Erstellt am: 6. 2. 2010 - 09:23 Uhr
Five Ring Circus
When I arrived from the airport, and was greeted outside by a warm gust of wind, I knew the Vancouver Winter Olympics were in a spot of trouble.
www.vancouver2010.com
Vancouver, British Columbia, Feb. 12-28
Dylan Goldfus, 2010
And indeed, it was true. On one hand, Cypress Mountain, where many of the ski competitions are set to take place, Mother Nature has provided very little snow. For the competitions to actually take place, snow will have to be transported in and dropped over the slopes.
On the other hand, the Blackcomb Whistler resort (which will be hosting Winter Olympics events) is currently bankrupt. Seized by creditors, it will be going on sale during the planned events in the weeks to come.
Walking on the streets by the Olympic Clock, I had a very difficult time finding people enthusiastic about the Olympics.
"It's okay," one lady tells me. "But I think most of us didn't really have a say on whether we wanted to host them or not. I guess we have to like it."
Dylan Goldfus, 2010
Others were more direct: "We'll just have a large debt [...] to pay. Once again, we'll just be left with a large tax structure that we'll have to keep on paying off, and we'll have all these symbols like the big clock around, to remind us that we've got to keep paying the taxes off, for the rich. It's just like Montreal, we'll be paying the taxes for twenty years or more.
"I'd be more happy if they fed the poor of Vancouver, the homeless, and sheltered them properly, and sent them to school. Gave them more self-worth," says Daniel, a local half-indigenous street artist. "All the Nations of BC should be represented, not just a few. And apparently they're not, so to me it isn't being fairly distributed."
A First Nations Perspective
That's right. One of the things the Canadian government was most proud of was the involvement of the First Nations in co-hosting the Olympic Events.
Dylan Goldfus, 2010
I went to the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, and asked the President, Stewart Phillip if he felt the First Nations were truly well-represented.
"All the good will generated by the torch run, and the involvement of the Four Host Nations, pales by comparison to the stark reality within all of our communities, in terms of crushing poverty that our indigenous people have to endure on a daily basis. There are 203 First Nations in the province of British Columbia. Only four are represented."
Five Ring Circus
To find out more, I talked to a documentary film maker named Conrad Schmidt, who made a film called Five Ring Circus, documenting the progress of all the promises the IOC made to the people of Vancouver, in exchange for the city hosting the Olympics.
"The one that gets me the most is when they call this the Green Olympics. One of their flagship projects was when they got these hydrogen buses up in Whistler. But they had to tear down some wetland to build a hydrogen bus depot. Then they have ship in the fuel all the way from Quebec. Then after the Olympics, the hydrogen buses are gone, but the hydrogen bus terminal is still stuck over there."
Dylan Goldfus, 2010
What about the price tag? How over-budget did things really go?
Dylan Goldfus, 2010
"I had a little suspicion that a good percentage of the promises in the bid book were all lies," he says with an ironic laugh. "One of the figures that really gave it away was the security cost. In the bid book [it] was 174 million dollars, but both games prior to that were over a billion dollars.
"What a few of us did [was] a Freedom of Information Act on the police force to find out what the real costs were. One department out of four sent us their information, which was that their budget alone was half a billion dollars. That's just one. We sent this information to the media, and only one small newspaper printed the story. It took another two years before the government acknowledged that the costs were over a billion dollars."
Free Speech and the Olympics
Finally, I went to the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA), and asked the Executive Director, David Eby, how things stood in terms of maintaining western principles such as freedom to protest.
Dylan Goldfus, 2010
Should I be concerned about my freedom of speech?
"Well," he tells me after a long pause. "If you'd asked me three months ago, I would have said no. But that was before Amy Goodman, who is a reporter for NPR (National Public Radio), was detained at the border for an hour, and interrogated about her intentions, whether she was going to be speaking about the Olympics."
Links to the mentioned organizations
Are there longer-term implications?
"I've really been sort of fascinated in the way you would be by passing a car accident," he says. "Things that I would have told you would have been impossible before the Olympic games, like laws that would allow the police to arrest the homeless who didn't immediately go to a shelter, have all happened. There's a larger narrative here of the International Olympic Committee's demands around how sanitized they want Vancouver to be; [how] the city will only be available for pro-Olympic messages, that everyone will look like they're happy and having a good time, and it seems like our governments will go a long way to allow that to happen."
Dylan Goldfus, 2010
To find out more about the not-so-shiny underbelly of the 2010 Winter Olympics, check out "All That Glitters Ain't Gold - The Dark Side of the Winter Olympics", featuring our man in Vancouver Johnny Bliss, Saturday the 6th of February, as of 12 midday, on FM4's Reality Check!
Photos by Dylan Goldfus, 2010