Quote:Olympic security officials have rolled out plans to create so-called free speech areas during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, similar to the protest zones used in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Quote:The Integrated Security Unit will also monitor potential threats, using more than 900 closed-circuit cameras, which Mercer promised would be removed when the Olympics are over.

Quote:Vancouver police will also monitor the movements of the city's homeless, some of whom will have to be moved in the interest of safety, said deputy chief Steve Sweeney.

"We currently have a few homeless that are residing within very close proximity to some of the venues. And those people, we will assist them in relocating elsewhere," said Sweeney.

Quote:As a Canadian living in New York for the last four years, I know full well what most people think of my country's showmanship skills. During my first week here, one of my graduate school classmates approached me after class.

"Can I ask you a question about Canada?" he asked.

Sure, I replied, expecting something about healthcare or Anne Murray. Nope.

"Why are all you Canadians so terribly boring?"

Canadian national identity has always been a curious mixture of American populism and British propriety, a fact that, along with our climate, geographical size and complicated relationship with our neighbor to the south, has led us to be suspicious of acting too impulsively or dramatically. Some people might call that boring; we call that prudent. We’re the only country in the Americas to have gained our independence from Europe without violence -- choosing, instead, to pursue it through a series of incremental accords. As Pierre Berton, Canada’s best-known historian, put it, "If this lack of revolutionary passion has given us a reasonably tranquil history, it has also, no doubt, contributed to our well-known lack of daring."

Friday night, when the Vancouver Olympics kick off their opening ceremonies, it will be Canada’s turn to put on a global show, and it’s fair to say nobody’s expecting a rerun of Beijing 2008: Estimated to cost over $100 million, that affair offered a spectacular mix of highbrow artistry and technical razzle-dazzle, with approximately 14,000 performers, a 16-ton globe that emerged from the stadium floor, footprint-shaped fireworks marching across the sky, and a jaw-dropping floating torchbearer. So how does a country built on self-effacement celebrate itself in front of the entire world?

Sure, we’ve had our moments of national pageantry, most notably the successful 1967 World's Fair in Montreal, which was timed to coincide with the centennial anniversary of Canada's birth. But the World’s Fair was more about celebrating utopianism than Canada itself. The 1976 Olympics in Montreal were marred by financial difficulties, and their most noteworthy piece of pageantry was a leaning Olympic stadium that has since become a symbol of poor planning and excess. (It wasn't finished in time for the games, and in 1986 a part of its tower fell into the playing field.)

When the Calgary Olympics debuted in 1988, the opening ceremonies were conspicuously low on patriotism, and high on pioneer nostalgia and '80s kitsch. The ceremony included purple-clad square dancers, the Calgary Stampede show band, stagecoaches and, of course, people in dinosaur costumes dancing on a float (presumably to celebrate the region’s proud history of paleontological discovery). As (Canada-born) Peter Jennings said during the newscast, "Have you ever seen a more spontaneous opening ceremonies?"

Unfortunately, Canadian history is rather difficult to turn into a three-hour pageant for worldwide consumption. Take, for example, Canada’s founding moment: the British North America Act, the 1867 agreement signed by Queen Victoria that united the British colonies of Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (but not the areas now know as Manitoba, British Columbia or Alberta, among others), created the Canadian parliament, and gave us control over our domestic agenda (but not our foreign policy or our courts).

Try turning that gem into a rousing dance number. Sure, you can dress up Shania Twain as a Father of Confederation, create a 10-foot fire-breathing animatronic Queen Victoria that floats down from the stadium ceiling, and throw in some lasers for extra flash, but, in the end, people would still just be sitting around signing things and you’d need a PowerPoint presentation to explain to the world what exactly happened. And then, of course, you’d have to repeat it again, in 1931, with the signing of the Statute of Westminster, and in 1982, when Queen Elizabeth II signed the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

But the modesty of our history and national iconography is a big part of what makes Canada so wonderful. (As any Canadian schoolchild can tell you, one of our proudest accomplishments is the fact that we built the mechanical arm on the American space shuttle.) You could probably reenact Canadian Frederick Banting's co-discovery of insulin by rolling in a glittery pancreas and dressing up dancers as sugar. (This could be a great cameo for Ontario-born Avril Lavigne.) Or celebrate the founding of our nationalized healthcare system by having a few hundred people ceremoniously dance around in crutches and arm-slings to a Rush song. But not only would that be awkward, it would be downright un-Canadian.

At times, our penchant toward quietness has gotten us in trouble. During the 1992 World Series, the Toronto Blue Jays had to beg fans to make more noise, not less. When the 2001 World Championships in Athletics were held in Edmonton, my hometown, the British press nicknamed the city Deadmonton (though clearly they hadn't seen the world's largest sausage). Most recently, Billy Bob Thornton railed against the quietness of Canadian fans by comparing them to "mashed potatoes without the gravy" during his radio outburst.

So what can we expect to see when the ceremonies begin on Friday night? John Furlong, CEO of the Vancouver Organizing Committee, has said that the opening ceremonies will "tell the story of a contemporary Canada that will inspire the world." Naturally, they’ll be produced by an Australian -- David Atkins, the same man who created the opening and closing ceremonies for the Sydney Olympics. It has been announced that neither Cirque du Soleil, the French-Canadian circus group, nor the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra will be participating. None of which suggests that Beijing has anything to worry about.

Vancouver’s Opening Ceremonies, like all Olympic openers, will have to pander to a worldwide audience -- which means nothing shocking or edgy. If it goes down the cliché route, its central character will be a child on a voyage of discovery. The ceremony will likely pay tribute to the region’s native population (the Games' controversial official logo is an inukshuk, a small pile of rocks used as markers by Canada's northern Inuit) along with Vancouver’s Chinese immigrant community. It’s likely that hometown hero Bryan Adams will be making an appearance, and if there’s anything life has taught me, you can never predict when Celine Dion will do something baffling in a ridiculous costume.

But here's one prediction: It’s likely that the ceremonies will neither blow viewers away nor leave them disappointed. And in some ways, that’s the point. The things about "contemporary Canada" that are worth celebrating couldn't (and probably shouldn't) be represented on a float anyway. We may not have built many epic monuments, or dazzled the world with our conquests, but over the course of the last century and a half we’ve built a successful model for a liberal, progressive multicultural democracy. So much so that, these days, the American dream is more feasible in Canada than it is in America.

Canada has higher class mobility than the United States. It has low crime rates, universal healthcare and a widely praised refugee system. Its banking system has been touted as a model for the United States. Gay marriage has been legal for the better half of a decade. As researcher Michael Adams recently argued in "Fire and Ice," his book about Canadian values, polls show that Canadians' attachment to social liberalism and "postmodern postmaterial multiculturalism" (try spelling that out on the floor of a stadium) continues to grow, even as American values move in the opposite direction.

Does that mean that we’ll be wowing the world Friday night? Probably not. But does it make Canada a pretty great country to host the Olympic Games? Most definitely. If anything, it’ll ensure that, for once, the focus of the event will be on the athletes, not on our rain-preventing technology, computer-generated fireworks, or how we kicked a young child out of our ceremony for not being pretty enough. Sorry, Beijing. Props to you, but that’s just not our style.

Quote:The United States is one sports-crazy country, and perhaps the most famous moment in the history of American sports took place on a hockey rink - why can't more Americans get behind hockey????

Quote: why can't more Americans get behind hockey????

Weltall Wrote:To elucidate: Hockey will never have a following like basketball/baseball/football in the United States because there's such little fertile ground with which to grow our own players. Unlike the three sports named above, hockey has practically no presence on the high-school level. In most parts of the country, expensive facilities are required for the sport to even exist. Thus, while we have a 'national' professional hockey league, much of its talent is imported from places where hockey can easily be played in a natural environment. A sport which requires an icy environment can only achieve so much success in a nation in which vast stretches never experience such an environment.

Fittisize Wrote:Hmm, interesting about NBC coverage - the Olympics up here is running basically nonstop and showing every single event, sport, and finding the time to interview virtually every Canadian athlete on three separate channels, and showing everything live. That could very well have to do with the increased national interest with the Olympics being in Canada, though. But that does seem like a pretty awful schedule NBC's running, and that's not in comparision to the non-stop live coverage up here, but just in general. Tape-delay, seriously? To make matters worse I can't even watch The Office. Damn NBC.

Quote:(usually, when it's not an incredibly stupid and worthless non-snowing winter like this one has been -- I know they've got a lot of snow down in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and southern New England, but up here in Maine we've barely gotten two inches all month. It's been miserable, no cross-country skiing... )

Weltall Wrote:How many Americans actually play in the NHL?

Fittisize Wrote:Lots, 22.2% of NHL players are American, and only Canada has more players (52.3%). Plus 24 of the teams, including 4 of the Original 6 = plenty of Americanization of hockey.

Weltall Wrote:That's kind of my point, actually. We have a league in which 80% of the teams are in the United States, but only 22% of the players are actually American.

If the NFL or the NBA imported most of its talent from abroad, it would kill a considerable amount of interest. As it stands, both leagues draw primarily from a huge college program, and many NFL/NBA stars were already famous and established talent before they turned pro. Unfortunately for American hockey, such a system is untenable in the United States, short of an acute Ice Age.

Dark Jaguar Wrote:Did you get shot or something? Otherwise I'm sure I won't be making out your cheers above anyone else's :D.

Dark Jaguar Wrote:I swear I heard him say "Hyena Reicht" at several points.

Fittisize Wrote:Alright, 8-2 vs. the Germans last night, and now 7-3 against Russia, a game the whole hockey world thought would be played for the Gold Medal instead of in the Quarterfinals, and it was a fucking route. Wow, does Team Canada ever look inspired. More of this to come, believe me - based on the play of their last two games, they're gonna roll over the rest of the competition.

DMiller Wrote:The good ole USA may have something to say about that. See you in the gold medal game.

Fittisize Wrote:Game over! Man, these Olympics were a huge success. What a way to finish them! Holy Christ, WHAT A GAME. That was one of the most intense, dramatic, and emotional games that I've ever seen in any sport, ever. Crosby's goal is already cemented as one of the biggest in the history of Canadian hockey. Poor Americans, good god did they ever look devestated, especially Ryan Miller. Parise too. Oh well!

Weltall Wrote:That was absolutely amazing. I just gave a shit about hockey for almost 8 full minutes!

Quote:That was absolutely amazing. I just gave a shit about hockey for almost 8 full minutes!

Quote:Really!!! That's so weird, me also.. It's like some mysterious force made me ever so slightly give a fuck...

Quote:Well, shit. How are you feeling? Gut punched? Broken? Just wanting to go to sleep and never wake up? Embrace it. It's a wonderful thing.

Just a brutal loss for the United States. The team that dramatically ties it up with 25 seconds left is supposed to have all the momentum. It's not supposed to end this way, you say. But it was.

It was always supposed to end like this. Canada were the favorites going in, and, despite hiccups against the US and Switzerland, were clearly the best team in every game they played.

Let go of your patriotism for a second. This is the perfect way to close Vancouver 2010. The home nation, topping off its most successful games ever with a gold medal in the biggest sport at at Olympics — and it happens to be their national sport, to boot. The fact that their golden boy scored the winning goal, against their biggest rivals? It's a storybook ending.

To be such a dramatic win, it had to be a heartbreaking loss for someone. And boy, it hurts right now. But you're not alone.

And that's the beauty of it. There are millions of Americans walking around like zombies right now. You're all going to be depressed for a while, and you'll spend the rest of your life thinking about what might have been.

It hurts because you care. And maybe you're already a huge hockey fan, and you understood every nuance of the game. But there are a ton of people out there who are only hurt because they supported their country by tuning in. They just happened to see one of the most exciting hockey games ever. Before Vancouver, maybe they never saw a hockey game. Now, hockey made them care.

Someone made the decision to watch their NHL team's next game. Some kid just made the choice to play hockey. Someone just learned the names Crosby, Miller, Luongo for the first time. Hockey has some new fans.

People are going to be talking about hockey tomorrow. So while Canada takes home the gold medal — and all due congratulations to them — it's hockey as a whole that wins.