Abby Brammell

Spectacle: The opening ceremony was watched by millions


You may have read of transport chaos in Vancouver, $400,000 worth of tickets recalled because of safety concerns, events postponed and a bob track criticised for its part in a young man's death.

You may reasonably conclude from it that these Winter Olympic Games are close to farce, that the red seen everywhere among the crowds is a reflection of official embarrassment. You would be wrong.

The passion for their Games is tangible among Canadians. They talk in this most westerly province of this vast country of little else.


v In taxis, on buses and trains, they confront you to garner your opinion because they want you to echo what they feel, that winning the right to host the Games was the best thing that ever happened to their city

It is not my subjective view from a few days in Whistler and now in Vancouver. It is there in unbelievable figures that cannot be denied. For one, you should know that 78 per cent of all Canadians watched all of the opening ceremony.

If the same percentage watches the same event in London in 2012 it would be 48million people, close to double the largest television audience ever gathered for a programme in the United Kingdom.

It means, as one media analyst put it, that everybody you know watched it, or if they didn't watch it, were sitting next to someone who did. It was than three times as many that watched the opening ceremony of the last Games in Canada in 1988 or watched those in Salt Lake City close by in 2002. And, more remarkably, they were not alone.

We may regard these as silly Games, full of risible events, but their American cousins south of the border were almost as keen to see them open. More than 32million of them watched the ceremony. Only one other Winter Games ceremony has been seen by more.


Spotlight: The Games have caught Canada's imagination

If those numbers do not convince you that there is a passion hereabouts for these Winter Games, how about the figure 1,200. That was how many people in Whistler, a village of fewer than 10,000 souls, were willing to climb a mountain at the weekend before dawn with their skis just to be available in case they were needed to pack down the piste.

London's organising committee is finding the same passion among people who want to volunteer to be part of 2012. And every one there as here knows full well that volunteering does not bring rewards beyond the pride.

I still remember with affection the two boys and two girls, students from Beijing University, who volunteered for the last summer Games and found themselves detailed in shifts to service a public convenience in the main media centre. The smile never left their faces, and it is like that again here.


There is something about Olympism which gets into people’s psyche. Emily Brydon will ski her third Olympic Games here for Canada in the downhill this week and then retire from competition. Not from the Olympics though.

She has accepted an offer already from her British rival and friend Chemmy Alcott to share her West London home for the next three so she can come to help the London’s organising committee fulfil its promise to encourage the youth of the world.

They call it putting something back and in these days when most sport is business it is one of the unique features of the Olympic Games that people who have enjoyed its limelight feel they must.


source: dailymail