There was a touching, if anxious moment, as the flame arrived at the grounds of the B.C. legislature Friday morning. The Olympic cauldron was to be lit on live television by John Furlong, the CEO of VANOC, and Darlene Poole, the widow of Jack Poole, who was the architect of Vancouver’s winning bid and chairman of the organizing committee. Poole had died a week earlier of pancreatic cancer, within hours of the flame being lit in Greece. For almost a minute, Furlong and Darlene stood with frozen smiles, rolling the flame atop the cauldron before it finally sputtered into life. “It felt like 30 minutes,” conceded VANOC executive vice-president David Cobb, who insists there is a backup plan for every contingency. “Yes,” muttered communications head Renée Smith-Valade. “Pray.”
The burning anxiety extended to several of Canada’s iron-willed top athletes. The first two Olympic medallists to carry the torch on Friday, speed skater Catriona Le May Doan and triathlete Simon Whitfield, admitted their hearts skipped when their torch gave an unsettling “clunk” before bursting into flame. “Is it broken?” wondered Whitfield. “We didn’t want to do anything wrong,” added Le May Doan. Silken Laumann, the epitome of grace under pressure during her storied rowing career, says she was frantically searching for the “key guy,” the man who accompanies the runners to unlock the torch’s fuel supply. “When you actually reach to the next torch,” she says, “there’s that split-second fear: oh my gosh, what if it doesn’t light?”
Far more stressful for Victoria police and relay security was Friday’s Anti-Olympic Festival and a subsequent “Zombie March.” It drew some 300-400 demonstrators to protest the Olympics’ “enhancement of capitalism, colonization and social control.” They represented causes, from Aboriginal rights to the seal hunt, to student debt, health cutbacks, inadequate housing and poverty—all better priorities, they said, for the billions of Olympic spending. Their evening march snarled downtown traffic and caused torch security to divert from the route at one point, costing 10 torchbearers the chance to run their routes. Marbles were scattered on the street in an apparent attempt to trip up the nine mounts of the Vancouver police horse squad who were in Victoria for crowd control.
The marchers converged on the grounds of the legislature, where, outnumbered by the thousands attending the rain-soaked celebrations, they chanted slogans, banged drums and tried to drown out a children’s choir. Later, with an escort of police determined to keep a lid on things, they marched away, shouting, “This is what democracy looks like.” Most of those approached by Maclean’s refused to give their names.
This reporter recalled speaking with Jack Poole more than six years ago, before Vancouver won the Games. He called such anti-Olympic protesters the No People. “I don’t like the No People,” he said flatly. “Why not be for something?” he asked. “Take that energy and be for something rather than against something.” Poole was wealthy, and undeniably a capitalist, all those things the zombie marchers decry. But he was also part Cree. He grew up poor. He built more affordable housing in Vancouver than most anyone before or since.
His passions weren’t that divorced from the No People. For both, the Olympics is a means to a better end, but the flame touched them in very different ways.
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