On February 12, news media across the country celebrated the preversary of the 2010 Winter Olympics. That’s my word for a date marking one-year-to-the-day before something happens, the kind of non-event beloved by news editors because of all the copy it enables. Fair enough; too many issues go unreported for lack of timeliness, after all. But notice that if, in the spirit of healthy sport, you play around with preversary, it becomes perversary.
Perverse, that is, just like the Games themselves – but that’s to be expected, at least up to a point. Even so it was startling to read James Christie’s front page story for the Globe and Mail that day, gleefully detailing how Canadian athletes are being given vastly preferential access to Olympic facilities; apparently we’re limiting foreign teams’ practice time on our tracks, slopes, rinks and racecourses so as to give our own contenders the advantage of familiarity on competition day. How sporting. I wonder what Dick Pound, the Canadian pitbull formerly in charge of the World Anti-Doping Agency, would say? I suppose he’d be happy no substances were being sanctioned, but it does seem to go against the principle of fair play he and WADA so vehemently espouse.
At least this should help dispel the whole polite and deferential rep we’ve been saddled with as Canadians. Now if only the same could be said for our mainstream media.
Thursday’s unabashed display of Olympic hype was almost enough to confirm the kind of theories propagated by some of my more conspiracy-minded friends. I might have expected as much from CTV, whose position as official Games broadcaster gives them a vested interest in boosterism, but the only reason I can see for someone like the Globe and Mail to applaud the Olympics so uncritically is sheer laziness – and even that’s a stretch. You don’t have to scratch very deep in this town to find an Olympic backlash, which is just the kind of conflict newsroom editors ought to be investigating. Instead, what passes for pre-Olympic coverage has for the most part read like a national anthem.
To be fair, the Globe did acknowledge one note of discord: buried in a page-ten story informing us how enthusiastic Canadians are about the Olympics was a sidebar revealing that Vancouverites are decidedly less so. Barely half of us are looking forward to the Games, as compared to the national average of 70% who just can’t wait.
That even half this city should still have a positive outlook is surprising, given the volume of complaint made in recent weeks about cost overruns being charged to Vancouver taxpayers (and again, to be fair, people like Gary Mason have been covering this semi-scandal well for the Globe and others). But the real reasons to object to the Olympics go far deeper than the billion or so dollars they’ll cost us (and you too, by the way – the feds are covering security): these include attention to homelessness, which ironically seems to be getting worse the more frantically Vancouver tries to hide it; First Nations land claims, which remain unresolved not just on Olympic turf but province-wide; and environmental costs, which take longer to pay back than a development loan. Just to name a few.
All this isn’t to say there’s nothing good about the Olympics. Even through the corporate haze surrounding modern sport, I still can’t help admire the sheer human performance on display at the Games. There’s no other comparable sporting event; complaints that the money would be better spent on something like poverty relief are valid, but to my mind they suffer from the same lack of imagination that hampers funding for the arts. Besides which it’s quite possible that the economic, social and environmental benefits of hosting the Olympics will outweigh the costs.
They might not though, which is what makes the media’s cheerleading so unpalatable. It’s VANOC’s job, not ours, to pretend everything’s just lovely. We expect them to play little tricks like importing an Inuit inukshuk to adorn the Olympic logo in the hopes that, rather than noticing or caring how little this has to do with local Coast Salish art, the public will appreciate the gesture and take it as a sign of aboriginal empowerment.
All part of the game. But to the extent that journalists fall for such tricks rather than see through them, it’s safe to say we’re on the losing team.
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