Where were you six months ago today? Today being Aug. 28, 2010. Six months ago being Feb. 28, 2010.
It was the last day of February and the last day of the the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver and Whistler.
The biggest sporting event on the planet that day was a certain 12:15 p.m. faceoff in downtown Vancouver between Canada and the United States to decide the men’s hockey gold medal in the final event of the Games.
It ended in triumph as Sidney Crosby scored in sudden-death overtime to give Canada the last gold medal of Vancouver 2010 and a record 14 host-team Olympic championships.
International Olympic Committee marketing director Timo Lumme estimated 114 million people around the world were watching the Game. That’s a bigger number than Super Bowl.
Other numbers involving Vancouver 2010 are less impressive. Total estimated viewership was 1.8 billion, which is less than the 3.5 billion Lumme forecast during the Games. VANOC sold 1.49 million of 1.54 million tickets available, despite insisting during the Games that the inventory was 1.6 million. VANOC continues to claim it will balance its $1.76 billion budget. But only after at least $80 million in direct bailouts from taxpayers. Corporate sponsors didn't come to the table or scaled back spending, causing ripple effects and chaos behind-the-scenes.
VANOC is operating under a financial information blackout despite being a signatory to the 2002 Multi-Party Agreement that required quarterly financial reports. Clearly, the task of closing the books is harder than originally envisioned. It still must compensate owners of Whistler Blackcomb and Cypress for use of their slopes, resolve a nasty $10 million contract dispute with charter bus contractor Gameday Management and somehow reclaim $2 million from Visa and an insurer after at least three Latvians used stolen credit cards to buy thousands of tickets on the official VANOC scalping website.
VANOC will be remembered for organizing the Games amid the worst economic climate since the Great Depression. But the Games organizer’s business plan incorrectly assumed there would be no recession of any size before or during the Games.
The debates will rage for many months and years on the impacts of the $6 billion-plus Games and how politicians for the ruling B.C. Liberals downplayed the costs and overstated the benefits.
The Sea-to-Sky Highway is a safer, smoother ride. A tunnel would've been nicer than razing the Eagle Ridge Bluffs forest and swamp, however. The Canada Line is the rapid transit downtown to airport link Vancouver has always needed. The Vancouver Convention Centre is a world-class convention centre that is already bringing big meetings and events downtown that previously would not have fit.
Too bad all three of the above cost more than $3.5 billion combined. Once upon a time, the price tag for all three was estimated to be under $2 billion.
The Vancouver Olympic Centre’s pool is open. Yes, taxpayers built a recreation centre when what the International Olympic Committee ordered was a curling rink. Where the curling rink was will be a hockey rink. Killarney and Trout Lake got a fine new hockey rink each, but not additional ice sheets.
Likewise the Richmond Olympic Oval, where a pair of hockey rinks will open after reconfiguration of the ice plant. The speedskating oval ice surface is hidden for possible future use. The key word is possible.
The Vancouver Olympic Village is a ghost town. The social housing is not open and not enough luxury suites have been bought and occupied by those that can afford them. The community centre is open, the Urban Fare and London Drugs are coming soon. Who knows about the brewpub that was supposed to occupy the Salt Building. The big, red heritage shack is empty. The seawall and man-made island in False Creek are popular with walkers and rollers.
Across the way, B.C. Place Stadium is undergoing a pioneering $563 million post-Games renovation that was supposed to cost $365 million. Let’s hope its retractable roof doesn’t malfunction like the one at Olympic Stadium in Montreal after its post-Games installation.
Robson Square, the biggest free public magnet of the Games, is closed for renovations. Who knows when the GE-sponsored public ice rink will reopen.
The Olympic Streetcar came and went from its False Creek South line between the Canada Line’s Olympic Village Station and Granville Island. Bombardier was willing to leave the two Brussels streetcars there through summer, but city hall had other priorities. Like homes for chickens, more bike lanes and an expensive renovation to Mayor Gregor Robertson and city manager Penny Ballem’s offices.
General Motors Place was Canada Hockey Place for the Games, but is now Rogers Arena. The automaker that drove through bankruptcy last year was under pressure to drive out of its naming rights deal early. The Toronto telecommunications company, a minor partner in the Canadian Olympic Broadcasting Consortium, took over.
The Countdown Clock at the Vancouver Art Gallery still displays zeros, but its days there are numbered. The Olympic half is destined for B.C. Place Stadium's B.C. Sports Hall of Fame. The Paralympic half is going to the Whistler Olympic Park's day lodge. Will there be a permanent memorial to Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, the 21-year-old who died on the Whistler Sliding Centre track on opening day of the 21st Games?
The Downtown Eastside remains Canada’s home for the homeless. An urban ghetto like no other in North America. The Woodward’s complex has breathed new life into the neighbourhood, but the area remains full of people who are ill and addicted, wandering aimlessly, in need of help.
The Games were, essentially, a strategy to improve the real estate and tourism industries.
House sales boomed for a few months after the Games, until hitting the brakes in July with a 20.1 percent drop in Vancouver.
Have you seen all the “for lease” signs outside offices and warehouses in Metro Vancouver? The city’s vacancy rate for the first half of 2010 was officially under 5 percent, but the suburbs are suffering.
Burnaby’s 13.08 percent vacancy rate is 6 percent worse than 2009. Richmond’s 17.58 percent is 5 percent worse than the previous year. Yes, there is new supply on the market that has yet to be absorbed, but there many companies big and small companies downsizing or disappearing.
The Microsoft Canada Development Centre in Richmond is shutting down this fall and remaining employees are moving to downtown Vancouver. That's a 73,000 square foot space for lease and it's not the only one in the Knight Street corridor in Richmond, which is rapidly becoming a lonely place to locate.
Metro Vancouver Commerce, an economic development campaign drive by Vancouver, Richmond and Surrey, claims it created $60 million to $70 million of new business to the region because of the Olympics. But the MVC publicity bumph is easily dissected. Two of the deals announced were worth $52 million combined and involved existing partnerships. The promotion
took credit for the six-and-a-half-year, $27 million contract extension between Lockheed Martin of Maryland and Abbotsford-based Cascade Aerospace, even though Abbotsford was not an MVC participant.
Organizers won't disclose the names of the 100 businesspeople they wined and dined during the Olympics. In fact, MVC appears to have been a sly strategy for staff of the city-funded Vancouver Economic Development Commission to get free Olympic tickets while helping VANOC boost its slumping sales after sponsors cut back.
Tourism Vancouver says overnight stays are up 4.8 percent through June, but that’s in comparison to 2009 which was not a banner year. The February figure of 547,357 was the best February ever, breaking the 2008 mark of 507,199. January showed a year-over-year drop, but March, April, May and June showed improvements over 2009. Except February, all months measured were below the annual averages since 2005.
July and August are the bread-and-butter, million-plus visitor months for Vancouver tourism. Those numbers, when tabulated, will tell us whether the $38.6 million taxpayer-funded You Gotta Be Here tourism ad campaign was worth it.
Federal and British Columbia politicians spending billions of your dollars on economic stimulus projects want you to believe in an economic rebound and a post-Olympic boom. Could the opposite have happened: A minor, post-Games recession, perhaps?
It will take more months than just six to fully assess the legacies of the biggest event in British Columbia history. In some cases, it will take years.
Nobody can deny that it was the city's greatest party. But was the hangover worth it?
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