In Vancouver’s short modern history, lifelong residents recognize the city’s coming-of-age as a kind of biblical Before and After. We were one thing Before Expo ’86 and we were another After.
Three decades later, many agree. On the timeline of our post-colonial city, we can pencil in a thick line for the year of the World’s Fair.
The initially small-scale transportation expo cost billions of dollars and was called the “biggest single catalyst for the dramatic change in the city.”
The north shore of False Creek became the prototype for our city of glass, design grew sky-high where wood frames couldn’t follow. The SkyTrain delivered the suburbs downtown, and the futuristic geodesic dome turned into the post-card-pretty landmark of our future.
More than 22 million people stopped by. The world came to visit and never left, as the joke went by Mike Harcourt, the city’s mayor at the time.
Five years this month after Vancouver 2010, can we say the same thing about the Olympic Winter Games? Did a brief, intense fixation with red mittens change us?
Here’s how what happened in the years since VANOC became a household name.
We came through.
Vancouver 2010 was an abject failure before it ever started. International headlines declared it so. The Athletes’ Village was still under construction. We had no snow (but imagine if we'd hosted this winter). The torch didn't light. And then the high-speed, accidental death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili took our breath away as we paused for a terrible moment of silence.
How to go on? In Canada’s respectful way, under the watchful eye and inescapable coercion of the IOC.
The mourning shroud lifted as the sun came out and the Robson Square zip line wait times surpassed an hour. The Bay sold out of red mittens.
The Times London described the scene as “joyful.” We were “modern,” “beautiful,” “an amazing party town.” Yahoo.com wrote, “…it’s the people that power the movement. The Canadian people pushed these games back from the brink of disaster and right off into history.” Salon, famously, announced: “These were the best Winter Games ever.”
Sochi 2014 sure couldn’t live up to that, not even as Vladimir Putin chased all the clouds away.
False Creek has more glass to call home.
All in, it cost $1.1 billion and possibly more. The construction of the Athletes’ Village on Southwest False Creek was granted to a development company that almost sunk the whole project into the Salish Sea. The city bailed it out. A marketing guru bailed the city out. Still, almost no one moved into the ghost town but the Downtown East Side quickly gentrified.
Now the neighbourhood is a tony seawall destination with thousands of condo units filling the blocks north of West Second Avenue. Branded the Village on False Creek, the one thing this the area code needs is a more honest name. NoMa is taken, so don’t even try.
Regional travel is safer and faster.
The CanadaLine scuttled a handful of small businesses on Cambie Street but made the airport much more affordable to access and the downtown more approachable for international travellers.
The improved Sea to Sky Highway reduced the number of deaths on a once dangerous mountain thoroughfare and opened Squamish in a similar way the SkyTrain opened the suburbs 24 years earlier.
Patriotism isn’t a dirty word.
Maybe it was Crosby’s Golden Goal or Canada’s first gold medal on home soil despite two previous Olympic Games, one summer and one winter.
Maybe it was Jennifer Heil and Alexandre Bilodeau, the two freestyle skiers who made us all marvel as Canadians yearned for that golden first. Heil was brilliant but in the end, it was Bilodeau who proved to be a huge-hearted citizen and brother worthy of his place in national sport history.
Or maybe it was that plastic beer pitcher now on display at the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame because Jon Montgomery surprised the ranks to win gold in skeleton and then guzzled mouthfuls of celebratory brew as he drank with and walked among the crowds in Whistler Village.
Or maybe it’s the fact the sun shined for two weeks in February. What snow? We don’t need no freakin‘ snow.
The invitations were sent and thousands came knocking at our door. The block party was in full swing.
Across the country, according to estimates, 80 per cent of Canadians watched the men’s hockey final on the last day of the Olympics. Statistically speaking, if you can name five friends, four of them could tell you where they were when Sidney Crosby called out, “Iggy” and slipped the puck past the U.S. goalie (who's back in Vancouver, incidently).
For two weeks, Canadian flags waved like it was July 1 at Parliament Hill. The national anthem spontaneously broke out at Robson and Granville, and the closed-off downtown streets hosted 150,000 nightly.
Canada topped the medal tables with 14 gold. It felt good to say we’d won.
Volunteering is cool.
You can still spot the striking but unnaturally blue and decidedly uncool (sorry, it’s true) jackets worn by 2010 Olympic volunteers. Hopefully you weren’t one of those short-sighted albeit mortgage-helping residents who absconded in fear of a few visitors. Because, instead of watching from the Interior or Hawaii, you could have been at the centre of it all as a true host.
Volunteers like Rowan Bartlett took time off work to commute two hours and stand in the snow for eight more. When she spread her arms wide to mark a pathway, she was rewarded with hugs. On the days she’d miss her bus back down the hill from Whistler, Bartlett would be grateful. Her day wouldn’t drag on. Instead, she could soak in more of the atmosphere. She was one of those doubters who almost left town.
“If I had been in the city of Vancouver and had voted [in the referendum], I actually would have voted no because I thought it was an awful lot of money,” the Burnaby resident told the Courier this week. “When I was walking around Vancouver in my [Olympic] jacket, people said thank you to me. At first, it was like — are they talking to me? They were thanking me for being a volunteer. It goes to show people do appreciate volunteers.”
The civic boosterism isn’t as bright as those “blueberry” jackets five years ago, but the warmth they brought can still be felt five years later.
