From a Distance

Today is hockey night, or more accurately, hockey morning in Switzerland. Team Canada takes on the Swiss Team and, in what will be my only chance to see any of Canada’s Olympic hockey action while I am overseas, I am downing coffee in anticipation of the 1:30 a.m. start, local time.

Watching the Vancouver Olympics from afar is an odd sensation. For one thing, even though they are being held in my home country, it feels like they could be anywhere, given the amount of coverage the actual city of Vancouver or Canada have gotten since I arrived here. For all the internationalist ideals embodied by the Olympics, the games inevitably reduce to base patriotism once the actual competitions get under way.

From my perch in Geneva, I have access to the national passions of two countries: France and Switzerland. My geographic location explains how I know so much about Jason Lamy Chappuis, the 23-year old French sensation who stormed the finish line of the Nordic Combined event and whom the French announcers were so excited about that they actually stopped calling the race resorting to hoarse shrieks of “Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y!” Likewise, it is only because I am here that I know the Swiss nation has been pining for a Gold in downhill skiing for 22 years, their desperation and desire only a slightly paler imitation of Canada’s hunger for a gold medal on native soil. I’ve been accused of turning Swiss-French, so enamoured am I with the athletes of these two nations. Geography is messing up my loyalties.

My sense of how geography skews things actually began during the Opening Ceremonies, which I watched in Montreal before getting on my trans-Atlantic flight. Having lived in Vancouver for the past three years, I have borne witness to an extremely grumpy city’s reluctance and refusal to embrace the Olympics until days before it started. The University of British Columbia, where the women’s hockey tournament is being staged, only tidied itself up with fresh paint jobs and pretty new banners the day before the Opening Ceremonies. Most of my friends have left the city: for New Zealand, Argentina, San Francisco. Anywhere but Van. And I shared this apathy, which partly explains my current location. I was unsure about the benefits of hosting the Olympics while being quite certain that there would be no room for the city’s social justice issues, especially as the preparation and count-down to the games intensified.

And yet, last Friday night, I was excited! Eager to see how Vancouver was going to showcase itself to the world, who was going to perform what the Canadian team was going to wear, the works. I gathered with friends at a favourite Montreal bar, home to regular viewings of our Habs’ on the bigscreen, and we made a party of it. Imagine. Not even the surly bar staff who refused to turn the sound on for the first part of the ceremony could dampen our spirits. What did sober me up, about halfway through the ceremony, was the realization that the Vancouver that I know and love, with all its beauty spots, and scars and wrinkles, was nowhere to be seen. There was no indication of the city’s rich Asian heritage or if its oddly-British attachments. No sign of the crazy weekend warriors or the coffee shops on every corner. It had been transformed in to a glossy, high-tech show, which was glitzy and glamorous and totally soulless.

And then I realized that in my excitement about the Olympics, I had lost sight of the heart of the city, which is exactly what everyone said would happen, that there would be no room for the Downtown Eastside in the XXI Winter Olympiad. It’s brutal. Apparently there are Red Tent protesters camped out around the city, to draw attention to Vancouver’s impoverished and homeless but I heard that word of mouth, not from CTV, NBC or SRG SSR (Swiss Broadcaster). They don’t have room for heart amongst their patriotic aspirations. And what’s further discouraging is that from a distance, no one seems to have room for Vancouver proper either.