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Columnists

Omega at the Olympics – Days 3 through 10

Cam Charron - Sports Editor

I have been to Grey Cups. I have been to World Junior Hockey Events. I have been to NFL playoff games—alas, being from Vancouver, no Stanley Cup games—but I have never been to anything where I get to meet with people from around the world.

The Olympics is the first time, and, let us say, Europeans drink a lot.

I don’t mean to generalize an entire continent because mostly the people who are coming over to Vancouver to watch the Olympics are the affluent sports nuts.

Let’s rewind to the Slovakia/Czech Republic hockey game. It was the late night game, starting at 9 p.m. local time. Naturally most of the fans had come from downtown Vancouver bars. I have been to games where the home team has lost (many, many, many games), and it’s quieted the Vancouver hockey fans. But the Slovaks were not discouraged when they were down 3-1 late and ran into a stifling trap that threatened any chance of a comeback. They kept drinking throughout the third period, through to the end of beer sales and well into the night. They were the rowdier bunch after the game, meaning they won in European terms, despite the final score.

But the Slovaks at the hockey games have been matched by the Germans at every event I’ve been to. The Germans occupy small sections of seats, but they arrive early, chant and sing all game and never seem to mind if their hockey team has lost to the Swedes or if they’ve placed out of the medals at speed skating. They keep singing.

General Motors Place, renamed Canada Hockey Place for the duration of the Games, has had its inside redone in VANOC colours and logos. It has also had its seats on the penalty box side removed for media. The atmosphere inside is louder than most Canuck games are, since you have pockets of fans trying to drown one another out.

This past Thursday I took in a speed skating event that ended up with a Canadian, Christine Nesbitt, winning the gold medal, which was special to see. That wasn’t the only event I was going to: later that night I was going to go with to see Canadian Kevin Martin and his rink curl against France. In a decision that will haunt me the rest of my life, I declined the invitation of two cute, young Dutch girls who invited me to hang out at Heineken House with them after speed skating, by telling them I was going to go watch curling.

So rather than cavorting around a hotel bed with cute Dutch girls, here I am watching a 44-year-old bald curler in a one-sided curling match. How does Webster’s define “missed the boat?”

It actually worked out well. The curling venue is spectacular. It’s a small facility with bleacher seating on three sides of the sheets, with the media occupying the far end. There are only about four or five thousand seats, and all of them are full. Vancouver is not known as a curling town, so the people who show up are not the usually reserved curling crowd that shows up for Canadian championship events. Faces and chests get painted, beer is consumed (a LOT of it) and the wave gets going two or three times a draw.

It’s an absolute nuthouse. It’s like the Dutch fans at the Richmond Oval, but since a curling rink is a lot smaller than a speed skating one, the noise is amplified. Since it’s not a sport that relies heavily on action, curlers can hear the cheers, jeers and taunts directed at them. So much so that it caused German skip Andrea Schoepp to complain, saying that the fans "never clapped when we made a good rock. They were noisy when we had to play important shots. On their last rock?

You could hear everything it was quiet like no one was there. I think it's not really fair." To me, that’s just home ice advantage. Kevin Martin enjoys it. Canadian skip Cheryl Barnard likes it. People are having fun, and they should be.

Another pretty cool thing about the curling venue is something called HACK radio, which allows users to buy a small, portable short-wave radio device and listen inside the venue to some curling veterans who are just sitting in the crowd. They mostly explain rules and strategy to beginner fans, but will also crack jokes at one another.

Since I promised in my column last week that I’d deliver my full take on sliding, I’ll do it here: it’s a sport designed to appeal to the top sliders in the world, and that is ridiculous, if you ask me, if you seek global appeal. The Whistler Course was designed to test the absolute best, giving the lower ranked sliders in the world no chance because you have to be so precise in dangerous areas of the course.

Nodar Kumaritashvili was ranked 44th on the World Cup circuit. To compare that to hockey, it would be like pitting a top hockey nation against Luxembourg, who are ranked 44th in the International Ice Hockey Federation rankings. If Canada or Russia played against Luxembourg, it would be a drubbing. Nobody would die, which is the tragic thing about Kumaritashvili’s run, but it is not fair competition.

If you want to challenge the elite, then only invite the elite, but open up easier tracks for the lower ranked sliders to develop.

People’s Heroes: This goes out to Marc Ahr, whom I met on the train one day. He’s a French artist who sketches pictures of the games, the venues and the skylines in Olympic cities. It’s a job not mandated by the International Olympic Committee so he and his gallery have to fund his ventures, but he’s just one of those guys who run around and work hard to make sure that the Olympics still maintain cultural significance.

Canadian Heroes: We heard a lot about Frederic Bilodeau. He’s the older brother of Alexandre, who was the first ever Canadian to win a gold medal on home soil. He also has cerebral palsy, and is the reason why younger Alex is skiing, and, despite his condition, has proved himself to be a phenomenal interview.

There was a great shot after Alexandre’s run of his family, and Frederic was leaning up on the railing, one hand raised in the air in celebration. If anybody deserved to be there when Alex won gold, the guy who told him to not be discouraged after his 10th-place finish last Olympics, to be proud that he was an Olympian, should be that guy.

And that’ll be enough out of… foreign media. Well, only those from Great Britain and from the United States. The Guardian, a populist British newspaper, wrote that “It is hard to believe anything will surpass the organisational chaos and naked commercial greed of the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta or the financial­disaster of the 1976 Games, which bankrupted Montreal, yet with every passing day the sense of drift and nervousness about the Vancouver Games grows ever more noticeable” and “most worryingly of all for the organisers in Vancouver, Vanoc has failed to quell the growing sense that the 2010 Winter Olympics will be remembered as something substantially less than a triumph.” [Vancouver Games continue downhill slide from disaster to calamity – 15 February]

I understand that the games haven’t exactly gone off without a hitch, but they’ve managed to provide a jolt of culture to the city, and it’s not like it’s just Vancouver that’s enjoying the party. CTV is enjoying record ratings all across the country. As far as organization and transportation goes, there are an amazing number of volunteers who are lining people up in orderly fashion and security lineups are quick and painless.

As for American media, NBC, who own the rights to the games below the border, is tape delaying important events for primetime hours to cater to the working population. The network that favours Leno over Conan is under the assumption that Americans don’t already know the results when sitting down to watch. Lindsey Vonn, who graced Sports Illustrated’s cover in their Olympic preview issue, had a gold-medal run which wasn’t seen by her countrymen until hours after the event was over. The website is not helping out. NBCOlympics.com will post results to events, but doesn’t stream the pictures for a public who might want to watch events live.

I’ll close with unfortunately pointing out that I did not manage to grab an exclusive Omega interview with Stephen Colbert. If anything changes, you can catch it directly from my twitter @camcharron or at @omeganewspaper. Seven days left. While the cops have shut down nighttime liquor sales, the party has just started.