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Tuesday, Feb. 23
Yet another sunny day in Vancouver and Whistler Monday, though the rains are due to return today. So Team Canada lost and the sun rose the next morning. Maybe the fate of the nation is not on the line after all. It was interesting to watch the shock sink in when the U.S. scored in the opening minute. There was absolute silence on a street where seconds before it had been Mardi Gras without the nudity.
February 23, 2010
By Paul Dixon
I was on my
way out of downtown during the first period of the game, working my way back to
Chinatown where I had parked. For the past
week I had been driving right into the heart of downtown and parking at The
Bay, but with Sunday, promising the biggest crowd on the streets yet and the
drunken buffoonery of Friday night, I figured discretion was the better part of
a new windshield. No comment about the exercise component, especially when I
arrived to find the elevator “out of order” when I had parked on the roof just
to get the view. That was about the time Canada tied the game at two – what a roar
rose from a downtown silhouetted by the setting sun; 100,000 voices as one.
On Friday
night, the drunk and stupid element had floated to the top of the bowl in the
downtown entertainment strip, just to prove it could be done. This had little
to do with the Olympics, it’s just the average Friday night gong show on Granville Street.
Twenty-seven arrested for breaches in etiquette and one stabbing of
note. Contrast that with the wrap up of this year’s Mardi Gras in New Orleans which
was described as one of the best behaved in years – more than 350 arrests, but
“only” two serious shootings (no mention of any minor shootings) this year.
The
difference between the Big Easy and Our Town is, of course, the reasons one
chooses to go to Mardi Gras or the Olympics. People on the street in Vancouver have been very happy and for the
most part sober, proving that the two concepts may not be mutually exclusive. The
size of the crowds in the core area is such that if a problem erupts it could
go viral very quickly. There are too many people for anyone to get out of the
way of anything in a hurry and if a scare were put into the crowd, a lot of
people could get hurt very quickly.
I noticed
that there was a much more visible police presence Sunday afternoon on the
streets before the hockey game. Nothing overt, but police officers of the
Integrated Security Unit were out on the street in twos and threes along with
Vancouver police, as well as a number of RCMP bike patrol types working with
Vancouver PD’s bike unit.
Vancouver
Fire Rescue is running at least one of its small wildland trucks downtown as a
quick response. They appeared to be
responding with BC Ambulance to a medical call and both were slowed down as
they had to work their way through the crowd, even with police working the
intersections to move them through.
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