Whistler's Ross Rebagliati, who won a gold medal for snowboarding at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, was a big booster of the successful Vancouver/Whistler bid to host the 2010 Games.

The City of Vancouver and the mountain resort community of Whistler will co-host the 2010 Winter Olympics. The dramatic announcement, made by the International Olympic Committee on 3 July, followed months of heated competition with two rival cities, Salzburg, Austria and Pyeongchang, South Korea. The success of the Vancouver/Whistler bid means that Canada will play host to its third Olympics. The 1976 Summer Games were in Montreal, while the 1988 Winter Games took place in Calgary. It will be the first time that British Columbia will be the scene of a major international athletic competition since Victoria welcomed the Commonwealth Games in 1994.

The success of the bid culminates five years of promoting the Vancouver/Whistler site, and marks the beginning of a hectic seven-year period of organization and construction, counting down to opening day, 12 February 2010. Competition is planned for many different locations, both at Whistler and in the Lower Mainland. In Vancouver, BC Place stadium will be the venue for opening and closing ceremonies, while hockey games will be played at General Motors Place, home of the Vancouver Canucks. Some hockey is also slated for a new rink at the University of British Columbia campus. As well, a renovated Pacific Coliseum will hold the figure skating and short-track speed skating events. A new curling facility will be built at Nat Bailey Stadium Park. In Burnaby, there will be a new, $68.5 million speed skating oval constructed at Simon Fraser University. And on the North Shore, Cypress Bowl will host the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events.

The most ambitious new facilities will be built at Whistler. There will be a $102 million Nordic Centre where biathlon, cross-country skiing and ski jumping events will take place. There will also be a $55 million Sliding Centre at Blackcomb Mountain to accommodate the luge, bobsled and skeleton. Alpine skiing events will take place at existing facilities on the mountains.

Back in Vancouver, accommodations for the 5,000 athletes and officials will be provided at the main Olympic Village planned for the southeast False Creek area. There will be a smaller Olympic Village for athletes competing at Whistler.

In total, facilities for the Games, both new and upgraded, are expected to cost $620 million. On top of that, the 16-day event will cost an anticipated $1.3 billion to stage. And then there are the related projects that do not have anything directly to do with the Games, in particular the upgrades to the Sea-to-Sky Highway between Vancouver and Whistler and a rapid-transit line to Richmond. All of these costs will be shared by the provincial and federal governments, and organizers expect to earn substantial revenues from the sale of television rights, ticket sales and corporate sponsorships.

As part of the successful bid, Vancouver/Whistler will also host the 2010 Paralympic Winter Games for athletes with disabilities. The Paralympics will take place at Whistler ten days after the Olympics end, March 5 to 14. Events include alpine and nordic skiing, sledge hockey, biathlon and wheelchair curling. Seven hundred athletes from 40 countries are expected to participate.

The Games themselves will be organized by a committee comprised of representatives from Vancouver, Whistler, the federal and provincial governments, the Canadian Paralympic Committee, the Canadian Olympic Committee and BC First Nations. This body, called the Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, will choose an executive committee that will be responsible for actually staging the Big Event.