Mar 03 2010
Life After The Olympics
On Sunday afternoon, most of North America (and part of the world) was watching the gold medal hockey game for the Olympics. After Canada’s nail-biter win, the world watched the closing ceremonies. That’s it, right?
Well, not really.. While the rest of the world goes on with life, with athletes returning home, and regular TV programming resumes, Vancouver is very much in the Olympic spirit. How does a city and country come down from the high? How do we resume life after over two weeks of a big party? There are still the Paralympics to come. All the pavilions will be open again, but I imagine that the whole event will be a little more low-key.
On the radio today, there was a report saying that this is not uncommon in cities that have hosted the Olympics. There are going to be counsellors available to VANOC employees to help them transition back to the real world of work. Ever since July of 2003 when the world heard Jacques Rogge announce that Vancouver was awarded the 2010 Winter Olympics, things have been building towards it. Major construction projects, such as the athletes village and the Canada Line, reports warning about road closures and the traffic mayhem to expect. The general hype around it was building until February 12th when it was finally here. Now that the Games are over, we all look around at each other and say, “Now what?”
Well, the sad reality is that after the Paralympics, it’s all done. Vancouver will return to life as it was before, but with one last question. What will happen to the economy here? We’ve avoided a lot of the job losses here so far, but without the driving force that we’ve had here, no one knows what is going to happen….