Olympic Diary: Neighborly love, bitter Russians

Vancouver

With the cheers for the Canadian gold medal-winning men's hockey team still resounding through the streets of Vancouver, I sit down to write my concluding impressions from this Olympic City. One thing these games have proved is that the puck stops here. In North America, I mean: The men's and women's hockey finals featured Canadian and U.S. teams, and there was absolutely no bitter residue because Canada won both.

Our two countries have grown even closer because of these games, and it wasn't just due to the steady stream of excited Americans pouring out of airplanes at Vancouver Airport and crossing the border at the Peace Arch, 30 kilometers south of here. It was also such things as newscaster Tom Brokaw waxing ecstatic about things Canadian in a mini-documentary broadcast by the mighty NBC network from atop the magical Grouse Mountain, 4,000 feet above the sea of lights called Vancouver, and NBC anchorman Brian Williams' praising the Canadian health system while the U.S. one was in such turmoil.

The thousands of friendly street encounters between U.S. tourists and the blue-jacketed Canadian Olympic volunteers served to cement all this even further. The quintessentially American Coca-Cola got into the act by abandoning temporarily in Vancouver its familiar red can design and substituting a golden one to commemorate the Canadian women's hockey team's acquisition of the gold medal.

Other countries, especially those whose relationship with their neighbors is considerably less cozy, see it differently. The Russians, who were unexpectedly humbled in Vancouver, wrote in their Pravda newspaper that the Canadians showed an inability to host an international event "due to an inferiority complex, born of a trauma, being the skinny and weakling brother to a beefy United States and a colonial outpost of the United Kingdom, whose Queen smiles happily from Canadian postage stamps." For a good measure, the Pravda writer threw in a jab at the Canadian military for its "abject cruelty" in Afghanistan.

Mind you, those are the same Russians who will be hosting the next Winter Games in Sochi, about whom one analyst says that, while Vancouver has only one truly bad section, the entire region around Sochi is "an extremely bad neighborhood" that could make any problems Vancouver had look like a church picnic.

It's not only the Russians who are contrary. Criticizing the Canadian officials and their perhaps too-intense quest for medals under the slogan "Own the Podium," the Times in the town of London, which will be hosting its own Olympics in two years, has somewhat more elegantly opined that "Canada has not come of age in Vancouver 2010. Canada has regressed into a sneering but ultimately impotent adolescence. It's been - well, rather unattractive on the whole."

Granted, there have been unattractive scenes during the last week of the games: that women's hockey team's short party on the ice, for example, replete with champagne, beer, cigars and underage drinking, for which the team later apologized. Even off the ice, the city fathers at one point had to curb the sale of liquor due to street rowdiness, though the arrival of the decidedly unattractive rain helped dampen the fans' enthusiasm somewhat.

The United States ended up with the most medals, while Germany came second. By midweek, the medal count for the Canadian team started to rise until, on the final day, it broke the Olympic record for the number of gold medals held by a host country. Judging by the cheers beneath my window, that seemed enough for us modest Canadians.

The closing ceremony was notable for its lightheartedness, particularly for the fun it poked at all the Canadian icons: smiling beavers, short-skirted Mounties, flying moose and dancing canoes. May the spirit stay with us long after the games have receded into history.

- The author is a Czech-Canadian writer and former diplomat. His latest book, Miluji Tě, Britská Kolumbie: Zimní hry ve Vancouveru, was published in 2009.

Jan Drabek can be reached at
features@praguepost.com