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From the Montreal Gazette:

No dance on Hastings St.
Good news for some Vancouver's victory a mixed blessing

JACK TODD
The Gazette

Thursday, July 03, 2003

Two years ago, I paid a visit to the hotel a half-block off Vancouver's infamous Hastings St. skid row where I had lived for six months in 1970 and a couple of weeks in the late fall of 1971.

The façade looked so different that I couldn't believe it was the same place. My friend Dr. John X. Cooper made the nostalgic trip down bad-memory lane with me and explained that, like much of the Hastings St. skid-row area, the hotel had been gussied up as part of the preparations for Expo '86, when Vancouver hosted the World's Fair.

I pushed open the door of the hotel, stepped into the tiny lobby expecting to see the same improvements inside - and staggered back under a wave of odors that took me back 30 years in a single whiff of the mingled smells of alcohol, stale urine, perspiration, vomit, cigarette smoke and desperation. What looked like a much-improved hotel from the street was in fact the same old skid-row hell where I lived for all those months.

Point is, no matter how much they attempt to gussy it up for the world, Hastings St. just keeps getting worse. Watching all those well-scrubbed, gleaming, happy, white people jumping up and down in Prague yesterday after Vancouver won its Olympic bid for 2010, I couldn't help but imagine the scene around my old stomping grounds, with thousands of heroin addicts, alcoholics and desperate screaming crazies partying down because, gosh and gee whiz, we got the Olympics.

Somehow, I doubt that my old friends on this country's largest and most appalling skid row did much dancing in the streets yesterday - or if they did, they were dancing as they always dance, too addled to realize where they were or what they were doing. And you can bet that Vancouver did not feature its massive heroin addiction problem in its final presentation to the IOC and that the shamefully high percentage of First Peoples among those addicts wasn't high on the list of attractions pushed by right-wing B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell.

You can also bet that when the world comes calling in 2010 it will find a skid row four times the size of the derelict district I stumbled into in 1970, and that the city of Vancouver and the province of B.C. will have done everything in its power to keep the addicts, the winos and the teenaged prostitutes out of sight.

All of which is not to say that Vancouver did not deserve to host the winter Games. Canada is a winter Olympics power, Vancouver has the most spectacular setting of any North American city of any size and the facilities in the very separate locations of Whistler and Vancouver will be world-class.

It's just that the Olympics and reality never quite converge. The whole thing, from the day the bid is awarded through the closing ceremonies, takes place in such an unreal atmosphere that I'm sure no IOC delegate in Prague even thought to ask about Vancouver's heroin problem. Somehow, the horrid reality of Hastings St. will be cleaned up, the addicts temporarily swept out of the way just long enough for the Games to be held before the hangover begins.

To the IOC and the people who organize these things, Hastings St. was never an obstacle for Vancouver. The trip from Vancouver to the Whistler ski resort was a problem, with reason. According to my handy-dandy Internet driving directions, the distance between Whistler and Vancouver is 125.7 kilometres and the driving time is two hours and 14 minutes, give or take a traffic light or two.

Throw in Olympic traffic congestion on a narrow and sometimes treacherous highway and that could easily become 14 hours and two minutes - but transportation is a headache at all Olympic Games and reaching the ski hills for the winter Games is always a problem.

Even in Salt Lake City, where the transportation system was unrivalled, it took a good two hours and two buses to get from downtown Salt Lake to the downhill-skiing venue.

In the end, it appears that Vancouver won, not because people paid attention to its problems or because delegates believed the Whistler-Vancouver transportation obstacle could be overcome, but because the Europeans weren't solidly behind Salzburg. The Austrian city was the first to be eliminated yesterday, and the B.C. bid won because enough Europeans then shifted their support to Vancouver to keep Pyeongchang from securing the Games that the South Koreans almost won on the first ballot.

The Europeans - as Montreal's Richard Pound found out the hard way - wield a disproportionate degree of power within the IOC, for better or for worse. In this case, it's for the better.

There is lingering resentment in Europe over the invasion and the continuing occupation of Iraq by the United States. The Europeans are mad and they don't want to see the much larger plum of the 2012 summer Games awarded to New York, so they made sure North America got its turn this time so that the 2012 summer Olympics can go to Paris or London.

The question now is who benefits. You can be sure it will not be the down-and-out on Hastings St.

First in line will be the biggest and greediest of the multinational corporations that now run the world with the aid of BushCo: Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Visa, GM. The next will be those British Columbia businesses that have the best connections to the various governments - i.e., those who have made the biggest campaign contributions.

Long before yesterday's vote, those businesses that stand to reap an Olympic-sized windfall will have positioned themselves with their snouts at the trough, ready to start guzzling.

Only one deserving group will get anything out of this: Canada's amateur athletes, especially athletes who compete in the winter Games. They should end up with more lucrative sponsorships, better training facilities, perhaps even more generous government subsidies. With any luck, perhaps there will even be some residual benefits after the Olympic whirlwind moves on.

But at the end of the day it will be the same old story. The rich will get richer, the poor will get poorer - and the middle class will get stuck with the tax bill.

The derelicts of Hastings St.? They will reappear as soon as the Olympics are over, trying to trade Olympic pins for a drink or a fix.

Some things, you see, never change.