A rather inauspicious start

So, as some of you may already know, the Vancouver Olympics officially started yesterday night (or early this morning on Canada's east coast if you count from the time of the final torch lighting). While the events of last night caused the Globe and Mail to use the headline "Our Shining Hour," I think that it is clear that this is really quite far way from an accurate depiction of yesterday's Olympic related events.

In some ways, it is necessary to start with events that occurred before the opening ceremonies even started. In the early evening I was saddened and disappointed to learn that the Olympic luge track has already taken the life of one Olympic hopeful, an athlete from Georgia. The diagram of the accident site that I saw in today's paper makes it clear that those who do a poor job of executing the final turn may face serious consequences as instead of just shooting out of the track, you are likely to be propelled directly into support beams. Though I am not a luge track designer, this does seem to me to be a serious design flaw.

Later in the evening, after several hours of regional stereotype after regional stereotype the opening ceremony finally moved onto the big finale, the lighting of the torch. Then, in front of millions of viewers (I couldn't find a total number of viewers though there were supposedly about 13 million in Canada), there was a major technical problem that delayed the progression of the ceremony and then couldn't be rectified. A $40 million dollar event that failed at the critical moment, "our shining hour" indeed.

A more personal problem that we experienced related the coverage that was offered by CTV. Presumably because of the time-overrun related to the aforementioned technical difficulty, the streaming coverage cutout just moments before they were eventually to light the torch, the event to which the whole thing had been building. In a strange way it was a rather fitting conclusion to the evening's events.

Oh, and just moments ago I learned that the riot police were called in to deal with a group of several hundred protestors (some of whom engaged in vandalism and property destruction). Yum!


Blog-off Score

Neil:0
Cameron: 23