We’re seeing the rise of two kinds of Olympic Games leading up to 2010. We saw them both in Whistler over the past weekend.
Last Friday we saw the Olympics being pushed by John Furlong, CEO of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for 2010. Flanked by images of Ilanaaq, the ubiquitous smiling inukshuk, he delivered a lunchtime lecture to the annual general meeting of the B.C. Chamber of Commerce at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler. In it he outlined his vision for an Olympics that could make all participants better people, just by joining in.
The central theme of Furlong’s speech was giving, and how Vancouverites and Whistlerites can do that when the Games commence in 2010. He began his speech by telling a story of how, on a recent trip to Beijing, he and an associate found themselves lost and frustrated in the city’s mammoth airport, unable to find the driver that would take them to make a presentation to the International Olympic Committee.
Soon they encountered a “sharp-looking” young man who offered to take them into the city for $25. On the way they started talking about the Olympics and the young man gushed about how proud he was that the Games would be coming to town.
Eventually the driver discovered that he was chauffering the CEO of the Olympics in Vancouver. The young man, ecstatic at his fare, told Furlong that it would be a privilege for him to do anything to “make life better” for him when he inevitably returned for the Summer Games.
Furlong returned to his hotel room the next day to find a gift from the driver waiting for him. It came with a note from the driver saying, again, that it would be a privilege for him to make life better for Furlong when he returned to Beijing.
He told his audience, “If we could get that and multiply it by two million and have that impact, and have every citizen play that role for everybody that comes from around the world when the Games are in Vancouver, we will have done the job we set out to do.”
Sixty-nine per cent of Canadians, he said, feel the 2010 Games will be a resounding success. Seventy-two per cent feel it will touch the country in a positive way. Both of these are figures from an Ipsos-Reid survey whose results have yet to be released.
A very different Olympics was seen on Saturday night at the Whistler Public Library. Tucked into a small room was a screening of Five Ring Circus, a film that suggests at least one group of citizens isn’t ready to be quite as giving as Furlong hopes.
On the surface, Five Ring Circus is a documentary that aims to showcase the various impacts that the Games are having on Vancouver, Whistler and their surrounding areas. Beneath that, it’s an invective against the Olympics that suggests the Games are an oppressive force that departs somewhat from the charitable vision that Furlong is pitching.
The film starts with majestic images of the Parthenon and a forum in Athens, with the Olympic Rings surrounded by doves in silhouette. It’s a glorious montage similar to one you’ll find in a Leni Riefenstahl picture.
Soon, however, it cuts to the lead-up to 2010, where pro-Olympic rallies at English Bay barely obscure protesters holding banners that implore the province to stop building a highway through the Eagleridge Bluffs.
The film sets out to prove how the 2010 Games are an unsustainable, secretive movement that 36 per cent of Vancouverites voted against in a 2003 plebiscite — neglecting, in effect, to mention that 64 per cent, a hefty majority, voted in favour.
It then trots out a series of political opponents to the Games in lengthy interviews, among them Chris Shaw, a professor of ophthalmology at UBC and spokesperson for the anti-Games group 2010 Watch. There’s also Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan, who sees 2010’s sustainability angle as “so laughable” as to be offensive.
The film, produced in 2006, neglected to mention that Burnaby had lost its claim to an Olympic speed skating oval to a site in Richmond while Corrigan was still mayor. Shaw admitted after the film that Corrigan’s interview could have been driven by bitterness over losing the facility.
The film laments the environmental degradation of Eagleridge Bluffs by showing images of elderly protester Betty Krawczyk as she stages a one-woman blockade against construction in the bluffs.
The film also spends a lengthy quarter documenting the attempts by social justice groups to occupy buildings in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a region whose buildings are allegedly being bought up by the city in advance of the Olympics. Those groups include the Anti-Poverty Committee, which later went on to trash the premier’s office and dump garbage at the front door of Sam Sullivan’s Yaletown apartment building.
Shaw’s problem with the Games is that he feels VANOC and the IOC are lying to the public. He argued that VANOC is exempt from Freedom of Information laws, which makes it impossible for the public to retrieve information about VANOC through the provincial government. He also argues, from his own group’s calculations, that the Olympics will lead to the discharge of 3.45 megatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
Regardless of what’s being said or neglected, there are nevertheless two Olympics being pitched today — one is John Furlong’s, an event that will be filled with glory and elation at hosting one of the biggest events in Canada’s history. The other kind, proposed by Five Ring Circus, is an event that has blazed a trail through natural areas and displaced people out of their homes in its wake.
Time will tell which vision will prevail, and whether the two currently on offer will meld or collide come 2010.
