Red Mitts and Cowbells

Guest Blogger: Belle

Now that the flame is out, the honking has died down on Yonge Street, and all of us have returned to real life, I thought I should share with everyone at Vic the flip side of Brandon’s blog about celebrating the gold medal hockey game in the Cat’s Eye – namely, what it was like to be in Vancouver during the Olympics!

Those of you who’ve been lucky enough to go there know already that Vancouver is breathtakingly beautiful – even though they were rather less snow-clad than the organizers might have wished, the Rockies were spectacular. The weather may have been unfortunate for the Games, but it was perfect for all of the visitors who packed the stands and cheered in the streets, all of them wearing the Olympics mitts and waving flags and breaking into spontaneous and horribly tuneless renditions of O Canada. There were flags literally everywhere, a sea of red and white interspersed with the colours of other nations as well, even a few people proudly displaying the flags of several nations in their apartment windows.

By watching deadlines and joining the lottery process a year and a half in advance, we were able to get tickets for three Olympics events: two figure skating (pairs’ short and men’s short) and one women’s hockey (Canada against Sweden). Our seats for the pairs’ short were right at the top, but we managed to sneak down to the lowest section for the men’s, which meant that when Stephane Lambiel skated into our corner to pick up a stuffed animal someone had thrown to him and smiled at the crowd, we could feel the middle-aged ladies around us swooning! Figure skating feels much more trick-oriented and less concerned with the emotional expression and music in person – I could almost forgive all of the recent talk about the quad, it is so spectacular in person. It seems that everyone watched it obsessively on TV and the internet, so I thought I’d let you know about some things that maybe didn’t come across over the media.

One thing you never see on TV is the young girls who skate out to collect any flowers or gifts the athletes get. They were sent out in pairs, but except when the Canadians or Japanese skaters were competing (when the entire contingent had to be dispatched!), almost none of them got their moment in the spotlight. Sometimes they’d skated halfway to the stuffed animals before the athletes turned out of their way and picked it up themselves instead, and the poor girls were so disappointed that we spent almost as much effort cheering for them as for the earlier skaters.

The other thing I’d never realized before was how much pressure there is on Canadian athletes. For everyone else, we clapped politely after jumps and at the beginning and end of the program, but for the Canadians, especially Patrick Chan, everyone pulled out their Canada hats and mitts and cowbells and noisemakers and basically roared through the entire program. And you couldn’t not clap, either, even though you knew it added so much more pressure, because not doing so would have been basically treason. One guy wearing the Olympic flag as a cloak ran around handing out Canadian flags to everyone in the crowd, and there was even a lady who pulled out a tambourine and was tapping along to the beat of the music!

Who knew there were so many closet figure skating fans? Back in Toronto, I was shocked to find out that everyone in class was talking about axels and lutzes and spins and footwork, about Lysacek versus Plushenko, about Joannie Rochette’s unimaginable courage and Tessa and Scott’s dazzling victory. As someone who is not much of a hockey fan (not that I would have said that on the night of the gold-medal game for the world), I was delighted to find that figure skating was finally getting the attention it deserved.

But of course, hockey was even crazier, being Canada’s game and all. From the moment we entered the stadium, we were overwhelmed by the excitement. All of us were cheering and yelling and the guy handing out flags at figure skating was back, sporting a police-car light on his head and organizing waves. (I’m pretty sure I saw him at the men’s gold-medal hockey game as well!) And of course the ladies gave us plenty to cheer for, with the final score an exhilarating 13-1 for Canada. There was a kid sitting in the first row wearing half Swedish and half Canadian garb who was utterly adorable and, I thought, very appropriately Canadian.

Since my friend’s dad works for one of the main Olympic sponsors, we got to go into the Olympic Village as well, which was amazing. Although understandably we couldn’t go into the residences, we did tour the gift shop and make rock star poses on the stage where the welcoming and flag-raising ceremonies for each country were held. (We were told that immediately after the ceremony, China abandoned the Village and whisked its athletes to a hotel in Richmond where they were fed food brought all the way from the other side of the world and cooked by Chinese chefs!) Our tour guide was rather scornful of Plushenko, who she thought took airs and carried himself like a snowboarder instead of a figure skater.

We even managed to hold real Olympic medals … after a four-hour wait, three line-ups (including one for special gloves that said “I touched a gold medal” on them), and a stern warning not to make thumbs up or victory signs or to bite the medals. They’re beautiful, as well as surprisingly heavy, weighing around a pound each! The medals for the Olympics carry designs of an orca pod, symbolizing the communities that support the athletes, while the Paralympic medals feature Raven, who represents triumph over obstacles.

The non-Olympics-related feature of Vancouver that struck me most was how much it has done in terms of protecting and promoting First Nations’ culture in recent years, despite all of the historical and ongoing problems we’ve heard so much about. Anyone who watched the Opening Ceremonies will know that this is the first Olympics where the aboriginal peoples have been involved in everything from the making the bid to designing the artwork to hosting the visitors. The First Nations and Northern Pavilions featured First Nations, Metis, and Inuit music, dance, art, and sports, including a video showing a recording of a traditional longhouse dance, which have never before been seen outside. Everywhere we went, we were asked to bear witness, to return home and tell our friends about what we had seen. One drummer told us that for too long, the songs he sang had been associated with protests, with camouflage wear and anger, and that he wanted to reclaim them and share them with others in a spirit of community.

There were wonderful exhibits of totem poles, bentwood boxes, sculptures, weavings, and potlatch dishes the size of baby carriages at the museums. In one museum, we saw photographs of masks that had been returned to the nations to whom they belonged in accordance with the terms of a recent treaty. When the art of making a certain kind of blanket had been lost, the ones stored in the museum’s collections were used by the women to reclaim it. And we discovered that the stories of totem poles could be told only by the owner or with his permission and needed to be read from the labels instead of being spoken by the guide. My favourite pieces were the sculptures of Bill Reid – if you have a $20 bill, check out the back. That’s his.

Each province or region of Canada had its own pavilion, as did many of the countries who’d sent athletes. Although my favourites were the Aboriginal and Northern Pavilions, Ontario’s was also quite popular, since you could control the lights on the CN tower from there! And in Russia House, we watched (on the IMAX screen in the Science Centre!) a film about Russian peasant women and learned that the designs on the Russian costumes were actually Firebird tails, which bring good luck if you can catch them.

So that was pretty much it, except for seeing a sea otter that ate 25% of its weight in clams a day at the Aquarium, a suspension bridge capable of holding 96 elephants (although whether or not it could hold 96 stampeding elephants is another story), and crocuses blooming in the middle of February in the Butchart Gardens in Victoria.

I hope that all of you were as proud of Canada’s and the world’s games as I was, and that all of you enjoyed the party!

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