Red Mittens & Red Ink: The Vancouver Olympics

By Bob Mackin, Jr

The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics ended with a bang, when the country that gave the game of hockey to the world was on top of the world. On home ice.
Canadians celebrated coast-to-coast-to-coast the record 14 gold medals won by their Olympians in Vancouver and Whistler. The politicians and sponsors who staged the event were quick to declare it a grand success. But was it?
The Games of the Great Recession were a party worth at least $6 billion, though none of the governments really kept track of all the costs. There were benefits. Vancouver, always striving to be "world class," got new transportation, convention and recreation facilities out of the deal. The massive spending diversion put a strain on hospitals, schools and courts.
The athletes of 82 nations who competed at the biggest, most expensive Winter Olympics in history didn't all go back to their home countries. Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili died on opening day in a crash at the extreme Whistler Sliding Centre, sparking questions about whether Games officials really did all they could to ensure safety.
This is more than a story of the thrill of victory and agony of defeat. It's about fear and greed, unity and division, celebration and anguish.
It is red mittens and red ink.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bob Mackin, Jr
• Release date: Feb 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465956255

Bob Mackin, Jr

Bob Mackin is a North Vancouver, Canada, journalist who has authored books on soccer and baseball trivia. He specializes in sports, business and news and covered the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympics for local, national and international publications.

Book preview

Red Mittens & Red Ink

The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics ended with a bang, when the country that gave the hockey to the world was on top of the world. On home ice.

Canadians celebrated coast-to-coast-to-coast the record 14 gold medals won by their Olympians in Vancouver and Whistler. The politicians and sponsors who staged the event were quick to declare it a grand success. But was it?

The Games of the Great Recession were a party worth at least $6 billion, though none of the governments really kept track of all the costs. There were benefits. Vancouver, always striving to be world class, got new transportation, convention and recreation facilities out of the deal. The massive spending diversion put a strain on hospitals, schools and courts.

The athletes of 82 nations who competed at the biggest, most expensive Winter Olympics until then didn't all go back to their home countries. Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili died on opening day in a crash at the extreme Whistler Sliding Centre, sparking questions about whether Games officials really did all they could to ensure safety.

This is more than a story of the thrill of victory and agony of defeat. It is about fear and greed, unity and division, celebration and anguish.

It is red mittens and red ink.

Red Mittens & Red Ink

The Vancouver Olympics

By Bob Mackin

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 and 2020, Bob Mackin

ISBN: 978-1-4659-5625-5

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold

or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Published by Bob Mackin at Smashwords. Cover art by Brian Howell. All photographs are by Bob Mackin unless otherwise noted.

Table of Contents

Foreword

1: Sudden Death

2: Sportsman’s Paradise

3: This Bid’s For You

4: Builder of the Decade

5: Demonstration Sports

6: Roof Goof

7: Village Idiocy

8: Even Faster, Higher, Stronger

9: Against the Wind

10: The Red and Green Games

11: Red Serge

12: Bus Bickering

13: Toil and Turmoil

14: Torch on Tour

15: Let the Games Begin

16: Excellent and Friendly

Conclusion: Legacies Now and Then

Foreword

The genesis of this book was September 21, 1998, when I embarked on my Olympic journey at the only news conference I can truly say changed my life.

This journey eventually took me to Turin, Italy, and Beijing to watch how the Olympics are organized and learn how cities function while hosting the five-ring circus. To St. Moritz, Switzerland, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, Munich, Montreal and Moscow to see the legacies and relics of past Games. To Olympia, Greece, to witness the torch-lighting ceremony among the ancient ruins at the birthplace of Olympism. To Lausanne, Switzerland, to visit the Olympic Museum and the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee. To Sochi, Russia, PyeongChang, South Korea, and Rio de Janeiro before their bids won.

On this journey, I also learned more about the virtues and stigmas of my hometown and province.

I went inside B.C. Place Stadium on the second-to-last day of summer in 1998 to hear Arthur Griffiths’s vision for Vancouver and Whistler to host the 2010 Winter Olympics. The former owner of the Vancouver Canucks hockey club formally launched the bid to gain the Canadian Olympic Association’s endorsement for an application to the International Olympic Committee. This was the other Olympic marathon. The one in which cities and countries spend tens of millions of dollars in a race to impress fewer than 120 aristocrats, industrialists and athletic champions who decide which one gains the right to spend billions of dollars to hold captive the attention of the world for 17 days. The IOC members did not always cast their vote with a candidate city’s merit in mind.

The slogan for Griffiths’s campaign was Can you imagine?

Can you imagine, the greatest hockey players, skiers, sliders, skaters and curlers marching into B.C. Place? The Olympic rings? The Olympic flame? The gold medals for Canada? The economic windfall for British Columbians? Fame and fun for Vancouverites?

We were reminded of the success that was Expo 86, the world’s fair on transportation and communication which opened and closed inside B.C. Place and was celebrated for five-and-a-half-months on the site that stretched around neighbouring False Creek. Yes, there were 22 million turnstile clicks recorded, but it also left taxpayers more than $300 million in the red. There was also the controversial sale of the prime waterfront land to a Hong Kong billionaire. The result paid dividends for the tourism, real estate and construction industries. It didn’t make Vancouver a cheaper place to live or solve the homeless problem.

By the end of the 1990s, the Expo 86 glow had faded. Vancouver, founded in 1886, remained a young city with an undeniable inferiority complex. It had a love-hate relationship with Toronto, always seeking a reassuring pat on the head from the media and corporate elite in the country’s biggest city and then offering a one-fingered salute behind its back.

So Vancouver needed to stage another spectacle to finally fulfill its never ending quest to join the ranks of the so-called world-class cities. It also needed to wrestle money from the eastern-biased federal government to expand transit, rebuild a highway and improve sport facilities.

Such was the Pacific Northwest way. No other region in North America pinned its hopes and dreams for progress so heavily on mega-events. The phenomenon transcended the border between Canada and the United States.

Seattle chose to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Klondike Gold Rush, albeit a year late, with the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition on what is today the University of Washington campus. Vancouver had the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games, which reappeared in Victoria 40 years later. Seattle hosted the futuristic 1962 World’s Fair. Spokane brought an Expo to Washington state’s interior a dozen years later. Seattle staged the Cold War-era Goodwill Games in 1990.

Now Vancouver and Whistler wanted the Winter Olympics after three previous bids had failed to get national or international approval.

It was about time. Whistler and Blackcomb were popular stops on international downhill skiing tours and Whistler Village was lauded the best ski resort on the continent by ski and snowboard consumer and trade magazines. Vancouver had three local ski hills so close to downtown, where it had the gleaming new arena built just three years earlier by Griffiths for the National Hockey League’s Vancouver Canucks.

The post-Expo 86 building boom and an ensuing economic downturn meant public land was scarce and money was too tight to improve the city’s aging sports facilities. The Games would be the answer. The Games would also make the small southwestern corner of Canada’s vast mainland the winter sports capital of the world. A dream come true for any lover of sports, especially a sports writer. Right?

As each milestone passed and Vancouver got closer to hosting the Games in 2010, something else became apparent. While the keepers of the rings always say it’s about athletics, in reality the Olympics are a show driven by politics and economics.

I expected to be writing about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, those famous words spoken by Jim McKay in the ABC Wide World of Sports opening montage that featured ski jumper Vinko Bogataj’s famous wipeout. The Olympic era in British Columbia was instead more about fear and greed.

Gordon Campbell became Premier in 2001 and anointed himself cheerleader-in-chief for the Games. The former Vancouver mayor audaciously branded British Columbia The Best Place on Earth, despite the host city’s obvious drug crime and Dickensian homelessness.

The local economy boomed from 2003 to 2007, driven by the Olympics, but it also rode the wave of a continent-wide bubble. Then it went bust amid a storm of global economic chaos not seen since the Great Depression.

How comical, I found, was it to host an event at which sustainability was the buzzword, except in the context of finances. Organizers said their operations would be funded only by corporate sponsorship, ticket sales, broadcast royalties and souvenir sales, but were secretly going back to governments with cap in hand. I learned how the famous words on-time and on-budget can be reinterpreted for political purposes.

Organizers also foolishly made a business plan for an advertising-reliant event that assumed there would be no recession at all before 2010. Anyone in my business knows the first casualty of a recession tends to be the advertising budget.

Some $900 million was budgeted for security, which was greater than the $580 million that the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games wanted to spend on construction of sports venues. Security was originally a low-ball $175 million program, even after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan increased paranoia tenfold.

Governments bent over backwards to hide the total price tag of the Games from the public. The province’s auditor general never did a final report, to gauge value for taxpayers, waste or even corruption.

I wound up with a front row seat to a dozen years of shenanigans -- by people in suits, people who didn't like the people in suits and people who couldn't afford suits at all -- and the three glorious weeks of sport. 

The world needs the Olympics. What else is there that brings so many people from so many places together in the name of peace?

An event this big consumes a city and province and requires the help of the rest of the country. As the decade matured, you could find the Olympic rings in the background or foreground of every major decision that affected the lives of the locals. If citizens knew the task would be so daunting, would Vancouver’s 2003 civic plebiscite have passed?

Whatever the Olympics do to unify and benefit a community, the Olympics can also divide and disenfranchise. For as much as there is celebration, there is also anguish. Red mittens and red ink.

Was it worth it?

The Games closed February 28, 2010. Immediately after, they were declared a great success by those who had much to gain by that verdict.

This book is my way of chronicling a dynamic, tumultuous period in British Columbia and gauging the sometimes questionable claims by those who were so quick to label the whole thing a big success.

--Bob Mackin, February 2012

* * * * *

1: Sudden Death

The case could be made we were warned and did nothing. John Furlong

It all came down to this.

Sudden-death overtime to decide the last gold medal of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

The ultimate showdown between seven-time winner Canada, the nation that invented hockey, and the United States, which won gold at Squaw Valley 1960 and again twenty years later at Lake Placid but lost on home ice to Canada at Salt Lake City in 2002.

The Americans wanted revenge. Defeat was not an option for the Canadians. American general manager Brian Burke knew it meant more to those north of the border than in his country.

Hockey is not a sport in Canada, it’s a cult, Burke said before the tournament.

Canadians would settle for nothing less than first.

Fans wore all manner of red and white, including the special edition Nike-made jerseys. Dave Ash, a travel agent from Saskatchewan, wore a flashing red light on a white hockey helmet and waved a giant Canada flag on a telescopic pole after paying $3,000 for a ticket to the game in General Motors Place.

The score was tied 2-2. Sixty minutes of regulation time settled nothing. Now it was a sudden-death showdown for gold.

All eyes were on the goaltenders. Roberto Luongo of the Vancouver Canucks for Canada and Ryan Miller of the Buffalo Sabres for the U.S.

Who would be the first to blink?

Canada should have been savouring the gold medal by then, but for Luongo allowing Zach Parise to tie the game and force overtime with 25 seconds left in regulation time. Parise was a New Jersey Devil and his father, J.P. Parise, was a member of the Canadian team that beat the Russians in the historic 1972 Summit Series.

Hockey was played on the narrower National Hockey League-sized ice for the first time during the Olympics, at an NHL team’s arena. Dubbed Canada Hockey Place for the Games, the arena opened in 1995 but the hometown Canucks had been unable to duplicate the triumph of the 1915 Vancouver Millionaires, the only team to deliver the Stanley Cup to Vancouverites. In this puck-crazy nation, the Vancouver Games were essentially a hockey tournament supported by Canada’s other indoor winter passion, curling, the grace of figure skating and a variety of ice and snow sports more popular in Europe.

Because of this, Canada could not lose this hockey game. A defeat would plunge the country into a funk, with weeks, months and years of soul-searching and bellyaching. It could even turn violent. Police were ready for a riot to break out on the jam-packed streets outside the arena, like the one that embarrassed Vancouver after the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup final in 1994.

Doomsday was averted in the blink of an eye.

Sidney Crosby, who led the Pittsburgh Penguins to the Stanley Cup championship the previous June, executed a give-and-go with Calgary Flame Jarome Iginla on the boards to Miller’s right. Crosby shouted for Iggy to pass him the puck, he got it, then went to the net and scored on a one-timer to the left of diving, sprawling Miller. Defenders Ryan Suter and Brian Rafalski weren’t fast enough to stop the drive.

The final score was 3-2, with 7:40 gone in sudden-death overtime.

Crosby raised his stick in celebration with his left hand, as he skated around the back of the net, facing his teammates pouring off the bench. He switched hands, removed his mouthguard with his right glove and then tossed the objects skyward. Captain Scott Niedermayer hugged him by the boards as fans went delirious. The images of elated number 87 Crosby and dejected number 30 Miller weren’t as dramatic as the black-and-white photograph of Canada’s number 19 Paul Henderson and the Soviet Union’s number 20 Vladislav Tretiak at the climax of the Summit Series 38 years earlier, but they were seen by so many more people.

For Canadians, hockey saved the Games.

The final event of the 21st Olympic Winter Games was a metaphor for the seven years of rollercoaster emotions that preceded it. Just when it looked like things would be all right, a surprise would derail progress and force a rethink. Back to square one.

Whether it was the worst recession in more than seven decades, the death of a key executive, death of an athlete or a public relations foulup, a new challenge was always on the horizon to test the organization behind the gargantuan event. Success and failure could be measured in so many different ways.

The Games ended with one kind of sudden death and started 17 days earlier with another.

On the morning after the last dress rehearsal for the opening ceremony, black helicopters flew in tandem, crossing the sky over B.C. Place Stadium and the Vancouver Olympic Village, the morning after the last invite-only dress rehearsal for the opening ceremony.

A Canadian Forces Airbus circled the city at 24,000 feet, acting as a 35-tonne tank to refuel American and Canadian warplanes charged with keeping the airspace clear, although there was no hint of any terrorist threat. Not even from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida. Some called them the five-ring circus. For others, the Olympics created a five-ring fortress because of the security-conscious times.

It was lack of snow that was proving a real threat. On Cypress Mountain, crews frantically worked to avert another potential crisis by dumping more snow imported from 160 kilometres away by giant trucks normally seen at open pit mines. They weren’t going to let the El Nino-influenced weather postpone the snowboarding or freestyle skiing events at any cost.

The Olympic torch relay was approaching the city of its destiny and the crowds were overwhelming the suburban streets.

We have this kind of tension you feel in your stomach when you’re sitting in the changing room before a big game and you should have it because it causes you to rise to the occasion, said John Furlong, the chief executive officer of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. I believe we’re ready and the city is responding in the most extraordinary way today by taking to the streets and supporting the arrival of the Olympic flame.

Furlong knew about dressing rooms from his days as a Gaelic football player in his native Ireland.

He was known as Sean Furlong when he originally came to Canada in 1969 as an 18-year-old Catholic lay missionary with the Frontier Apostles. He worked as a volunteer gym teacher at the Immaculata elementary school in Burns Lake, B.C. Furlong married and moved to a Prince George Catholic high school, but returned to Ireland in 1972 after suffering an assault while refereeing a soccer match in a local industrial league. He settled in Canada as a landed immigrant in 1975, the year after his cousin died in a terrorist bombing and his father died.

His career never strayed far from sport. He moved to Vancouver Island to be a civic parks and recreation executive, then to Vancouver to run the province’s amateur sports governing body before managing the city’s most exclusive country club where powerful politicians and captains of industry spent their leisure time. He took a leave of absence to lead the winning campaign to host the 2010 Winter Olympics.

That was 2,416 days earlier, when times were a lot easier and less stressful. Now Furlong was captaining a team that put the reputation of a city, province and nation at stake. The eyes of the world were watching.

Sitting at the centre of a table on a riser with fellow VANOC executives to his left and his right, Furlong appeared at the obligatory news conference on the afternoon before the big show began. Television crews were broadcasting live to the world. Wire service photographers were shooting. Print reporters were sending quotes directly to readers via Twitter.

The Games had yet to begin, but already, the media appeared to be getting under the skin of the people running them. There was a tension in the room. Furlong, his deputy Dave Cobb, operations chief Terry Wright and sport chief Cathy Priestner Allinger were eager to talk about the transition from planning to execution and the economic and weather challenges they had to overcome. They seemed insulted by the probing questions about the quality of the private bus service hired for the Games or who might be doing what in the opening ceremony, where tickets retailed for as much as $1,100. Furlong was frustrated by the Olympic media horde’s traditional curiosity over who would light the Olympic cauldron. He was especially incensed that the local rights holding television station, CTV, used its helicopter to reveal aerial images of the outdoor cauldron, which was hidden behind large white tarps.

Directly across Burrard Inlet from the hidden cauldron, the SeaBus commuter ferry -- so integral in transporting people between downtown and the bus connections to Cypress Mountain -- was at a standstill. The North Vancouver detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigated a bomb scare at the Lonsdale Quay terminal.

SeaBus attendant Ernie Kovacs noticed a suspicious pipe leaning against a fence by diesel tanks near the administration building at 2:18 p.m. It was a three-to-four foot long black pipe with yellow enclosures at either end, electrical tape, two bar codes with the letters YVR (the code for Vancouver International Airport) and a piece of paper with a name and Nanaimo, British Columbia, address.

The area was evacuated and buses rerouted. Police helicopters, boats, dogs and the bomb disposal unit descended on the scene. A robot detonated the package three times.

SeaBus service resumed at 6:07 p.m. on the eve of the 21st Olympic Winter Games, minutes after a man called to say he left a fishing rod there before 8:30 in the morning. The city had been hooked.

If only the phone call Furlong received the next morning from Cobb could have been a similar false alarm. It was not to be.

Friday, February 12, 2010, began in Stanley Park with Hollywood icon and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and two-time Olympic gold medal British miler-cum-London 2012 organizer Sebastian Coe among the last Olympic torchbearers of the cross-country relay. Protesters later blocked the procession on Commercial Drive and in the Downtown Eastside near the Victory Square war monument. Veterans who came to the cenotaph looked on with disappointment, deprived of their chance to see the Olympic torch up close.

Over in Gastown, a long-haired and bearded prankster even lit a cigarette from the joint-like torch by the often-wrong, yet popular-with-tourists, steam clock. He was grabbed by police.

Meanwhile, in Whistler, tragedy.

Nodar Kumaritashvili, a 21-year-old from Bakuriani, Georgia, wore the number 30 bib at the start line of the Whistler Sliding Centre and was on his luge sled. He adjusted his helmet and visor and took deep breaths before his last training run on the world’s fastest track for winter sliding sports.

One more practice run on the icy 1,374-metre luge course with its 152 metre vertical drop and Kumaritashvili, who took up luge as a 13-year-old, could relax before the start of his first Olympic competition the next day.

Off he went, hitting a top speed of 144.3 kilometres per hour. He went through turns nicknamed Slingshot, Shiver and Gold Rush Trail like a blur. Then something went horribly wrong in the moments between turns 15 and 16. Kumaritashvili was catapulted off his sled on so-called Thunderbird. He flew, like a rag doll, backwards toward an unpadded steel pole. The sound of his helmet and upper back making contact with that pole was a grim, blunt clank.

His sled continued on the track, empty and undamaged.

Paramedics rushed to the scene to try their best to resuscitate him. Some of them had prepared for the worst at a mock exercise the previous June, based on the scenario of a bobsled exiting the track. Now it was real. Instead of multiple actors pretending to be hurt, it was one, real patient. The first on-scene was Terrance Kosikar, who worked at the venue.

10-80, 10-80 [the track’s code for injured athlete], code 3, corner 16! Kosikar shouted.

It was 10:50 a.m. Every moment counted. Could he be saved?

Kumaritashvili had landed under the track, in a six-foot trench, with his eyes wide open, but he was not breathing. Kosikar slipped a mask on his face and performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation until ambulance paramedics arrived. The unconscious Georgian’s face was bloodied and he had no pulse.

The blunt force trauma to his head was too much to overcome. He was pronounced dead at the Whistler athletes’ village polyclinic within an hour.

There was nothing more that we could do to help bring this kid back, Kosikar sighed.

The only other time any sliding athlete had been killed at an Olympic Games track was Britain’s Kazimierz Kay-Skrzypeski in 1964 at Igls, Austria. That was two weeks before the Games, not on opening day. It was also before the advent of high definition TV, instant replay and YouTube.

The Igls incident was 10 years after Vancouver’s first major international sports festival almost ended in tragedy.

English marathoner Jimmy Peters nearly expired of heatstroke, 385 metres shy of the finishing line on the last day of the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Empire Stadium. The race was conducted on a course half-a-mile too long in stifling, 28 degrees Celsius midday temperatures. What were the organizers thinking?

Peters walked out of hospital. Kumaritashvili did not. Now the same question was being asked.

The Whistler track was marketed by VANOC as the world’s fastest and most extreme, but the head of the International Luge Federation had reservations a year before that fateful day.

After a February 2009 world cup that