Vancouver 2010 BETTER
More than 600 torchbearers proudly carried the flame during the Vancouver 2010 Paralympic Torch Relay. The torch visited 11 communities across Canada in 10 days, leading to a 24-hour long circular relay through downtown Vancouver before the Paralympic Cauldron was lit at BC Place.
Vancouver 2010
The 2010 Winter Olympics, officially known as the XXI Olympic Winter Games (French: XXIes Jeux olympiques d'hiver) and also known as Vancouver 2010 (Lushootseed: K'emk'emeláy̓ 2010), were an international winter multi-sport event held from February 12 to 28, 2010 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, with some events held in the surrounding suburbs of Richmond, West Vancouver and the University of British Columbia, and in the nearby resort town of Whistler. It was regarded by the Olympic Committee to be among the most successful Olympic games in history, in both attendance and coverage.[1] Approximately 2,600 athletes from 82 nations participated in 86 events in fifteen disciplines.[2] Both the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games were organized by the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), headed by John Furlong. The 2010 Winter Games were the third Olympics to be hosted by Canada, and the first to be held within the province of British Columbia. Canada had previously hosted the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Quebec, and the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta.
Vancouver 2010 was immensely successful, with the official Olympic Committee press release citing "Full venues, record public attendance: Over 97% of the 1.54 million tickets available were sold, with 71% to the Canadian public at an average price of $139. Adding in international public ticket sales, the percentage of ticket sales to the public exceeds 75% of all available tickets."[1] Vancouver 2010 also achieved record global television coverage as per the Olympic Committee, more than double the viewership of the preceding Turin 2006 games and triple the available coverage of Salt Lake City 2002, and is "recognized in numerous post Games reports as being among the most widely viewed and well received Games in Olympic history, both in Canada and internationally."[1] Vancouver 2010's gold medal final between Canada and USA "was the most watched hockey game ever with viewership of 114 million viewers around the world."[1]
The Vancouver Olympic Committee (VANOC) spent C$16.6 million on upgrading facilities at Cypress Mountain, which hosted the freestyle (aerials, moguls, ski cross) and snowboarding events. With the opening in February 2009 of the C$40 million Vancouver Olympic/Paralympic Centre at Hillcrest Park, which hosted curling, every sports venue for the 2010 Games was completed on time and at least one year prior to the Games.[16][17] Pyeongchang eventually hosted the 2018 Winter Olympics.
The opening and closing ceremonies were held at BC Place Stadium, which received over C$150 million in major renovations. Competition venues in Greater Vancouver included the Pacific Coliseum, the Vancouver Olympic/Paralympic Centre, the UBC Winter Sports Centre, the Richmond Olympic Oval and Cypress Mountain. GM Place, now known as Rogers Arena, played host to ice hockey events, being renamed Canada Hockey Place for the duration of the Games since corporate sponsorship is not allowed for an Olympic venue.[28] Renovations included the removal of advertising from the ice surface and conversion of some seating to accommodate the media.[28] The 2010 Winter Olympics marked the first time an Olympic hockey game was played on a rink sized according to NHL rules instead of international specifications. Competition venues in Whistler included Whistler Creekside at the Whistler Blackcomb ski resort, the Whistler Olympic Park, the Whistler Celebration Plaza and the Whistler Sliding Centre.
The 2010 Winter Games marked the first time that the energy consumption of the Olympic venues was tracked in real time and made available to the public. Energy data was collected from the metering and building automation systems of nine of the Olympic venues and was displayed online through the Venue Energy Tracker project.[29]
The Olympic Games in Vancouver were broadcast worldwide by a number of television broadcasters. As rights for the 2010 Games have been packaged with those for the 2012 Summer Olympics, broadcasters were largely identical for both events.
The host broadcaster was Olympic Broadcasting Services Vancouver, a subsidiary of the IOC's new in-house broadcasting unit Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS). The 2010 Olympics marked the first Games where the host broadcasting facilities were provided solely by OBS.[30] The executive director of Olympic Broadcasting Services Vancouver was Nancy Lee, a former producer and executive for CBC Sports.[31] The official broadcast theme was a piece called "City of Ice" composed by Rob May and Simon Hill.[32]
For the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games, the flame was lit in Olympia on October 22, 2009.[citation needed] It then traveled from Greece, over the North Pole to Canada's High Arctic and on to the West Coast and Vancouver. The relay started its long Canada journey from the British Columbia capital of Victoria. In Canada, the torch traveled approximately 45,000 kilometres (28,000 mi) over 106 days, making it the longest relay route within one country in Olympic history. The Olympic Torch was carried by approximately 12,000 Canadians and reached over 1,000 communities.[41][42]
82 National Olympic Committees (NOC) entered teams in the 2010 Winter Olympics.[54] Cayman Islands, Colombia, Ghana, Montenegro, Pakistan, Peru and Serbia made their winter Olympic debuts. Also Jamaica, Mexico and Morocco returned to the Games after missing the Turin Games. Tonga sought to make its Winter Olympic debut by entering a single competitor in luge, attracting some media attention, but he crashed in the final round of qualifying.[55]Luxembourg qualified two athletes[56] but did not participate because one did not reach the criteria set by the NOC[57] and the other was injured[58] before the Games. Below is a map of the participating nations and a list of the nations with the number of competitors indicated in brackets.[59]
Vancouver 2010 was also the first winter Olympics in which both men's and women's hockey were played on a narrower, NHL-sized ice rink,[60] measuring 200 ft 85 ft (61 m 26 m), instead of the international size of 200 ft 98.5 ft (61.0 m 30.0 m). The games were played at General Motors Place (now Rogers Arena), home of the NHL's Vancouver Canucks, which was temporarily renamed Canada Hockey Place for the duration of the Olympics. Utilizing this existing venue instead of building a new international-sized ice rink facility saved C$10 million in construction costs and allowed an additional 35,000 spectators to attend Olympic hockey games.[60] However, some European countries expressed concern over this decision, worried that it might give North American players an advantage since they grew up playing on the smaller NHL-sized rinks.[61] By contrast, the only other NHL venue to host Olympic hockey, the Calgary Flames' Olympic Saddledome, started construction before Calgary won the bid for the 1988 Winter Olympics and it was designed to accommodate an international ice rink.
There were a number of events that were proposed to be included in the 2010 Winter Olympics.[62] On November 28, 2006, the IOC Executive Board at their meeting in Kuwait voted to include ski cross in the official program.[63] The Vancouver Olympic Committee (VANOC) subsequently approved the event to officially be part of the Games program.[64]
In the following calendar for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, each blue box indicates that an event competition, such as a qualification round, was held on that day. The yellow boxes represent days during which medal-awarding finals for a sport were held with the number in these boxes representing the number of finals that were contested on that day.[68]
Some in the foreign press, including London 2012 organizers, had criticized the lack of city decorations to acknowledge that Vancouver was the host of the Games. The original plans to decorate the city in Olympic colours, a tradition followed by other recent Games host cities, were canceled for several reasons. Anti-Games activists repeatedly vandalized the existing 2010 Olympics monuments such as the countdown clock, forcing the city to install CCTV cameras, and adding more Games decorations would have inevitably required more security presence to deter protesters, so VANOC opted to minimize these symbols to avoid making the city a police state. Besides local opposition, budget cutbacks also forced the organizers to scale back on the elaborate plans.[69]
On Saturday, February 13, as part of a week-long Anti-Olympic Convergence, protesters smashed windows of the Downtown Vancouver location of The Hudson's Bay department store.[86][87] Protesters later argued that the Hudson's Bay Company, "has been a symbol of colonial oppression for centuries" as well as a major sponsor of the 2010 Olympics.[88]
Some of the issues reflected in the opposition continue the themes identified in opposition to all Olympic games, some of which are outlined in anti-Olympics activist and Professor of Sociology Helen Jefferson Lenskyj's books Olympic Industry Resistance (2007) and Inside the Olympic Industry (2000), which examined a number of different Olympic Games prior to the 2010 Winter Olympics.[89]These issues of concern, underlying the opposition to any and all Olympic Games, include:
On March 11, 2010, it was reported that the Polish cross country skier Kornelia Marek was tested positive for EPO by the Polish Olympic Committee. If found guilty of doping by the International Olympic Committee, Marek and the relay teams would be disqualified and stripped of their Vancouver results. She would also be banned from the next Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, in 2014. 041b061a72