Western’s 1976 Olympians Recall the Montreal Games That Changed Women’s Sports

Queen Elizabeth II stood inside Montreal’s Olympic Stadium fifty years ago today and declared the Games of the XXI Olympiad open, first in French, then in English. Abby Hoffman carried Canada’s flag in moments earlier, the first woman to lead her country into an Olympic Summer Games opening ceremony.

The Games that followed left two legacies rarely told together: a debt that took thirty years to erase, and a permanent widening of what women’s sports could be. Fifty years later, both still frame the fights over Los Angeles 2028 and this summer’s FIFA World Cup, and fifteen Western University students and alumni watched the second legacy begin firsthand.

Fifteen From Western Joined Canada’s Biggest Team

Western University sent 15 students and alumni to Montreal, part of Canada’s 416-athlete team, the largest the country had ever assembled. They competed in diving, volleyball, rowing, track and wrestling.

Bob Barney, professor emeritus and founding director of Western’s International Centre for Olympic Studies, watched several of them compete in person. He traces Western’s Olympic pipeline back to John Howard Crocker, who managed Canada’s first Olympic team in 1908, then served as the team’s honorary manager from 1912 to 1956 while also joining Western as director of physical education in 1930.

“To have so many athletes who studied and trained here is a testament to what Western means to the Olympics, and what they mean to Western,” Barney said. “We’ve always had a strong connection to the Games.”

Rowing and wrestling alone accounted for nine of the 15, a cluster Barney credits to Crocker building physical education into a serious academic discipline at Western decades before either sport made room for the athletes who would carry it to Montreal.

How Did a Track Runner End Up Rowing for Canada in Two Years?

Monika Seymour switched from track to rowing during orientation week at Western, then made Canada’s Olympic coxed four before she had even finished her degree. She had never touched an oar until a friend introduced her to the sport, and within two days she was hooked.

“I loved being outside, in the water, all of it,” she said. “I didn’t even go back to track; I was in love with rowing.”

She learned from James Walker, a Western graduate freshly back from the 1972 Munich Olympics. After her first season, the Olympic committee announced women’s rowing would debut at the 1976 Games. Western’s men’s rowing coach, Bob Marlowe, urged her to start training seriously, and she spent the summer of 1974 at Western under new instruction. Kris Korzeniowski had just relocated to Canada from Europe when he took over her coaching.

Montreal’s Games introduced three new women’s events that had never appeared at an Olympics before:

• Rowing, added to the Olympic program for women for the first time
• Basketball, also debuting as a women’s Olympic sport
• Team handball, completing the trio of new women’s events

Seymour’s coxed four became part of that first Olympic rowing class. By 1974 she had rowed for the first Canadian women’s crew at the World Rowing Championships in Lucerne, Switzerland, finishing ninth, and she competed again at the 1975 championships in Nottingham, England, alongside fellow Western graduate Becky Ostrom.

“The rowing landscape was nothing like it is today. I don’t know how we did it, but we were just really naive, focused and lucky to have Kris coaching us,” Seymour said.

Rowing Canada Aviron and Quebec’s rowing federation are marking the anniversary with a commemorative regatta honoring the sport’s first Olympic women, bringing rowers from that 1976 field back to the same water this summer.

It doesn’t matter which country you’re from. The athletes walk into that stadium waving their flag and there’s nothing in your life that will ever top that. You’re an Olympian and nobody can ever take that away from you.

Seymour said that of walking into Olympic Stadium for the opening ceremony, an experience she still ranks above meeting her childhood hero, Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut, in the athletes’ village days earlier.

Canada’s federal Status of Women agency, now Women and Gender Equality Canada, became a standalone department that same year, though equal protection against sex discrimination would not reach the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms for several more years. Seymour’s crew competed before those protections existed.

“As young women, we felt empowered that we could do whatever we wanted to do. Whether at school or at the Games, we weren’t going to let anything stop us,” she said.

She did not make the podium in Montreal. She finished her degree, built a career as a librarian, and returned to Western in 2016 for induction into the university’s Rowing Wall of Excellence.

Wrestling Mats Led Michael Barry and Brian Renken to Law School

Brian Renken arrived in Montreal as a 21-year-old Mustangs wrestler, the only Canadian to compete in both freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling at the Games. He remembers being overwhelmed by the size of it all.

“To put it bluntly, I think I was awestruck,” he said. “It was beyond belief.”

Fifty years later, he remembers the people more than his own results. He and fellow Western wrestler Michael Barry still gather with old teammates, and members of Canada’s 1976 wrestling team reunited in Montreal in May to mark the anniversary.

“The friendships I made at Western have proven to be lifelong. I can’t replace that,” Renken said.

After graduating in 1978, Renken and Barry took the law school admission test on a whim. Both became lawyers, and Renken was inducted into the Western Mustangs Sports Hall of Fame in 2001. He credits the discipline of Olympic training directly for his legal career, saying elite sport does not tolerate athletes who lack organization.

Western’s athletic program kept evolving long after Renken’s era, most recently as the Mustangs move field hockey and frisbee indoors for winter, a sign the school’s sports identity never stopped growing past 1976.

Renken said the internet and expanded media coverage are the biggest change in the sport since his Games, turning Olympians into recognizable names and helping them find funding to train.

“These are household names now that you see out there,” he said.

The Big Owe Behind the Games

Mayor Jean Drapeau promised in 1970 that the Olympics could no more run a deficit than a man could have a baby. Labour strikes between December 1974 and April 1976 cut planned working days on Olympic construction from 530 to 155, forcing round-the-clock shifts through Montreal winters just to finish on time.

Officials had budgeted the Games at roughly $300 million. The International Olympic Committee’s own accounting puts the final numbers at CAD 606 million in revenue against CAD 383 million in operating costs and CAD 1.21 billion in venue construction.

Add the operating and construction totals together and the gap comes to roughly $1.6 billion, the figure that stuck to the stadium’s new nickname: the Big Owe.

Quebec spent three decades repaying that gap through a dedicated tobacco tax and a national lottery. The debt scared off other bidders for years. Los Angeles ended up the only city willing to bid for the 1984 Games, and it turned a $223 million profit by reusing existing venues instead of building new ones.

Eric Myles, chief sport officer at the Canadian Olympic Committee, said the Games actually turned a profit on operating costs alone, a detail he said still surprises people. “It’s crazy when you say that; people look at you and don’t believe you,” he said.

Los Angeles and Toronto Inherit the Same Math

The financial pattern Montreal set has not gone away. LA28, the private committee organizing the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, is working from a budget near $7 billion. If it runs short, the city covers the first $270 million in losses, California the next $270 million, and Los Angeles taxpayers everything after that.

A watchdog report from the nonprofit SAJE argues the real price tag is closer to $12 billion once security, sanitation and transit costs are folded in, and it has urged the city to consider renegotiating or scaling back its hosting agreement.

The money trail spans five decades:

1. May 1970: Montreal wins hosting rights over Moscow and Los Angeles at the IOC’s 69th session in Amsterdam.
2. July 17, 1976: The Games open with a budget already well past its original estimate.
3. 1984: Los Angeles, the only bidder left standing, turns a profit hosting the Summer Games.
4. 2028: Los Angeles hosts its third Summer Games on a budget near $7 billion, with overruns split between the city and the state of California.

Toronto and Vancouver are covering a smaller version of the same math this summer. Their taxpayers are paying $380 million and $578 million respectively toward the 2026 FIFA World Cup, a tournament FIFA projects will generate roughly $40 billion in North American economic impact even though twelve of the last fourteen World Cups have lost money for their hosts.

Paris tried to break the streak in 2024 by reusing existing venues and cleaning up the Seine instead of building new stadiums. A French government audit still found the Games added just 0.07 percent to the country’s annual economic output.

Barney Still Calls It Negotiation Over Confrontation

Barney has studied the Olympics since 1976, when he watched the Games in person for the first time, an experience he called magical. Two things stood out to him.

Security spending had exploded after the 1972 Munich Massacre, the killing of Israeli athletes that reshaped Olympic security for good. And women’s sports were having a breakout moment that pulled in fans who had never watched before.

“I know many women who started watching the Olympic Games to watch the women athletes, especially gymnasts and swimmers in 1976,” Barney said. “It just captivated young women watching, because now, the Games were no longer a men’s event; they were becoming a family event.”

Thomas Bach, honorary president of the International Olympic Committee, made his own Olympic debut in Montreal, winning gold in team foil fencing. “These Games left a great legacy,” he said of the anniversary this year.

Tricia Smith, president of the Canadian Olympic Committee, also debuted in Montreal and later won rowing silver at Los Angeles 1984. Roughly 40 percent of Canada’s recent Olympic teams have come from Quebec, a share some Olympic officials trace directly back to the sporting culture the 1976 Games left behind.

Montreal is marking the anniversary all summer, including an exhibition of Games-era artifacts and archives running through September at the McCord Stewart Museum.

“When I watch the Olympics, I see we’re pretty much all alike,” Barney said. “We have the same tendencies, same concerns for children and ancestors. Anything that enhances being together is a good means of eventually solving global problems. It’s negotiation over confrontation.”

Seymour still watches every Olympic opening ceremony live. Fifty years after Montreal, she says she is glad women now have a real shot at building a career from sport.

“I’d like to think we had a hand in that,” she said.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much did the 1976 Montreal Olympics actually cost?

The Games generated CAD 606 million in revenue against CAD 383 million in operating costs and CAD 1.21 billion in venue construction, according to the International Olympic Committee’s own accounting. The Oxford Olympics Study later calculated an inflation-adjusted outturn cost of US$6.1 billion in 2015 dollars, a 720 percent cost overrun, the largest of any Olympics on record.

Who was the first woman to carry Canada’s flag at an Olympic opening ceremony?

Abby Hoffman carried Canada’s flag into Montreal’s Olympic Stadium in 1976, the first woman given that role at a Summer Games opening ceremony. She later became the first woman elected to the executive of the Canadian Olympic Association.

Did host nation Canada win any gold medals at its own Olympics?

No. Canada left the 1976 Games with 11 medals and no gold, the only host country in Olympic history to leave its own Games without winning one.

How does the Los Angeles 2028 budget compare to Montreal’s?

LA28’s privately funded budget sits at about $6.9 billion. Unlike Montreal in 1976, which absorbed its entire shortfall alone, Los Angeles has a tiered safety net, with the city and then California each covering $270 million in overruns before the bill returns to city taxpayers.

How did Quebec pay off the Olympic debt?

The province leaned on two revenue streams: a national lottery that became Lotto Canada, and a dedicated tax on tobacco sales. Between them, they retired the debt by the end of 2006, and the lottery kept funding amateur sport in Quebec long after the bill was paid.

Why couldn’t the scoreboard show Nadia Comaneci’s perfect 10?

Gymnastics officials had told the scoreboard’s manufacturer before the Games that a perfect score was not possible, so the display was built with room for only three digits. When Comaneci scored a 10.00 in the team compulsories, the board flashed 1.00 instead, and stadium announcers had to explain to the crowd what had actually happened.