Olympic fever was palpable this week as celebrations of the 2010 two-year countdown rocked communities from Halifax to Vancouver. Here in Squamish, the CBC Early Edition chose to broadcast its 6 a.m. show from Cleveland Avenue on Tuesday, and Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee CEO, John Furlong himself, was at the mic (for approximately 10 minutes) to launch the official call to volunteers.
And despite the CBC's attempts at creating divisiveness in town, with its "probing" questions on contentious issues, the audience didn't quite play ball, standing firm in its enthusiasm for the Olympics and more or less presenting a common front.
Perhaps as reward (although others may call it punishment) Squamish seems to have finally gotten an invitation to the party. VANOC reps were also in town Tuesday to announce and open the Sea to Sky volunteer centre location on Tantalus Road. The situation obviously works well for VANOC, and it means thousands of people from around the world will be ushered to town to get oriented, organized and, presumably, sent on their way.
This bodes well not only for local businesses, but also for Squamish's reputation, since these people will undoubtedly leave with a truer sense of the town and its people than will be generated by the national and international media.
Misrepresentation on the national and international stage is a burden residents will see time and again coming up to and during the Games. We've already witnessed this with the CBC's erroneous report of our "Waterfront" development partnering the district with the "private" Squamish Oceanfront Development Corporation, which would apparently involve multiple-storey towers.
If a media outlet located no more than an hour away can't get it straight, surely journalists from across the globe, many with little or no English, will have a tough time. And VANOC's PR machine won't help the cause - according to their news release, this week a "street team" of young men and women tasked with generating enthusiasm for Games volunteering were "sent to high traffic areas in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Squamish, Whistler and Vancouver, staging fun, interactive games for the public and providing information about where to apply."
Although the Squamish team had planned on bringing the Olympic mascots along, the mascots themselves had other ideas and simply drove straight through to Whistler. The street team itself stood shivering in the rain on the corner of Pemberton and Second Avenue with nary a wave to passing motorists, then they too were on their way.
So, as has been repeated over and over again by local Olympics enthusiasts, it lands on residents to create the image that thousands of individuals will take home with them and share with others for years to come. So, what's it going to be?
