Quote:
Originally Posted by OLS
The OLYs. Oly fatigue or not, it was an event you can all be proud of nationally. How you conquered the weather and still made it happen was monumental. How you allowed Catherine O'Hara to talk about Peeing one's name in the snow in the Closing Ceremonies was amazing. Alot of beer swilling talk. And isn't Bill Shatner dead? I heard he was upset that they wouldn't let him play Captain Kirk in the new Star Trek. (no I didn't)
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The Oly fatigue was really more of a pre-hangover and I'm sure most host cities experience the same thing. The media spends so much time hyping the coming event that by the time it finally draws near you're a bit sick of hearing about it. Once it's on it all changes though, and honestly I've never seen anything like it in my life. Wearing our patriotism on the outside for all to see is a stereotypically un-Canadian thing to do, so seeing such an outburst was frankly unbelievable.
A lot more was made out of the weather issues than really needed to be, and I predict you'll see more of the same with Sochi since their climate is almost identical to ours. There were some challenges with snow up on Cypress, but that really boiled down to a stupid decision about 8 years before (ie. wanting the freestyle events on Cypress so tourism shots of the mountain looking down onto Vancouver would be possible). Anyone that's spent any time at all in Vancouver knows that those conditions are par for the course on the local mountains (Cypress is only 1 of 3 resorts that immediately ring the city) and that about every 3rd years is a total write-off for snow. Because of that they should have always planned to hold all the alpine events up at Whistler IMHO. Would have saved a lot of last minute scrambling and expense. The effort to get the courses setup was amazing, just never should have had to be done. The ironic thing is they were paid for out of the snow
clearing budget which had been doubled the year before as in Jan 2009 we got very uncharacteristically heavy snow fall which would have caused a total shutdown of the Olympics if they'd been held a year earlier.
Other than the snow issues what you saw on the TV was really just standard Vancouver "winter". Admittedly a this year was little warmer than average, but only by about 4 degrees C. We're not exactly a winter paradise here on the Left Coast; palm trees grow year round, the nude beach is open and in use every day of the year, a killing frost is an anomaly instead of a yearly event and most places in the US get far more snow than we ever see in the city proper...... we've just trained the snow to (usually) fall where it's useful, in the mountains
Just think of us as the California of Canada
