The Olympic flame arrives Feb. 12 in Vancouver for the Opening Ceremony of the 2010 Winter Games. Since late October, when it landed after a long flight from Greece, the flame has been trekking across Canada - part of what's planned to be the longest relay in Olympic history to be contained within the host nation.
Canada, and this is a fact that is all too easy for others to forget, including Americans just to the south, is huge. It includes six time zones; the flame will traverse them all. The relay will travel nearly 30,000 miles. The route will take it through more than 1,000 communities, everywhere from Toronto and Montreal to outposts in the great white north.
All of that is Canada, and this extensive journey is designed to highlight what organizers keenly hope will prove the emotional call of the 2010 Olympics - a Games by and for Canada, symbolized by the pair of red mittens that are part of the torch-bearer uniform.
"As the flame travels across Canada's vast landscape," Vancouver 2010 Chief Eexecutive John Furlong said in Athens in late October as he and a Canadian delegation received the flame, "it will shed a light on the people, places and achievements of our country."
Any Olympics, whether Summer or Winter, simultaneously offers two related narrative threads. The first is universal - the gathering of young people from around the world in a gesture of global brotherhood. The second is deliberately more particular, and in the case of Vancouver and the 2010 Olympics it is a particular point of emphasis - a reflection of the distinctive qualities that a particular city and country bring to the occasion.
The most memorable editions of the Olympic Games represent not just "a city's Games but foremost a national Games," International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge said in an interview, turning to the 1994 Winter Games in adding, "Like Lillehammer was not just a city's Games but also the Games of Norway.
"I expect," he said, "the same from Vancouver."
On the outside of those mittens, for instance, stitched in white, appear the Olympic five rings under the words "Vancouver 2010." On the palm side - the national symbol, the maple leaf.
The mittens - of course they'll also be for sale - seem ready to become the "it" Vancouver souvenir, in the way that the blue beret emerged as the must-have accessory in Salt Lake City in 2002. Each pair goes for 10 Canadian dollars - four of which go into an athlete-support program.
Furlong, speaking at a news conference in Copenhagen earlier in the fall, said, "If you could, in your mind, see a scenario where an Olympic city in California would partner with New York or Miami or Seattle and see that happen - what would that do to the spirit of the country?"
From the streets of Vancouver to the slopes of Whistler and beyond, explore the setting for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.
Many American athletes have competed in Vancouver and Whistler several times before. So what's it like up there?
In that spirit, he said, referring to the 2010 Games: "We thought this would be a rare opportunity to let Canadians be family for a while."
To share in what he called the "positive anxiety" of being on the verge of staging the Games. To share as well in the melancholy of loss - Jack Poole, who led Vancouver's winning bid for the Games and then served as chairman of the organizing committee, died in October after a lengthy battle with pancreatic cancer, at 76. He passed away just hours after the flame was lit in ancient Olympia.
In a report to the International Olympic Committee members delivered at the IOC's 2009 annual meeting, Furlong said, "The motto for the Games in Vancouver is ‘with glowing hearts,' " a phrase from the Canadian national anthem. He said a moment later, "I think it fairly reflects the spirit of the Canadian people," and then adding, "We're very excited to be in the position we are in, to be almost ready to stage the Games."
All venues - done, and on time.
The bobsled and luge track - already dubbed fastest in the world.
The speedskating oval in Richmond, a Vancouver suburb - arguably the signature venue of the Games, 330,000 square feet with a roof made of wood salvaged from a British Columbia forest damaged by a pine-beetle infestation.
All test events - finished.
The Sea-to-Sky Highway, which for years had been the bane of anyone contemplating the drive from Vancouver up to Whistler, site of the Alpine events at the 2010 Games? A massive construction project has shaved the commute time to 90 minutes, maybe even a few minutes less if the weather and traffic are just right.
The financial picture, which for so long had threatened the Games, which prompted the IOC in an unprecedented move to offer earlier this year to contribute to the Vancouver 2010 operating budget - about $1.65 billion - if need be?
"Since the start of September we have noticed a real change in the levels of optimism and interest in what we're doing," Dave Cobb, the Vancouver 2010 executive vice president and deputy chief executive, said, adding, "We'll balance the budget. It's a question of what our surplus might be, a sliver [or something more]."
Furlong, in an evocation of the earnest Canadian-ness that has marked the Vancouver enterprise since the bid days in 2003, told the IOC, "We have as an organizing committee done our best. We have worked very hard and tried very hard to live up to our commitments to you."
Indeed, he said later, there's only one promise from the bid years that hasn't been met - a pledge to stage the entire Paralympic Games in Whistler. It turned out that just wouldn't work, he said, in part because it would "somewhat take away from our ability to inspire the country" because that drive to Whistler, even if it's 80 minutes, not 90, might prove enough of a deterrent that it would thwart the ability to tell the Paralympic story fully.
So, he said, he went to Paralympic organizers and asked formally to be released from the promise - which, he said, they were happy to do, because staging some events in Vancouver is of course a win-win. Nonetheless, he found it almost too much to have to ask to get out of the original commitment because, as he said, "That was the first one and the first one leads to another one," and that was a risk the Vancouver 2010 team did not want to run.
Having tried to keep their word while planning for seemingly every contingency, the fate of the 2010 Games - as with any edition of the Olympics, the Winter Games especially - is almost sure to turn on some number of factors inevitably outside the control of organizers.
Will the buses run on time?
Will swine flu invade the Games? Medical authorities are now recommending that all athletes heading to Vancouver get the H1N1 vaccine.
Will it snow too much - or not enough?
The men's snowboard halfpipe final on the evening of Feb. 17, under the lights at Cypress Mountain, about 20 minutes from downtown Vancouver - it could be one of the magical nights of the Games, again if the weather cooperates. A clear night and the views will be breathtaking - the mountain, the sea, the lights of downtown, all of it.
The men's downhill up in Whistler on the very first day of competition, Saturday the 13 th - what if one of the Canadians wins? Twice before the Games have been in Canada - Summer in 1976 in Montreal, Winter in 1988 in Calgary. Never has Canada won a gold medal at a home Olympics.
Canada's John Kucera won the downhill at the 2009 world championships in France; another Canadian, Jan Hudec, took silver in the downhill in the 2007 Worlds; another, Manuel Osborne-Paradis won the downhill at the end of the 2009 season at a World Cup stop in Norway; yet another, Erik Guay, has seven World Cup podium finishes in the downhill.
The Canadian Olympic Committee has aggressively sought in a big-budget plan called "Own the Podium" to, well, own the podium - that is, win as many medals as possible. The plan has sparked complaints from elsewhere that non-Canadians haven't been allowed appropriate training time on Olympic venues; Canadian officials insist they have played fair.
Should one of the "Canadian cowboys" - as the skiers call themselves - win gold in the downhill, it might well ignite a buzz of the sort that, as Jean-Claude Killy, the famed 1968 skiing gold medalist who now is one of the IOC's Winter Games experts and most soulful thinkers pointed out in a 2006 Games after-action report, was missing from those most recent Winter Olympics, in Torino, Italy.
Meanwhile, at the end of the 17 days of the Games comes the men's hockey final - and, as Furlong has said many times, that's the event most Canadians want Canada to win.
"Where are our red mittens?" Killy asked Vancouver organizers after their report to the IOC in Copenhagen.
"Before you reply, Mr. Furlong," Rogge said, "let me tell you - you can send me the invoice, 115" - roughly the number of IOC members - "times [10] Canadian dollars.
"And we will pay it immediately."
