Go ahead, pick a controversy, any controversy.

“Something will happen in Vancouver,” predicts Frank King, who dealt with a few publicity problems during his tenure as chairman and chief executive officer of the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.

“It’s almost certain to happen.”

King says communication is the key to preventing problems. Organizers must hire communications professionals, he says, and be as open and honest as possible with the public.

Frank King has given pep talks to B.C.

“When you get issues like that, you have to address them,” says King. “So that’s what I would recommend again.”

Based on past Olympics, some controversies to watch out for are: unfair awarding of contracts, construction cost overruns, ticket scams, and illegal drug use among athletes.

With construction on the Whistler Nordic Centre slated to start in April, and all other construction on $510 million worth of projects to begin in 2005, the tendering process is the first potential pitfall.

Patrick Reid, the chairman of Vancouver’s Expo ’86, says it’s essential that organizers control finances. Otherwise, no matter how much people enjoy the Games, Canadian taxpayers will suffer.

Even the Calgary Olympics, which eventually operated at a profit and produced a legacy fund that is used to fund facilities today, had cost overruns, recalls King.

“The city was building a Saddledome and at the same time they were building a city hall and other sports facilities for other purposes,” says King. “There were cost overruns in all of those constructions, including the light rail transit . . .

“Construction costs were running 30-40 per cent over and when the construction cost overruns started to hit the Saddledome, largely because of change in the design, people thought that Montreal had hit,” says King, referring to the fact that the Montreal Summer Olympics eventually cost more than $1 billion largely because of overruns at Olympic Stadium.

“So there was a bit of a communication problem over it. When we compared the overruns on all public facilities, the Saddledome had the least overrun of any of them, but it got 90 per cent of the publicity.”

King says organizers must recognize that they only get one chance to make the right decision.

Vancouver already has experience hosting international events, the most obvious being Expo ’86. But Reid says it’s much easier to run a world’s fair because you have six months to gain the public’s trust and smooth out problems during the event. Olympic organizers only have 16 days.

Consequently, says Reid, Olympic organizers should pay more attention to what happened during the Calgary Olympics than Expo.

Sam Corea, communications director for the Vancouver Games, says the 2010 organizing committee has worked closely with the Calgary Olympic Development Association. Meanwhile, King served on the Vancouver bid corporation’s board of directors and has given pep talks to B.C. organizers.

“I told them that I was a living example that you actually could go through a bid and the Games and still be alive 15 years later,” says King. “It really was humanly possible to do this, even though it seemed difficult when you look forward.”

Reid says Vancouver-Whistler’s goal must be to make people wish that the Games could re-create the good time they had in the future.

“If you get a name for doing something badly or stupidly, people remember,” says Reid, adding he still can’t forget that the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, N.Y. had transportation problems.

Reid has attended the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics, the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Games, the Calgary Games and the 1992 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Calgary, he says, was the most memorable.

“Calgary was the greatest experience of all because of the street scene,” says Reid.

But one street scene that Vancouver can do without is the Downtown Eastside, an area notorious for homeless people, heroin addicts, prostitutes and crime. Some anti-poverty activists who opposed Vancouver hosting the Games argue that the millions the province has pledged should be spent instead on improving living conditions in the area, which happens to be near Vancouver’s main police station.

Others are worried that the Downtown Eastside, with its dilapidated buildings and residents who have been known to inject themselves with drugs in public, will create a negative image in the eyes of the rest of the world. Others contend that the Olympics could push Downtown Eastside residents out of their home.

“I don’t see that happening because the Downtown Eastside, the geography and the residents who live there have been the same for decades,” says Reid.

He says people were worried that Downtown Eastsiders would be pushed out out of their homes during Expo, but the fears did not become reality. He says a new methadone clinic in the area, which has already treated thousands of addicts, and other social programs are paying off, and new affordable housing will be built by the time the Olympics arrive.

In what’s probably a sad commentary on the times in which we live, says Reid, thousands of cruiseship passengers who disembark near the Downtown Eastside don’t notice the residents and most Games visitors “are probably pretty well-heeled” and can afford to stay in nice hotels.

As the Games draw closer and new facilities start to pop up, labour relations, militant at the best of times in the heavily unionized province, will likely become a concern.

Taking a page from Alberta right-to-work legislation, which allows unionized workers to cross picket lines without penalty from unions, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell has introduced the Significant Projects Streamlining Act.

The new law, which passed third reading in the B.C. legislature Nov. 26 and is awaiting royal assent, appears to give the government the right to order unions to finish a job of significant provincial interest – and may have implications during strikes.

The law also grants the province the right to approve projects that local authorities may reject. The Union of British Columbia Municipalities, including the City of Vancouver, has voted against the law. Although the vote has no legal authority, it sets the stage for some Olympic- related disputes.

“The whole point here about this bill in its entirety is that it gives the government the ability to override and run rough- shod over local government authority,” Vancouver-Mt. Pleasant New Democratic Party MLA Jenny Kwan told the legislature in November.

But B.C. Deregulation Minister Kevin Falcon defended the legislation.

“It is not guaranteeing a certainty of outcome; it is guaranteeing a certainty of process,” Falcon told the legislature. “Right now in British Columbia, sadly, after many, many years of a whole lot of process being added to government, it often takes years – up to a decade – for projects to be approved. We think that the province can do better. We certainly think that local governments, working in co-operation with the provincial government, can do better.”

Falcon added the legislation enables the province and municipalities to work together on projects of provincial interest.

“We may be a project of significant provincial interest,” quips Corea.