How Vancouver came of age

Fans at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Photograph: Gene J Puskar/AP
At some point during the night of 19 February, something changed in Vancouver.
The Olympic games were a week old, and by and large, those paying attention to the media coverage of the event were lead to believe that the entire thing was a resounding failure. First, tragically, was the pre-games death of Georgian luger, Nodar Kumaritashvili, whose horrific crash during a training run quickly became early fodder for questions surrounding Canada's aggressively titled Own the Podium campaign, and which would cast a dark pall over the following 17 days. Then, there was the hydraulic malfunction during the opening ceremony, followed by hockey legend Wayne Gretzky's bizarre evening tour of downtown Vancouver in the back of a pickup truck in the pouring rain. In the days that followed, the weather would continue to be an issue, causing postponements and ticket cancellations, which, combined with the bleak beginning, seemed to solidify the idea that these games were somehow cursed.
And that's ignoring the protests. As spectators made their way to BC Place stadium to take their seats for the opening ceremony, a throng of protesters marched through the downtown core. They chanted "Shame on Canada" and branded placards with slogans that railed against everything from the lack of affordable housing, to the continued excavation of the oil sands in northern Alberta, from which came the fuel to power the games.
So as the first week wore on, there was an overbearing sense that Canada ought to be ashamed of itself – that Vancouver's games were nothing but an expensive propaganda campaign, designed to push the nationalistic fervor for Canadian pride into everyone's face. The Own the Podium brashness seemed somehow "un-Canadian," and drew scorn from all corners, including domestically – especially because Canada's athletes seemed to be, at best, only renting it.
As Simon Barnes wrote for the Times:
"It is customary at the Olympics to say that the nation holding them has 'come of age'. China 'came of age' in 2008; Australia "came of age" with the Sydney games of 2000 … But Canada has not come of age in Vancouver 2010."
It was as if Canada was upset at the rest of the world crashing its party, rather than being pleased to host invited guests.
Then, everything kind of changed.
A poll taken prior to the games revealed that only about half of British Columbia residents felt that Olympics would be beneficial for the province. On Friday 19 February, that poll could not have seemed any more inaccurate. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked to Vancouver's downtown core that night in the most impressive showing of what effectively amounted to the city embracing the games wholeheartedly for the first time. The daytime crowds prior to that night were large, but it was the infectious, positively celebratory feeling of that night that was new. Since then, the criticism has been quieter, and the games were labelled the one thing that initially looked impossible: a success.
For Vancouver, the No Fun City, the games have given it reason to further tout itself as "world-class" – a familiar self-imposed label that has always seemed overly insecure. And while many of the benefits of the games are as easy to list as the detriments, one potential benefit has to do with exactly what Barnes addressed: a "coming of age" for Vancouver.
After the 1994 riot that followed the Vancouver Canucks losing the Stanley Cup to the New York Rangers, John Masters described the crowd as:
"[A] large group of citizens who don't feel that the society in which they live is theirs … For many, when the party turned ugly Tuesday, the fleeting feeling of having belonged to something was lost."
Understandable, in a way – it was a riot, after all. But the feeling of belonging to something is exactly what suddenly made the Olympics an event that was no longer dominated by negativity. It is what made the tongue-in-cheek, cringingly nationalistic closing ceremony, an event that almost made sense (giant inflatable beavers and all) – that feeling of, for once, being a part of a large shared experience. It's also a feeling that's difficult to find in Vancouver, a city often fragmented by its neighbourhoods, and defined more by its geography than by its citizens.
The Olympics were never going to make Vancouver any more of a tourist destination than it already is. Instead, these games have given Vancouver a taste of what living in a world-class city actually feels like: the vibrancy and togetherness that defines the world's great metropolises did, if only for a moment, flicker to life here.