The Olympics are at the midway point, and still they are dancing. hile waiting to get into the Czech-Slovakia hockey game last week, a dance crew -- at least I think that's what you'd call it -- cut an enormous crop circle in the crowd before being joined by three fans
By Dave Bidini for National Post
The Olympics are at the midway point, and still they are dancing. While waiting to get into the Czech-Slovakia hockey game last week, a dance crew -- at least I think that's what you'd call it -- cut an enormous crop circle in the crowd before being joined by three fans -- one of them wheelchair-bound -- draped in glow rings and wearing white Boney M costumes.
The first week of the event was as much a costume party as sporting tournament.
On my walk home from the game, I counted two girls dressed like lions, seven pirates, a large shaggy dogperson, three spacemen, some grotesque-looking aliens, a Russian bear drinking a large can of beer and countless Draculas smoking and waving around their capes.
After being convinced to join friends at a bar in Yaletown -- Vancouver's revelry central -- I discovered that the street had turned into a giant rave, with two deejays in Team Canada sweaters waving their arms while mixing from a tent. This was happening at 7 pm. On a Tuesday. In February.
Stephen Colbert was in Vancouver too, having rigged his set outside Sochi Zoyi, Russia's cultural centre for the Games. Four-thousand people lined up in the early morning to see a taping of his show, and if the grounds -- normally Science World -- were typically empty on other occasions, here it squirmed with life.
Just down the road, a Russian choir dressed in red and white stood behind a teenage guitar player singing a low, sad anthem. The teenager, however, was wearing an Ovechkin jersey, and despite the funereal quality of the song, smiled ear to ear as he watched life parade before him.
As I played out my last day on the west coast, I knew that, returning to Toronto, this chimera would leave me, just as it would leave the whole of the city once the Games ended. Workers would take down the lights, spool the zipper cables, and deflate Saskatchewan's orb. With this, the question of the Games' legacy would be addressed, and so far, the answer was unclear.
A friend of mine had taken to calling Vancouver 2010 the Glitch Games, but it was easy to scratch the small itches -- endless lineups, Zambonis that broke down, and the vagaries of the region's weather (although why anyone who wasn't competing in or attending sporting events would argue with plus 6 and sunny was beyond me). The big problems, however, were harder to address.
The luger's death had cast a terrible pall over the proceedings and the bad Richmond ice as well as the boondoggle at Cypress Mountain -- a location that, it became clear, had been chosen for its power-point optics rather than its security of climate -- were vectors of discontent.
And that VANOC proved unrelenting in its declaration that these Games were the greenest ever rankled many who'd been neutral in their view of the event. In an essay in the Vancouver Sun, writer John Hume dissected the natural images used during the Opening Ceremonies and across official literature, noting the hypocrisy of rolling out the grizzly bear when lax hunting laws had badly depleted the population, and using the killer whale, one of the world's endangered species, as a symbol.
For Doug Chapman, a long-time 73-year-old west coast environmental lawyer, commercial fisherman, and activist, the last straw came after reading that the Athlete's Village -- located on False Creek -- had been cited for its green initiatives. Prior to the Games, Mr. Chapman had taken water samples of the Creek and found elevated levels of PCBs, PAHs and heavy metals, so high that it proved to be a contaminated site for aquatic life. He wanted signs posted, but the Vancouver coastal health authority refused.
Sure, the athletes might have recycled, but the village vista -- which had prettied TV images of the Games' urban idyll -- turned out to be a playground for infection. And nothing had been done about it.
I sat with Mr. Chapman one afternoon in his 12th floor apartment, looking at the city and eating fish chowder, prepared that day from a Pacific catch. His window provided a long view of English Bay to the left, and the greater city in front of us.
Below, the streets pulsed with carnival life as the sun rippled over the mountains. He talked about VANOC's imagined notion of Vancouver -- righteous and hopeful, which he considered an implausible vision of home. For two weeks, a sporting tournament had convinced people of the palpable nature of this vision. Whether it would hold true after the carnival left town is anyone's guess.
