Welcome to our World Cup world

While this page is frequently used to offer some form of condemnatory opinion on a Valley-related topic, readers may find this editorial to be refreshing in that we are

giving a plug to several aspects of the upcoming Viessmann World Cup weekend.

First off, we would like to say welcome and good luck to all of the athletes, support staff, supporters and visitors who arrived in town for the final international cross-country ski event to be held prior to the Vancouver Whistler Olympic Games.

Canmore’s World Cup event, we hope, gives all of you the opportunity to fine-tune your skills before the big push on the biggest stage there is. Here in the Valley, we appreciate the dedication, long hours of training and sacrifice amateur athletes make in their quest to make an Olympic dream a reality.

We also hope your stay in our Valley is enjoyable enough that you return in the future – and that goes for international team members, visitors and media as well, of course.

And trust us, the mountains surrounding us present just as beautiful a landscape in summer as they do in winter.

While the Viessmann event is a big one, kudos also need to be handed out to the Town for kicking in $17,000 to assist the organizers who have managed to piggyback community activities onto the international event.

In the big picture, that $17,000 may well turn out to be money very well invested when it comes to promoting tourism in town. While the Town does support Tourism Canmore-Kananaskis via the business registry and the Canmore Economic Development Agency (CEDA), it’s good to see that the possibility of millions of World Cup-related TV viewers tuning into a Canmore-based event wasn’t lost on council.

Kudos as well to the partnership of groups that have stepped up to make the event one to remember under the umbrella of the Business Revitalization Zone (BRZ) – Canmore Rotary, the Nordic Centre and Alberta World Cup Cross-Country 2010.

A world-class event like the Viessmann World Cup certainly lends itself to an all-out effort to combine the athletic endeavours at the Nordic Centre with family and community-oriented events in the downtown core.

And the planned downtown awards ceremonies, parade and send-off rally will tie the two events together nicely to present a united package.

After all, to catch the attention of uber skiing body FIS (Fédération Internationale de Ski), a group that is used to cross-country race events in Europe which draw thousands of cowbell-wielding spectators, Canmore needs to showcase itself as being one showing community support for athletic endeavours.

Finally, when events like this weekend’s World Cup take place, somebody, without fail, will bandy about numbers related to how many millions of dollars said event will generate for the community.

Often, though, these cash-infusion estimates are merely that, an estimate not grounded in hard numbers.

For that reason, a kudo may also be handed to CEDA for its intention to conduct an economic impact assessment of the World Cup event.

CEDA will take a provincially-developed survey, use it as a pilot project for the World Cup event, and try to discover, realistically and with concrete numbers, just what kind of economic impact the event will have on the town.

Hopefully, that will keep organizers from answering the question Travel Alberta has been asked recently – what is the economic bang for taxpayer’s bucks when it comes to tourism spending.