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Vancouver 2010
When Olympic illusion becomes out-and-out deception
By Chris Shaw
The 2010 Vancouver Organizing Committee, and the Western media, may have learned a few lessons after the fiascos of the Beijing Games
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Movies rely on illusion, as does theatre, and both art forms depend on a process of culturalization in which we, the audience, learn the conventions of the medium. In movies we learn to accept that time can be compressed and so it seems perfectly natural when characters are in London in one scene and in Los Angles only a few frames later. Watching as the set is changed in the theatre between acts does not seem unreal to us, merely an essential part of the play as one act segues into the next. In both forms, we have learned to "suspend disbelief," to accept as real what we know really isn't in everyday life.
The suspension of disbelief can come to an abrupt end, however, when the audience feels cheated or feels they have been manipulated in some unfair way. And when that happens, a disgruntled audience might just get up and walk out.
The Beijing Olympics started out as a spectacular illusion for the world. The Chinese government thought to turn the Games into a coming out party, serving notice to all that China was back as a superpower, perhaps the dominant superpower for the new century. They thought the illusions had to be perfect in all details. For example, the notorious air pollution was to be banished by closing factories and taking cars off the road for the duration of the Games. The fact that thousands of Chinese had their jobs and transportation curtailed, or that the blue skies were merely a temporary stage effect, seemed a small price to pay to keep the suspension of disbelief for the rest of the world in place for 17 days.
With the air "clear" and the cameras rolling, the opening ceremony seemed to go off flawlessly. News anchors from all the major TV stations gushed with praise for the performances and fireworks that seemed to march across the skies. Tears were shed for the adorable little Lin Miaoki, age 9, in her red dress sweetly singing Ode to the Motherland to an audience of over three billion. Utter perfection. The spectacle had captured the hearts of the world. China had finally arrived.
That’s about when the illusion began to go south. The fireworks turned out to have been digitally-enhanced. That alone wasn't fatal to the illusion and an adept public affairs officer working for the Beijing organizing committee massaged the deception to portray the Chinese as just trying to put on the best possible show for the world.
Instead, what became the beginning of the end for the illusion was the revelation that the voice behind Ode to the Motherland was a very different little girl, 7 year old Yang Peiyi. Yang has a chubby face and uneven baby teeth and was deemed cosmetically inferior to Miaoki, so the Beijing organizing committee had Miaoki lip synch the song. For parents of little girls around the planet, this deception became almost a personal and visceral blow, a gratuitous insult to our own children.
This one illusion, this one deception, became like the loose end of a badly woven sweater. Pull on it and the entire thing begins to unravel: underage Chinese gymnasts taking gold medals and protest zones curiously empty of protesters, the latter having been arrested and taken to "Reeducation Though Labour" camps for simply applying for protest permits. Now it began to make perfect sense: if the organizers could be cruel to a little girl, was anyone immune? Certainly the1.5 million Beijing residents displaced for Olympic venues weren't. Nor were the thousands of migrant workers summarily expelled from the city to keep the TV cameras away from them and the shanty towns where they had lived in squalor while building those same venues.
The take-home message for the world was that the Olympic illusions of Beijing had failed spectacularly. The IOC switched to serious damage control mode. The IOC's nightmare was that the world's media, particularly the Western media, might begin to wonder what else was illusion and why the IOC hadn't done anything about any part of it from the cheating gymnasts to the lack of the promised human rights, to whatever future revelations might still emerge.
Then, somewhere in the background, there was the sticky problem of what to do about the illusions surrounding the 2010 Vancouver Games. Reporters began to ask those pesky questions about poverty and protests and rockslides, in the process turning Premier Gordon Campbell's happy-news Beijing conference into a train wreck during which he boldly denied any thoughts of warehousing the burgeoning population of the homeless. Some of the Vancouver reporters, however, had been tipped off by the Work Less Party that there was in fact just such a warehousing plan in the works with documents obtained under Freedom of Information from the City of Vancouver to prove it.
All of this opens a raft of illusion-breaking questions: how did Vancouverites wind up with so many homeless in a "world class" Olympic city, how much of our bubble real estate economy has been built on false Olympic promises while neglecting the failing forestry and fishery of the province, and what are the true environmental costs of the Games compared to the mindless rhetoric of "the greenest Games ever"?
The illusions behind the Beijing Games came apart due to the overt falsehoods and institutional cruelty that finally spilled out into the public consciousness due to a Western media seemingly hell-bent on China-bashing. The same scrutiny is needed in Vancouver since our Olympic illusions are no less than those in Beijing. If Canadian reporters have learned a thing or two there, perhaps the lessons will translate to equally hard questions back home in 2010.
More likely, the mainstream press will give Vancouver 2010 a free pass, leaving the heavy lifting to Chinese reporters sure to be looking for Olympic scandal payback.
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