The star-crossed games

Were they the worst of games? Were they the best of games? Herman Goodden presents his check list to help you decide ...

Let’s work up a little check list (shall we?) of all the things that could and did go wrong at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver last month.
Right at the start there was the horrible portent, even before the games had officially begun, when Georgian luger, Nodar Kumaritashvli, was killed on a test run at the Whistler Sliding Centre when his sled went airborne, sending him slamming into a steel girder. This threw a pall over an event that is supposed to be all about youth and hope and striving and ambition. What game is worth dying for? When those girders were subsequently wrapped in people-protective padding, it seemed to suggest a reckless lack of planning in the design and construction of the slick and icy track.
There was the embarrassment just prior to the Games’ commencement of anarchists and street protestors running riot in downtown Vancouver, smashing windows and demanding that the obscene cost of funding something so frivolous as an international sport competition be funnelled instead into some real nation-building initiative like cleaning up Vancouver’s east side Junkie Town and supplying more safe-injection sites. Other nations, one suspects, would have found a way to exclude such hooligans from their Potemkin-village of a host site but not Canada.
There was the exquisitely politically correct flatulence of the three-hour opening ceremony gala in BC Place stadium that was clogged with obscure First Nations imagery. A National Public Radio reporter opined: “Sometimes it was a little strange, as with a long sequence where it appeared that a guy created Canada by making lightning circles, and then constellations were invented, and then there was a giant bear, and then there were trees…” This was followed by one of those awful stylized re-workings of our perfectly lovely national anthem by some 16-year-old pop tart named Nikki Yanofsky. Then, topping it all off, at the supposed climax of the event, a great torch bowl took repeated sputtering efforts before it finally ignited.

For the first week in particular there was some diabolically uncooperative weather when the West Coast seemed to be the only area in the entire country that wasn’t covered in snow. Heavy rains meant that 4,000 spectators for the snowboarding competition on Cypress Mountain had to have their tickets refunded as there was no way to ensure the structural safety of their bleachers on top of such soggy ground. The temperatures were so mild that first week that gnats and bugs were coming out and the misty rain gave the manmade snow on many of the ski slopes the consistency, said one skier, of “mashed potatoes”.  

So, how tropical was the weather in Vancouver? On the first Friday of the games came the absolutely surreal news that a case of leprosy had been confirmed aboard a cruise ship anchored in Vancouver Harbour that housed security personnel for the Games.
There was the widely-resented arrogance of the usually (or stereotypically, at least) mild-mannered and deferential host nation with its unwisely trumpeted goal to “Own the Podium”, ie: out-scoop everyone else when it came to snagging medals.

This was unwise because it would make us look like deluded blowhards when, inevitably, we failed to rake in more medals than anybody else, and also because it was ungracious, inhospitable and “tone-deaf”. It was the kind of thing one might have expected to hear from Chairman Mao if he’d still been around two years ago to host the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008.

Midway through the second week, the Historica-Dominion Institute released a survey which showed that 52% of Canadians believed that the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games were a more defining moment for Canada than the 1972 Hockey Summit between Canada and Russia or the First World War battle of Vimy Ridge, which many historians would single out as the moment when Canada -- in winning a battle that no other country in the Commonwealth could handle -- came into its own for the first time.

At this, the old guard of press pundits rushed into print denouncing the foolishness of Canadians and their historical myopia, their inability to separate a truly significant landmark event from some passing enthusiasm.
And in the sense of an ultimate reckoning of what is lastingly important, the commentariat were undeniably right. But the Historica-Dominion survey did point out something that the world media – particularly Britain’s – had missed in their unceasing sniping and grousing about how these were the “worst games ever”, and represented a “downhill slide from disaster to calamity.”

Okay, they may have been imperfectly presented. All right, there were problems and snafus. (And let’s see how much better congested old London handles such matters in 2012 when they host the Summer Olympics.) We get it!

But do you know what? These were the games that happened to be on right now, the games that thousands of athletes from all around the globe worked like crazy to be part of.   
And do you know what else? “Own the Podium” turned out to be much more than a tin-eared slogan. It was also the name of a $117-million initiative on the part of the federal government and corporate sponsors for training and equipping Canadian Olympians to do better at these competitions than they ever have before. And we did.

In Lillehammer in 1994, Canada came in seventh in the overall standings with 13 medals, three of them gold. At Turin in 2006, we pushed ahead to third place overall with 24 medals, seven of them gold.

And at the final tally in Vancouver, following a heart-stopping, gold medal win for men’s hockey in overtime play against the Americans, Canada came in third place overall behind the U.S. and Germany with 26 medals won -- 14 of them gold – setting a new record for gold medals won by any one nation at a Winter Olympics.