Fifty years ago this summer, Montreal marked one of its biggest milestones on the world stage, hosting the 21st Olympiad — the country’s first Olympic Games.
For Bruny Surin, a child at the time who would go on to compete in future Games, July 1976 was significant.
“Every time I go past Olympic Stadium, I have feelings,” he said.
They’re feelings of greatness and of what’s possible, because of one event in particular that helped motivate him to push for greatness as an Olympian.
“The only thing I remember from the 1976 Olympics in Montreal is Nadia Comaneci,” he said. “Oh, she got a 10! People thought it was impossible and everything. And from that time, for me, that was greatness. She got a 10, so it is possible.”
The Romanian 14-year-old became the first gymnast to ever record a perfect 10.
Those Games also helped open doors in the city for other kids to become Olympians, like former Olympic diver and now coach David Bédard, who participated in four Games from 1984 to 1996.
There are fond memories, too, for Montreal Gazette editorial cartoonist Terry Mosher, who works under the pen name Aislin. He documented the city’s response to the Games and the events around them.
Get daily National news
Get daily Canada news delivered to your inbox so you’ll never miss the day’s top stories.
He said the Montreal Games were “hugely significant, because I think that Montreal reached an apex in terms of its possibilities or becoming an international city. But also, because of it, we lost it.”
He just published a book to mark the 50th anniversary, titled Jean Drapeau’s Baby, a reference to the then-mayor who famously said that “the Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby” — words that would come back to haunt him.
For Mosher and many others, the Games signalled the start of Montreal’s decline as an international city, because of cost overruns, corruption and the Malouf Commission that, years later, led to criminal convictions.
Mosher argues that all these tarnished the Games’ success.
“Because of it backfiring,” he said. “The Games were very special for spectators — all of us. There were no problems with the Games. It was just all the stuff that went into it and came after.”
He points to the stadium, which took 30 years to pay off at more than $1.5 billion and is still costing taxpayers, as an example.
Daniel Béland of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada agrees and notes that the Montreal Games also came at a time when other things were happening in the mid-1970s.
“Montreal was declining vis-à-vis Toronto,” he said. “Toronto actually, in the mid-’70s, became the largest city in Canada ahead of Montreal for the first time. There was a sense of economic decline.”
Then, there was politics — talk of Quebec separation and the Parti Québécois election win that fall discouraged many, particularly anglophones.
But Béland also observes that after the success of Expo ’67 that put Montreal on the world map, it’s the Games that stand as a symbol of failure for many Montrealers, coming at a time when Montreal was thriving.
“I think it hurt the image of Montreal and Quebec more generally in terms of, not the Olympics itself, but the legacy of all this discussion about corruption,” he said. “Montreal became the poster child of what not to do when you organize a major sporting event.”
It’s a complicated legacy that Monteralers continue to grapple with.
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.