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Monday, March 1, 2010
The game’s over. The Games are over. It’s Monday morning comin’ down from Sunday’s dramafest. Hockey fans across Canada rode the emotional roller coaster. In Vancouver, those who couldn’t afford a second mortgage to buy tickets from scalpers started lining up at the three major free viewing areas in downtown Vancouver at daybreak Sunday. Bars in the downtown core were jammed long before they could legally serve refreshments. As with the previous Canada-USA game, the streets were almost deserted when the puck was dropped.
March 1, 2010
By Paul Dixon
USA boosters were practically
non-existent. The few who were spotted on the street received the obligatory
half-hearted razzing. Abe Lincoln was spotted crossing Robson and Granville
early in the first period but he could have been the Maytag repair man for all
the attention he drew.
A couple
of things caught my eye in the neighbourhood adjacent to GM Place. There were a lot more police on
the street than previously and they were Vancouver police and RCMP. Last weekend there had been lots of municipal
police from across Canada out on the streets around GM Place as part of their Olympic duties. Sunday,
it was all VPD and Mounties. They were all laid back and kibitzing with the
crowd but they were all in groups of four or five. Then there were the security fences that were
in place around GM Place and BC Place Stadium next door. Once
the hockey game was over, people weren’t able to linger. They had to move away
from GM Place, because there were 60,000 people on their way
into BC Place for the closing ceremonies.
Once the
game was over, fans descended on the Robson and Granville axis by the thousands
from all directions. It quickly became a crush and we didn’t waste any time leaving
the area. Everybody was happy and having a good time but it was the sheer mass
of humanity. Traffic on Georgia Street and several other downtown arties came
to standstill as thousands of flag-waving, red-and-white clad celebrants
spilled out from curb to curb and police were eventually forced to block off a
number of additional blocks in the downtown.
Coupled
with the crowd that left BC Place later, downtown Vancouver was pretty much shut down into
the evening by the crush of bodies. Vancouver Police described the masses
downtown as “the biggest crowd yet” and “generally well behaved”. Vancouver
Fire & Rescue had a number of rigs pre-positioned in the downtown core,
either as move-ups or extra units. BC Ambulance had extra units downtown along
with bicycle teams and its Gator crew. Even so, it was slow going with the
crush.
At one
point in the evening, a two-alarm fire on the west side of Vancouver forced
VFRS to pull some of the special-call apparatus out of downtown to provide
fill-in on the west side.
As I
wrote this, shortly before midnight, a quick peek at local TV news
showed there were still thousands of people dancing in the streets.
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