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The rough-and-rollicking stereotype of Calgary has been created, in large part, by the summer shindig known as the Calgary Stampede, a major stomp on the rodeo circuit that has been drawing revelers since 1912. Some citizens would like to shuck that image. "People think of Calgary as a town full of red-neck, capitalist cowboys driving Cadillacs," complains Rod Love, who works in the mayor's office. "We are the financial and technical capital of Western Canada." There is a stock exchange and a contingent of high-tech companies to back up that claim. There is even a mayor who acts plumb comfortable in pinstripes and silk ties.
A former television reporter with an expressive, Silly-Putty kind of face, Ralph Klein went straight from covering city hall to running it in 1980. Now in his third term and a tireless polisher of his city's image, Klein is full of rosy facts and rousing figures about the Games. Some 80,000 visitors will jam the hotels, and every event should be close to a sellout. The Canadian organizers expect to turn a $23 million profit. In addition, Calgary will inherit state-of-the-art facilities, such as the $31 million indoor speed- skating oval and the ski jumps and bobsled and luge runs at nearby Canada Olympic Park.
The mayor and Olympic officials are trying to stare down one looming controversy as the opening ceremonies approach. A tribe of Indians, the Lubicon Lake Band from northern Alberta, is protesting the Games to bring $ attention to a century-old unsettled land claim. "I support their claim," says Klein, who speaks a dialect of the Blackfoot language. "I oppose their methods." Local police and the Mounties are prepared for demonstrations -- and for the ever present threat of international terrorism. Although security experts privately believe the risk posed by terrorists is low, they are taking no chances. The Olympic Village has been surrounded by a double fence affixed with electronic detection devices.
No precautions can control another specter that hangs over the city. It is the arch of clouds created by the dread Chinook wind that sweeps out of the west each winter at speeds up to 72 m.p.h. The winds can raise the temperature by 18 degrees in the time it takes to grill an Alberta-bred New York strip steak. The Chinook could turn venues in the mountains into piles of slush. Snowmaking machines are already churning away, building stockpiles in case.
Calgary is no one-cuisine culinary backwater, as some smaller Winter Olympics-host towns have been. There is a large and prosperous Chinese community with roots dating back to 1883, when the tracks of the Canadian Pacific Railway were laid. In recent years the scores of Chinese restaurants have been supplemented by a handful of Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese establishments, and there are also French, Italian and Greek entries. A first- rate seafood restaurant, Cannery Row, has fresh fish flown in from Vancouver. Still, a steakhouse is Calgary's idea of a real night out. At Hy's the menu lists seven different steak dishes, and near the bottom is a discreet announcement to gluttons pointing out that a 2-lb. sirloin can be custom ordered for king-size appetites. Seven-ounce fillets, however, outsell 20-oz. T-bones by a 10-to-1 ratio these days. "Even here, eating habits have changed," admits Assistant Headwaiter Beau Yee.