Who Invited You? Party Crashers or Unwelcome Guests: The Legacy of Social Protest at the 2010 Winter Olympics

In February 2010, Canada hosted the world's largest multi-sport event for the third time when athletes from around the globe gathered for the 21st Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver and Whistler, British Columbia. (1) On the first full day of competition, the world was treated to images of balaclava-clad protesters marching through downtown Vancouver smashing store windows. (2) Visitors could be left to wonder if Vancouverites really wanted them there. The national newspaper, the Globe and Mail offered reassurance that the silent majority were enjoying themselves. In fact, thanks to the Games the city had discovered sense of civic worth, where seemingly everyone had taken renewed pride in their city. While may have been voices critical of the Winter Olympics in the build-up to the Games, few are saying that now. (3) And yet, protests--on wide variety of issues--had orbited these Games since the bidding stage and, as the Opening Ceremonies loomed, one observer noted that Vancouver was a city divided. The decisions made by the local organizing committee (VANOC) and officials at all three levels of government had created an environment and context in which a protest movement was born. (4) Indeed, as David Eby of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) notes, there were demonstrations almost every day of the first week of the Olympics. (5) If not divided, the citizens of the Vancouver that hosted the 2010 Winter Olympics certainly seemed conflicted about the event. Ever since the Games had been awarded in July 2003 to the bid group that became VANOC, the event had been lightning rod for local protest and controversy. This paper explores the issues that fuelled these debates. It examines the public protests, which garnered considerable amount of attention in the days leading up to the 2010 Games, and the issues that informed them. These issues captured public attention--at times national, but more often local--thanks to the increased focus that the mainstream media placed on the Games as the Opening Ceremonies loomed and the Games unfolded. Nevertheless, the issues around which protest coalesced have long history and the resistance that occurred in Vancouver, Whistler, and elsewhere in British Columbia's Lower Mainland was built up over nearly decade through resistance first to the bid and then to the Games themselves. To establish this longer narrative of protest, this paper taps into the narratives that played out in both the mainstream and alternative media and also focuses on semi-structured in-depth interviews with leading local activists in Vancouver and Whistler. Sporting Boosterism and Dissent: The Legacy of Public Debate and Resistance Critiques of the Olympic Games have sought to examine the claims made by Games' bidding and hosting interests and the benefits to their communities that these groups tout. This work has crossed disciplinary boundaries to reflect the influence of cultural studies on the critical study of sport (and vice versa) and has included David Harvey's notion of the entrepreneurial city, John Hannigan's Fantasy City, and more recently Andrew Ross's notions of creative industries in Nice Work If You Can Get It. (6) But, as Dave Whitson and Don Macintosh identified nearly 20 years ago (and scholars such as political scientist David Black continue to examine), are primarily three perceived benefits of events that host cities--more precisely, the capital-cultural elites that represent host cities in this process, or as Ross would put it, the creative industries--typically claim: (i) legacies, most visibly of sporting facilities, but are other types of legacies including legacies of volunteerism and community involvement; (ii) infrastructure development, through both direct and indirect investment, the former including sport-specific facilities, and the latter featuring tangential but hardly incidental development in transportation networks and tourism inventory (new-built hotels, restaurants, and other services); and (iii) increased tourism--serviced by this new infrastructure--both at the time of the mega-event and after the fact in host communities, who seek to promote their region both to tourists and the tourist industry. …

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