In any discussion about the merits of playing host to the 2010 Winter Olympics, Games boosters and tourism types have consistently maintained that the free positive publicity the event would generate was priceless. But I don't imagine a recent story in the British newspaper The Guardian is the type of advance billing that supporters of our winter festival had in mind. "Vancouver's Olympics head for disaster," shouted the headline.
Just days before the big event, the story said, the city of Vancouver is gripped with dread. The Bailout Games, as the reporter dubs them, have "already been labelled a staggering financial disaster."
Originally to cost $660-million, the price tag is now $6-billion.
"With a police officer on every corner and military helicopters buzzing overhead," The Guardian goes on, "Vancouver looks more like postwar Berlin than a winter wonderland."
A nice bit of anecdotal imagery if only it were true. But it's not. It's what the Brits might call complete rubbish.
That includes the bit about the budget ballooning from $660-million to $6-billion. But, then, when you're reading a story that says, "This manic mix of hype and gloom is a byproduct of the Games' utter pointlessness," it does make one suspicious.
Unfortunately, The Guardian is not alone when it comes to the kind of reporting on these Games that makes you worry about the state of journalism.
I had to check twice that a recent story on Sports Illustrated's website had not been written by the same prognosticator of doom that The Guardian had hired. "As Olympics near, people in Vancouver are dreading the Games," blared the headline.
This was based, near as I could tell, on an interview with a disillusioned city bus driver. Suddenly, he was giving voice to the masses.
The story also repeated the fiction that the Games were $5-billion more costly than anticipated. And included a quote from an activist who intimated there were 3,000 homeless people on street because of the Olympics who were being harassed by police officers whose job it was to clean the sidewalks of riff-raff before visitors started arriving.
The truth is, the city and provincial government have been working overtime to set up temporary shelters and establish more long-term accommodations for the homeless. Yes, it all should have been done years ago, but it wasn't.
Now the greatest legacy of the Games may be the impetus it provided to start tackling this problem. But to suggest that people are being dumped on the streets by the thousands is patently ridiculous.
As for the cost of the Games, well, we can go round the mulberry bush all day on this topic. But if you're going to suggest, as Olympic critics do, that the Games have cost $6-billion, at least have the decency to say that a good chunk of that amount - $4-billion, in fact - has gone to things that were going to get built anyway.
Like a new rapid transit line, which the Greater Vancouver area desperately needed. (It's already running at capacity.) Or the upgrades to the Sea-to-Sky highway, which was known as one of the deadliest stretches of road in the country and had to be fixed. Or the new convention centre, which was also going to be built because of the tens of millions of dollars the city loses annually in business to North American competitors that have the capacity to play host to large events.
This is all infrastructure that will exist decades from now, continuing to generate revenue that never seems to get factored into the Olympic financial equation. All that the Games did was speed up the completion timetable for these projects.
Yes, there are people who feel that money for sporting extravaganzas would be better spent on libraries and hospitals and helping the poor. Bless them. And I get that there are those who believe the Olympics are nothing more than a decadent corporate cocktail party that gives politicians the bogus right to impose police-state like sanctions and limitations on our freedoms. I don't. Call me a sellout.
But if we're going to talk about this, let's make it an honest discussion. Some of the media's advance work on the Vancouver Games shows why that's so hard to do.
Gary Mason