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These are not the worst Games ever
February 17, 2010 9:48 PM | Comments32Recommend60
By Bruce Arthur
VANCOUVER -- So there was this French downhill skier on Wednesday, and she burst out of the starting gate and got about 35 feet before the whole thing went kablooey. And if you were a fool, you would use that as your metaphor for the 2010 Olympics Winter Games.
If you were a fool, you would use that, or the vomiting faux-Zambonis, or the weather. Especially the weather. And if you were a ghoul, you would use the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili. You know, to show these Games have been one big accident.
All this, of course, relates to the discussion about this potentially being the worst Games ever. The British press led the charge, but they are by no means alone; they're just the most openly feral members of the English-speaking media. Everyone is weighing in, to various degrees.
So as The Guardian runs the much-quoted headline, 'Vancouver Games continue downhill slide from disaster to calamity' -- with a subhead that says fiascos are "threatening to make these Games the worst in Olympic history" -- and various others chime in, maybe we should take a second to examine, as they say in figure skating, the judging criteria.
I am not saying this whole thing is going well. It's not. If they could just get through one day without a fresh report of something that went wrong, it would be like yesterday's break in the weather. Instead, we get a million problems, big and small. A mucked-up start in the biathlon. An accident at a downtown concert that sent nine people to hospital. Another transportation situation. A report that a mentally ill man, using a homemade security pass, got within a few metres of U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden during the Opening Ceremonies.
If you're paying attention, you know the rest of the rundown: The weather at Cypress has been bad enough that 28,000 tickets have been revoked due to unsafe conditions in standing-room areas. We're only one-for-two on lighting the Olympic cauldron as intended, and the permanent cauldron was stuck behind security fencing, 100 feet from the public, until Wednesday morning. On and on it goes.
So no, things aren't quite going seamlessly. You want to criticize it? Feel free.
But you want to judge this the worst Games ever after five days, here's what you base it on: You base it on the fact that it included the preventable death of an athlete in competition. That's it. That's the main criteria. Base your criticism on the fact that yesterday, the IOC again said, "This was a [luge] track that was safe," cited run statistics as if they mattered, and again failed to admit that somebody is to blame if a kid becomes the first fatality in luge in 35 years because, on the fastest track in history, he made one damned mistake.
Everything else that has happened here is an inconvenience at best. So many of us have already left that death in the past, to the point that a CTV anchor said Wednesday that "The 2010 Games have had to contend with a few glitches, none bigger than the weather."
But if you're scoring the rest, you want to judge these Games as worse than Munich, where athletes were taken hostage and killed? Worse than Atlanta, where in addition to logistical nightmares -- and the fact that they gave homeless people one-way bus tickets -- a bomb actually went off?
For that matter, what about Beijing? Well, in Beijing the transportation system was a marvel. The one time I was on a bus that broke down, the replacement driver drove like a demon all the way back into the city, his thumb constantly on the horn, as if his life depended on this one gaggle of international journalists getting home on time.
The problem was that it's possible that was the case. Nobody judged the success of those Games on the fact that an estimated 1.5-million people were displaced for the Games, that censorship and human rights violations ruled the day, or that people who applied to demonstrate in the designated protest zones were immediately arrested, including 77- and 79-year-old grandmothers who were sentenced five years of re-education through hard labour.
There was criticism of these outrages, of course. But nobody called Beijing the worst Games ever, because the buses ran on time.
There are more than one Olympics. There is the Olympics that we in the media experience, the one the athletes experiences, and the one the public experiences. But only one of us write the verdict on the Olympics in question. And we're too often petty creatures, we are.
For fans, meanwhile -- well, this city has come alive. Downtown fairly crackles these days; people are swarming anything Olympic-related, to the point that German House had a 35-minute lineup at noon Wednesday. The outdoor cauldron viewing area, where they moved the fence in and cut a strip out and opened a neighbouring rooftop for all the picture seekers, is teeming. Everything is.
Organizing Committee CEO John Furlong said Wednesday that "There's a great spirit, and that spirit, I think, can be best seen around the venues, in the city, at night. I've lived here for a long time and I've never seen anything like what's happening in our city every night here."
It's easy to dismiss the words of the organizer, but I lived here for 27 years, and I agree with him. This Olympics is a remarkable festival. People are having fun. You could call that a success, if you bothered to look. And as for the kinks, I agreed with Furlong there, too, when he said "When we make mistakes, we have to fix them."
This isn't a Canadian coming to the defence of his country, or even his hometown. My only investment in these Games running smoothly is one of professional convenience; I don't benefit one way or another if the Vancouver Games are judged a success or a failure. And hell, there's still time for this whole enterprise to fall apart.
But there's time for it to hold together, too.
http://www.cbc.ca/olympics/blogs/brucearthur/2010/02/these-are-not-the-worst-games-ever.html
February 17, 2010 9:48 PM | Comments32Recommend60
By Bruce Arthur
VANCOUVER -- So there was this French downhill skier on Wednesday, and she burst out of the starting gate and got about 35 feet before the whole thing went kablooey. And if you were a fool, you would use that as your metaphor for the 2010 Olympics Winter Games.
If you were a fool, you would use that, or the vomiting faux-Zambonis, or the weather. Especially the weather. And if you were a ghoul, you would use the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili. You know, to show these Games have been one big accident.
All this, of course, relates to the discussion about this potentially being the worst Games ever. The British press led the charge, but they are by no means alone; they're just the most openly feral members of the English-speaking media. Everyone is weighing in, to various degrees.
So as The Guardian runs the much-quoted headline, 'Vancouver Games continue downhill slide from disaster to calamity' -- with a subhead that says fiascos are "threatening to make these Games the worst in Olympic history" -- and various others chime in, maybe we should take a second to examine, as they say in figure skating, the judging criteria.
I am not saying this whole thing is going well. It's not. If they could just get through one day without a fresh report of something that went wrong, it would be like yesterday's break in the weather. Instead, we get a million problems, big and small. A mucked-up start in the biathlon. An accident at a downtown concert that sent nine people to hospital. Another transportation situation. A report that a mentally ill man, using a homemade security pass, got within a few metres of U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden during the Opening Ceremonies.
If you're paying attention, you know the rest of the rundown: The weather at Cypress has been bad enough that 28,000 tickets have been revoked due to unsafe conditions in standing-room areas. We're only one-for-two on lighting the Olympic cauldron as intended, and the permanent cauldron was stuck behind security fencing, 100 feet from the public, until Wednesday morning. On and on it goes.
So no, things aren't quite going seamlessly. You want to criticize it? Feel free.
But you want to judge this the worst Games ever after five days, here's what you base it on: You base it on the fact that it included the preventable death of an athlete in competition. That's it. That's the main criteria. Base your criticism on the fact that yesterday, the IOC again said, "This was a [luge] track that was safe," cited run statistics as if they mattered, and again failed to admit that somebody is to blame if a kid becomes the first fatality in luge in 35 years because, on the fastest track in history, he made one damned mistake.
Everything else that has happened here is an inconvenience at best. So many of us have already left that death in the past, to the point that a CTV anchor said Wednesday that "The 2010 Games have had to contend with a few glitches, none bigger than the weather."
But if you're scoring the rest, you want to judge these Games as worse than Munich, where athletes were taken hostage and killed? Worse than Atlanta, where in addition to logistical nightmares -- and the fact that they gave homeless people one-way bus tickets -- a bomb actually went off?
For that matter, what about Beijing? Well, in Beijing the transportation system was a marvel. The one time I was on a bus that broke down, the replacement driver drove like a demon all the way back into the city, his thumb constantly on the horn, as if his life depended on this one gaggle of international journalists getting home on time.
The problem was that it's possible that was the case. Nobody judged the success of those Games on the fact that an estimated 1.5-million people were displaced for the Games, that censorship and human rights violations ruled the day, or that people who applied to demonstrate in the designated protest zones were immediately arrested, including 77- and 79-year-old grandmothers who were sentenced five years of re-education through hard labour.
There was criticism of these outrages, of course. But nobody called Beijing the worst Games ever, because the buses ran on time.
There are more than one Olympics. There is the Olympics that we in the media experience, the one the athletes experiences, and the one the public experiences. But only one of us write the verdict on the Olympics in question. And we're too often petty creatures, we are.
For fans, meanwhile -- well, this city has come alive. Downtown fairly crackles these days; people are swarming anything Olympic-related, to the point that German House had a 35-minute lineup at noon Wednesday. The outdoor cauldron viewing area, where they moved the fence in and cut a strip out and opened a neighbouring rooftop for all the picture seekers, is teeming. Everything is.
Organizing Committee CEO John Furlong said Wednesday that "There's a great spirit, and that spirit, I think, can be best seen around the venues, in the city, at night. I've lived here for a long time and I've never seen anything like what's happening in our city every night here."
It's easy to dismiss the words of the organizer, but I lived here for 27 years, and I agree with him. This Olympics is a remarkable festival. People are having fun. You could call that a success, if you bothered to look. And as for the kinks, I agreed with Furlong there, too, when he said "When we make mistakes, we have to fix them."
This isn't a Canadian coming to the defence of his country, or even his hometown. My only investment in these Games running smoothly is one of professional convenience; I don't benefit one way or another if the Vancouver Games are judged a success or a failure. And hell, there's still time for this whole enterprise to fall apart.
But there's time for it to hold together, too.
http://www.cbc.ca/olympics/blogs/brucearthur/2010/02/these-are-not-the-worst-games-ever.html
