Do the Olympics Suck?

The Olympics might kinda suck.

So far the Olympics haven't really been the best thing I've ever experienced live. In fact being here is a bit overrated. If you had a ticket for a quality event (i.e. not involving the Swiss women's hockey team) every day it might be OK. But we don't have tix for something every day.

When you don't have an event there's really not much to do. Wandering the overcrowded squares and subway stations of downtown Vancouver with the mobs and waiting in lines all day really ain't my style.

A bunch of corporations and governments have venues downtown where there's free events and you can watch the Games on big screen TVs (and learn about the wonders of, for example, the Canadian national telecommunications conglomerate).

But I don't really enjoy being just some zero, getting herded around, penned in, and being given permission—after being thoroughly screened, searched, and patted down by security of course—to enter the not that great corporate pavilion.

There's even an hour long line just to get into the Olympic Superstore at Hudson's Bay Company. Do I really want an Olympic souvenir sweatshirt that badly?

The only way the Olympics would be cool is if you had an in—like if you were friends with an athlete who could get you into stuff, or if you had a media credential or if you'd arranged an event gig in advance somehow. Otherwise you're just a peon and a suspected terrorist until proven otherwise.

Plus it's probably easier to actually follow the Games from home, on the net and on TV. I don't even have 3G in Canada so I have no idea what the hell is going on, even though I'm right here.

And security is so tight and paranoid they even fenced off the plaza near the Convention Centre where the Olympic flame is. When we asked why, a volunteer manning the barricade blamed lefties, claiming the protesters who'd broken a few windows earlier in the day had threatened the cauldron too. All the volunteers were saying the same thing—they were definitely on message—and that whipped the somewhat buzzed late night crowd into an anti-hippie frenzy.

I bet it was BS though. I bet the VIPs, politicians and cops just want to keep all the best stuff for themselves, and not have any grubby commoners obstructing the view of the cauldron from the luxury suites in the Media Center.

The volunteers had obviously been instructed to blame all protesters and weren't overly careful about distinguishing reasonable anti-Olympic opposition from the allegedly violent anarchists and radicals who had supposedly forced the closure of the plaza. It seemed very convenient for the government. (Doesn't it usually come out afterward that the window smashers in these situations were actually undercover cops and agents provocateurs?)

Anyhow, we've still got curling on Tuesday, and I'm taking an Olympic break tomorrow and going snowboarding, so hopefully things will get better. Not gonna do any more random sightseeing in downtown Vancouver though.