Soul on ice

Could Dustin Byfuglien save hockey in Atlanta?

While Vancouver Canuck Henrik Sedin was celebrating a Hart Trophy, Byfuglien was quietly enjoying his Stanley Cup summer in Phoenix until he found out he was traded.

The Fugly One was a Chicago Blackhawk until June 23 when he was dealt to the Atlanta Thrashers. The 25-year-old from Minneapolis had 11 goals and five assists in the Hawks’ Stanley Cup run. He certainly got some votes for the Conn Smythe Trophy and was unpopular in Vancouver for getting in the way of Roberto Luongo so often.

Atlanta is the eighth-largest media marketplace in the United States and it is rich with sports, where the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Falcons dominate the pro sports scene and the Georgia Bulldogs are the college mainstay. Basketball’s Atlanta Hawks are a bigger wintertime draw than the Thrashers, who averaged only 13,607 fans last season. That’s the third-worst attendance in the league.

Atlantans never did relate to Russian Ilya Kovalchuk, but they might just come to know and love The Fugly One.

While much was made of the Blackhawks marketing to African-American fans in Chicago, it’s a demographic that the Thrashers need for their survival. More than half of Atlantans are African-American.

Byfuglien, whose father was African-American Ricky Spencer, could end up playing on the same line in Atlanta with Vancouver Giants’ product Evander Kane. Kane was picked fourth overall last year by the Thrashers and is named after Atlanta heavyweight boxing superstar Evander Holyfield.

Atlanta is also the birthplace of Martin Luther King, who led the civil rights movement.

It's a long climb to the hilltop that is the Stanley Cup, but 2010-2011 could be the year Atlanta is spared from becoming the first city to lose two National Hockey League franchises. Thanks to Evander Kane and Dustin Byfuglien.

No Vancouver 2014

There will not be a Vancouver 2014.

Who would organize it and who would pay for it? VANOC is dismantling itself and, well, you know all about the British Columbia government's budget problems and the HST in the former Host-province.

Rumors swirled during Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics that the Russians wouldn’t be ready to host the 2014 Winter Games because work had barely begun in Sochi.

Sochi 2014 president Dmitry Chernyshenko tried to thwart the rumors at a Vancouver news conference at the end of February by calling his hometown the “world’s biggest construction site.”

It wasn’t spin folks, it’s the truth. I was there last week and saw the massive amount of work to build venues, hotels, tunnels, bridges, port facilities and power plants. Some $30 billion of public and private money is being spent. It’s nothing like we saw in Vancouver because the Russians are building from scratch. It’s actually the winter version of Beijing. Chernyshenko wants the sporting venues to be finished two winters before his Games.

Work hasn’t begun on the 40,000-seat Olympic stadium near the shores of the Black Sea, but the Bolshoi Ice Palace hockey rink (below) is on-track to be finished by the end of next year. Sochi, like Vancouver, has a year-round, construction-friendly climate.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin didn’t come to Vancouver, but he hosted a dinner in Sochi for International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge on June 7. These are Putin’s Games. He is on a mission to make Russia a super-power again and not just in the realm of sports. This is also a second chance at hosting the five-ring circus. Thirty years ago, the Soviet Union hosted the 1980 Summer Olympics which were boycotted by 65 countries in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan.

The peaks around Sochi, 2 kilometres high, still have snow from last winter. Despite the subtropical Black Sea coastal climate that gives Sochi-proper bananas and tea plantations, the mountains are snow magnets. Several resort villages are being built to accompany the alpine and nordic venues. There are 19,000 workers at 58 sites. They live in portables stacked three-deep in villages dotted along the banks of the Mzymta River. Mzymta means “crazy” and the level of work done to divert the river would probably not pass a Canadian environmental assessment.

With almost three-and-a-half years to go, the Games should also be built on-time, unless the doomsday predictions of Sergei Volkov come true. The consultant to Sochi 2014 quit and fled to Ukraine. He said a lack of engineering assessment has taken place and works are being conducted in a seismically active area with unstable slopes.

Ultimately, Sochi’s greatest weakness could be its lack of international sporting events and lack of English and French speakers. Organizers are scrambling to create a Russian volunteer culture. They already have a few quality people -- some 70 who participated in the June 7-10 Vancouver 2010 Debrief at the Krasnaya Polyana resort. But they will need more than 20,000 by Games-time.

The organizing committee has people with competent English language skills, but the same can’t be said for restaurateurs and cabbies. The frontline of the tourism industry.

While Sochi readies itself, June 22-23 in Lausanne, Switzerland will be the next chapter in bidding for the 2018 Winter Games. Representatives of Annecy, France, Munich, Germany and PyeongChang, South Korea will submit their applications. The IOC executive board could rubber stamp all three or make a short-list of two. The 2018 host will be decided next year at the IOC congress in Durban, South Africa.

There are already whispers of a Canadian bid for the 2022 Winter Games from Quebec City and a group in Calgary is preparing a challenge.