CONSIDERING all the complications, expense, fuss and bother involved, why would any country want to play host to an Olympic Games? Twenty months ago, the world travelled to Beijing to take in the spectacle the Chinese had conjured up for the occasion. The host country had to practically build nearly all the facilities from scratch but now they are hard put to find uses for the spectacular “bird’s nest” stadium they built.

As you read this, another set of people are enjoying, so to speak, the privilege of hosting an Olympic Games. You may not be aware of it, but Olympic fever has gripped the Canadian city of Vancouver and its nearby winter sports centre, Whistler. The 21st Winter Olympics began with a larger-than-life multi-media show at a stadium in Vancouver and will continue for eight more days. More than 2,600 athletes from 82 countries are competing in 15 sports, some of which most of us will find quite unfamiliar.

Even those of us who live in the tropics know of skiing, ice hockey and figure skating. Those sports were for many years the mainstay of the winter games, but who knew about such contests as luge, skeleton, snowboard cross and curling?

Luge, bobsleigh and skeleton involve people riding contraptions on a meandering trough of ice plunging down a hillside and are not for the faint of heart. In skeleton, the rider lies chest-down on a small sled and goes head first, while in luge the rider lies on his back and goes feet first. A bobsleigh is an enclosed vehicle holding up to four riders. Of course, every Jamaican now knows about bobsleigh, which brought this sun-baked island into the consciousness of the winter sports world in 1988 at the games in Calgary.

Bad luck, as the old saying goes, is worse than obeah, and these games began under a heavy cloud.

Several hours before the opening, a young member of the team from the republic of Georgia (one of the former members of the Soviet Union) died after sliding at more than 150 kilometres an hour on the luge track. Nodar Kumaritashvili was doing some practice runs at the Whistler Sliding Centre when he flew off the track at a sharp bend near the end and crashed into a pole supporting the snow roof. He was rushed off to a nearby hospital where he died of his injuries.

As the national teams marched into the BC Place Stadium in the opening ceremony, the Georgian team, wearing black armbands, was greeted by a standing ovation from the 60,000 spectators and the Olympic officials who welcomed the participants and spectators invoked a gesture of respect.

The ceremony went off as planned until right at the end. At the beginning, representatives of the four native groups on whose aboriginal land the games are taking place gave their blessings and welcomed everyone. Four transparent totem poles rose from the floor of the stadium to signify that welcome. They went back into the floor, where they were transformed into giant metal torches to emerge once again at the end.

Four prominent Canadian athletes, one of whom had crossed the country in a wheelchair several years before, bore torches to light the huge ones emerging from the floor. But they had to wait for what seemed like an eternity as a hydraulic malfunction prevented the beams from coming up as they should. Three of them finally emerged and were duly lighted, and one of the torch-bearers travelled outside the stadium to light a twin cauldron outside in a public square.

The next day, visitors who wanted to get close to the cauldron to take pictures were greeted by a chain-link fence and some of the heavy security which has blanketed the whole affair. After considerable griping about this, the organisers of the games, known as VANOC, changed the setup, putting in a more user-friendly barrier and viewing platform.

International games, particularly the Olympics – are one part sports, multiple parts hoopla, and these are typical. Big companies jostle one another for the privilege of being named Olympic sponsors. They blanket the media with their logos and tie their advertising campaigns in with the games.

The organisers are no slouches in engaging in hoopla either. Take those torches. Made by a company that is the world’s biggest manufacturer of trains and the third-largest maker of aeroplanes, they are a high-tech contraption containing a cylinder of gas which can feed a flame for about 20 minutes. The company made thousands of them for the biggest torch relay ever run. It began last October in Olympia, Greece, where the first games were held many centuries ago. The flame then travelled from Greece over the north pole to the city of Victoria on Canada’s west coast, where it began a meandering trail some 45,000 kilometres long through all parts of the vast country.

In the course of 106 days, some 12,000 Canadians carried torches which were lit in succession through more than 1,000 communities. Many celebrities took part in the torch relay, including on the final day, the former movie star and governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In addition to a mild climate, fabulous views of the sea and mountains, Vancouver also has its share of street people, the unemployed, drug addicts and sex-trade practitioners living in ramshackle housing in an area close to the fashionable downtown. This was an area of interest to the hordes of foreign reporters and camera crews before the games began.

Some of the columnists attracted by the games have brought their acid-filled pens along. A few of the complaints are well aimed. VANOC had to bring in hundreds of extra buses to shuttle athletes and spectators between locations and has had a number of delays and buses going astray. They had sanctioned a supplier for a machine to re-surface the ice after each skating event. The machine runs on batteries and is thus emission-free, but died when it should have performed and had to be replaced by a conventional machine which runs on bottled gas.

Much of the negative stuff emanates from bloggers, some Canadian and some American, but the harshest observations come, as usual, from the British press. Case in point – a column by Lawrence Donegan (who usually covers golf) in The Guardian characterising these as “the worst games ever”. A headline in The Times proclaimed “London 2012 can’t be worse than the Vancouver Games”.

They are also very critical of a Canadian programme called “Own the Podium” which encourages athletes to go for medals rather than be content merely to compete. This is perhaps a reaction to the old view of Canadians as modest, retiring, self-effacing folks who shy away from offending anyone. But in the 1976 summer Olympics in Montreal and the 1988 winter games in Calgary, Canada turned in undistinguished performances and won no gold medals. The country’s sports authorities vowed that this time would be different, and its athletes are already harvesting gold.

But for most people, the games are a welcome diversion from the humdrum quotidian round. They’ll even get to see performances by athletes from non-traditional countries as Algeria, Bermuda, Brazil, the Cayman Islands, Colombia, Ghana, India, Mexico, Pakistan and Senegal. Oh, and of course, the free-style skier Errol Kerr, who carries the flag of Jamaica. No bobsleigh this time, though.

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca