VANCOUVER -- Walk the streets here and you can feel the Games shifting under your feet. That is, if you can walk rather than shuffle, or for that matter be forced to halt. And all of this assumes that you are not standing in line. Which, if you're here, you probably are.
One week in, and these Olympic Games have not just been embraced; they are practically being overrun. Sidewalks are flooded, patios jammed, Olympic attractions buried under the crush of people. After a few days the title of Glitch Games was being thrown around; now, the Party Games might be more appropriate.
"We're seeing unprecedented levels of people; [but] everyone's very, very happy," said Vancouver police spokesman Lindsey Houghton. "The spontaneous renditions of O Canada, and people running up and down the street with flags -- we've never seen that before.
"West Coasters can be pretty fickle when it come to buying in to big events. But they're buying in. We should be proud. We should be more fun and happy. And it's OK to wave a flag every once in a while."
Once in a while? Much of this city dreaded these Games as they approached. Now, it's gone as red as a blood sample. The estimated extra 150,000 people in Vancouver's downtown are an international mosaic, but they are dominated by revelers wearing flags as capes, sporting red-and-white hats or splashed with maple leaf facepaint.
The anthem often bursts out of nowhere, especially after Canada wins a medal and the Stanley Park foghorn blasts the first four notes of O Canada. It is a bonfire of patriotism, without the fire.
And, it should be said, a largely happy one. One police officer, surveying the crowds, said, "I keep telling my wife, everyone is exceedingly positive. It's very weird. Even the people who didn't want the Games are happy to have them. I've never seen people so happy, all the time. People are just super happy. I mean, who waits four hours, six, seven hours, and comes out with a smile?"
Nearly everybody, that's who. At the Bay, the lineup for the Olympic superstore has stretched as long as two hours, from morning until night. One young woman said, "We don't have tickets; where else are we going to be able to touch the Olympics?"
Another woman was wearing a white Canada hooded sweatshirt that she bought from another shopper who reached the store before she did, $20 above the retail price. Essentially, we're at the point where scalping Olympic clothing is viable short-term employment.
Inside, security guards have had to be posted to keep rabid shoppers from jumping the makeshift barrier separating the Olympic section from the rest of the store, and there is a steady stream of people begging to be let in.
"Everyone says my children, my wife, my mom's inside," said a guard charged with keeping people out.
In response, the Bay is having their leftover Olympic inventory shipped in from out East -- just about everything will be here by next weekend -- and the store was kept open 24 hours on Saturday night to test the demand. If warranted, the store will be open overnight next weekend, too.
"They expected it to be busy, but right now they're at about triple what they expected," said one Bay employee. "It's been insanity."
The madness is spreading, too. At the Canadian Mint, the queues are almost beyond comprehension, peaking at six or seven hours to see a 15-minute presentation in which people can touch Olympic medals while outfitted with white gloves. It's so popular that some people, by the time they reach the front of the line, are exchanging e-mail addresses and vowing to keep in touch.
"One guy waited for an hour and a half, got lined up again and waited with my husband and me for three more hours," says Amy, in her mid-thirties, who came in from Langley. "For a while, the line was doing the wave."
People are told the length of the line when they start, too, which means it's an informed decision. And the crazy part might be that after enduring half a day for the chance to spend 15 minutes touching the Olympics, people leave smiling from ear to ear.
"They stand here for six hours," says the Mint's Crystal Hiebert. "And they leave saying 'thank you.' "
The lines stretch for a block at German House, too, which ordered 25,000 litres of beer, thinking that would be sufficient for the duration of the Olympics. By Friday afternoon that they had to order fresh shipments to avoid going dry. When the Germans underestimate your willingness to drink, you know you have a party on your hands.
"I was walking down the street and there was so much street entertainment, so many people, it was like being in a real city," said Gillian, a Vancouver native in her mid-20s. "Vancouver is usually so subdued, and everyone's kind of living their own healthy lifestyles. And now people are out having fun."
You would think that all these people, and all the booze, that misbehaviour would spike as well. And while there are pockets of young idiots here and there -- Toronto Maple Leafs forward Mikhail Grabovski, among others,
was allegedly involved in a bar fight early Saturday -- it's far from real trouble.
According to Vancouver Police, in the week leading up and including the first few days of the Games, crime in Vancouver plummeted. Auto theft dropped 58%; property crime in general was down 39%; serious violent crime was down 38%, and all violent crime dropped 23%. Overall, crime in Vancouver was down almost 40%.
"There's always going to be the drunk rowdies, but this is nothing in comparison to what you'd expect," said another local police officer, who like everyone else is pulling 12-hour shifts alongside 7,000 extra cops from across Canada. "Like, if you were to take a regular Vancouver night, and scale it up with what we're seeing per capita, it's way better. We were expecting a lot worse."
This was the city that rioted after the Vancouver Canucks lost Game 7 of the 1994 Stanley Cup final; but it was also the city that was consumed with horn-honking joy after the Canucks won Game 6 three days before. The former came on a night freighted with menace, just hanging in the air; the latter rode on a wave of bliss. And while it could all still go sideways, it feels like we're far, far closer to Game 6 than we are Game 7.
So is the narrative of these Games changing? Maybe it is. IOC president Jacques Rogge told The Toronto Star that this was Games was tied with Sydney in 2000 as the warmest, most ecstatic Olympic crowd he had seen. In a television interview, American speed skater Shani Davis said, "I didn't know Canadians were this patriotic." In the Mint, spokesman Alex Reeves said, "It's like Canada Day, every day."
That it is. And there are still eight days to go.
