Half Century of Protest and Resistance, ed. Russell Field (University of Illinois Press, 2025), 21-45; and Christine O’Bonsawin, “Mohkinstsis (Calgary) 1988: Settler Colonial Roots of Olympic Environmentalism and the Disavowal of Indigenous Rights, Winters of Discontent, 71-98.
[2] Chen and Reichwein, “The Village Lake Louise Controversy,” 97-105.
[3] PearlAnn Reichwein, “The Supreme Mountain Machine: The Making and Legacy of Canada’s First Olympic Nordic Ski Centre, 1984-2010,” Olympika: International Journal of Olympic Studies, December XXXI (2022): 1-29. https://digital.la84.org/digital/collection/p17103coll10/id/23176/
[4] Michelle Murphy and PearlAnn Reichwein, “Manufacturing Nakiska: The Politics of Alpine Ski Hills, Mountain Parks, and the 1988 Calgary Olympic Games,” Olympika: International Journal of Olympic Studies, XXVIII (2019), 29-64. https://digital.la84.org/digital/collection/p17103coll10/id/20606/ ; Reichwein, “The Supreme Mountain Machine,” 3-9, 15.
[5] Reichwein, “The Supreme Mountain Machine,” 4, 8-10, 13. Chinooks are warm dry winds known as “snow eaters” in southern Alberta. Katabatic winds form as gravity forces cold, dense air masses downslope. Canmore hosts World Cups for cross country skiing, biathlon, Para Nordic skiing, para biathlon, and Masters competitions.
[6] For example see, “Frozen Thunder Officially Open (Photo Gallery), Faster Skier, Oct. 23, 2016, https://fasterskier.com/2016/10/frozen-thunder-officially-open-photo-gallery/ accessed Jan. 30, 2026.
[7] For Paskapoo, see Reichwein, “The Supreme Mountain Machine,” 9-10; Charlotte Mitchell, “Carving Out Spaces of Resistance: Remembering Women’s Ski Jumping, Gendered Spaces, and Built Environments at Canada Olympic Park, 1987–2019,” Sport History Review 55, no. 1 (2024): 48-64, https://doi.org/10.1123/shr.2023-0023; also, Charlotte Mitchell, Lyndsay Conrad, and PearlAnn Reichwein, “Women’s Ski Jumpers: Fighting to Fly,” produced by Charlotte Mitchell, Ski Like a Girl Podcast, Jan. 22, 2025. Podcast, 26:25, https://ualberta.aviaryplatform.com/r/ks6j09xx42.
[8] PearlAnn Reichwein, “The Origins of the Canadian Birkebeiner Ski Festival: Invented Traditions, Winter Sportscapes, and Heritage Sport Tourism in Sustainability and the UNESCO Beaver Hills Biosphere,” Journal of Heritage Tourism (Abingdon) 19, no. 1 (2024): 129–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743873X.2023.2256898; also, Charlotte Mitchell and PearlAnn Reichwein, “Canadian Birkebeiners: The First Forty Years,” produced by Charlotte Mitchell, Ski Like a Girl Podcast, May 23, 2025, Podcast, 1:05:08, https://ualberta.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3133/collection_resources/149003.
[9] Reichwein, “The Supreme Mountain Machine,” 3.
Feature Image: Olympic Cauldron Lighting at Canmore Nordic Centre in 1988. (Published with permission of City of Calgary Archives.)
PearlAnn Reichwein
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