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BEIJING — Now it's Vancouver's turn.
When the final Chinese acrobat has flown through the air, the last lip-syncher pranced from view and the Olympic flame snuffed out at the spectacular Bird's Nest stadium here tomorrow night, the eyes of the world will shift to the next city in the Olympic spotlight.
Vancouver, warts and all, and its preparations for the 2010 Winter Olympics will be poked, prodded and probed by the global news media as never before.
It's already happening. VANOC boss John Furlong held a news conference here yesterday, expecting the usual suspects from the B.C. news media and maybe a wire service reporter or two. Instead, the room was packed.
The Krolak family of Ottawa and Wiggan family of Vancouver get a tour from Whistler Sliding Centre volunteer John Brodie at the venue Friday. (Bonny Makarewicz for the Globe and Mail.)
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"We are no longer second in line," said Mr. Furlong, CEO of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Winter Games. "Every activity we do from here on will be analyzed and scrutinized. In China, for the past year, almost every last thing that happened there was reported globally. Well, that's going to start happening to us."
Daily hits on VANOC's official website, meanwhile, have gone up by an astonishing five times since the Summer Olympics began.
But how do you follow a "wow" like Beijing?
While the Winter Games are a much more modest affair, no one denies that a new Olympic standard has been set by the mostly trouble-free and surprisingly smog-free Games in Beijing.
For the past two weeks, a relatively small but key group of VANOC executives has seen it all first-hand. And they've been blown away, too.
Yet they've done more than just gasp in awe. With this the last chance to see a real Olympics unfold before 2010, however inexact the comparison with Vancouver, they've been doing their own probing, prodding and poking into the soft underbelly of Beijing's so-called Godzilla Games.
And their conclusion? With fewer than 18 months to go, VANOC is quietly confident that its Olympics will be the equal of Beijing, and in some ways even better. Not in scope, but ethically and in quality.
The 2010 Games will not be staged in an authoritarian country. They will be done the Canadian way.
That means no embarrassing daily questions to the International Olympic Committee about the host country's latest human-rights shortcomings, nothing hidden behind hastily erected hoardings, no kilometre after kilometre of intimidating chain-link fencing around parks and venues, and above all, no evictions, not even from Vancouver's grimmest of eyesores, the Downtown Eastside.
Protests, which Chinese authorities have quashed like a bug? Bring 'em on, Mr. Furlong told reporters.
"We don't see them as a negative. They are something we value. They happen in communities right across the country. We accept it and that's the way it is," he said.
"It's just what people do in Canada when they want to make a point about something, and Canadians do it as well as anybody."
And more. Having seen the Summer Games here up close, Vancouver organizers are even more determined to make the city an Olympic party town.
A major knock on the Beijing Olympics, amid all the huzzahs, was the lack of on-site buzz, since access to the vast main venue area was restricted to those with event tickets or special passes. Chinese authorities, still nervous about uncontrolled crowds, also ruled out establishing a central gathering place where Beijingers without tickets could show up, watch the Games on large outdoor screens and boogie.
Some have called these the "No Fun Games."
"I did expect that there would be more people gathering at night out on the streets," Mr. Furlong said. "But we didn't see it."
That's the exact opposite of what Vancouver is planning.
VANOC and the city want large celebration zones to create a festive atmosphere all over the downtown. "We want people to celebrate every night. We want to give everyone a chance to be part of the Games, a sense of ownership over the Olympics," Mr. Furlong said. "Our goal is to share the Games with every citizen."
And no one will need a ticket or a pass.
Even more aggressively, VANOC continues to pursue an unprecedented Olympic strategy of what has come to be called "putting a bum in every seat." As all other Games before it - summer and winter - Beijing had many venues with rows of embarrassingly empty seats, when all events were supposedly sold out.
The problem, traditionally, is that 30 per cent of all tickets are allocated to the Olympic family of sponsors and national Olympic committees. Many of these tickets go unused.
"It's a complex challenge, but we believe we can do better than our predecessors," said VANOC executive vice-president Dave Cobb.
It's no fun for the athletes or the spectators when so many seats remain unfilled, he said.
VANOC hopes to press corporate sponsors to do the right thing and cough up tickets they know will not be used. An approved ticket exchange program is also being worked out.
Mr. Cobb acknowledged that the fewer events and the popularity of winter sports in Canada makes tackling the empty-seat syndrome easier for them than for any city playing host to a Summer Olympics.
"We will have 1.6 million tickets compared with 6.8 million in Beijing, and the 15 sports of the Winter Olympics are all very well known," he said. "One of the big problems at other Olympics is the number of sports the host country is unfamiliar with. So we are in a much better position."
Mr. Furlong can't resist adding another built-in advantage Vancouver has: "that fantastic natural backdrop."
At the same time, many aspects of the Beijing Games did sufficiently impress VANOC's 38-member team of observers that they are taking home some valuable operating lessons.
Security is one. Against all expectations, Beijing organizers set up security checkpoints, staffed by polite young volunteers, that were fast and efficient.
VANOC was also intrigued by the system of briskly preclearing members of the news media at their residences and busing them directly to the Main Press Centre, rather than having everyone wait grumpily in long lines outside the facility for their security clearance.
The Vancouver observers also thought the dedicated Olympic traffic lanes worked well, although there will be far more walking to 2010 venues than was possible in spread-out Beijing.
And they were totally captivated by the Summer Games' vast army of helpful, smiling volunteers.
VANOC officials were impressed as well by the spectacular Olympic look of the city, with banners, flags and billboards everywhere, and the speed with which Olympic arrivals were processed at Beijing's stunning new airport.
And Mr. Cobb said Beijing did a superb job of moving large numbers of people in and out of large venues, such as the Bird's Nest. It helped that there were vast empty spaces outside most of the venues, a luxury Vancouver does not have.
"We are quite envious," he confessed. "We have much smaller spaces, and the flow of people is a problem we are going to have to meet head on."
With its smaller budget, smaller scope and cold winter sports (many countries in the world barely know a luge from a pineapple), the 2010 Winter Games, Canada's third Olympics, has a tough task ahead to find its place in the Olympic pantheon of "greatest Games ever," now that Beijing has gone over the top.
But Mr. Furlong simply isn't worried, despite spending enough time here surrounded by the spectacle "to need two haircuts."
"I really don't think people are going to compare the two Games. A month from now, people will remember Beijing and then move on. ... We have a very good reputation in the world, and we've made our Games about the whole country," Mr. Furlong said.
"That's unique for the Olympics, and our expectations of delivering a magnificent Games are very high."
Michael Payne, the IOC's former marketing director and now an independent consultant, agrees that the tireless Mr. Furlong's expectations are well founded.
"The Winter Games don't pretend to compete with the noise level of the Summer Games," he told the SportsBusiness Journal this week. "But Vancouver is such a perfect destination in a country that is passionate about Olympic sports ... that the experience and atmosphere there in 2010 is going to be stunning."
