When you talk about Olympic legacy, one of the enduring legacies for me was to see Roberto Luongo win that game. I somehow care deeply about the health and welfare of Roberto. I'm not as worried about Sid as I am about Roberto.
There was a reference to the sensitivity about public finances and infrastructure. Part of the legacy of the Vancouver Olympics, and it is replicated in almost every Olympics, is cost overruns the public is on the hook for. The optics of cuts in city services alongside Olympic costs overruns are, to put it mildly, not good. This was mentioned in a Sports Illustrated story at the time.
One of the things that concerns me about this discussion is that we are talking about two different things, conflating them, and then turning them into the same thing. That thing is that this becomes a vehicle for corporate sponsorship. We are celebrating the 150th anniversary of our country. If we want it to have the kind of resonance that the centennial had, I have to say that our interest in how the global corporate world helped to sculpt the Vancouver Olympics is troubling to me.
What we need to do is drill down and find out why many of us who weren't even born at the time of the centennial still remember it. The fact that the corporate community didn't play a huge part is not necessarily significant. What is significant is that we're still talking about the centennial 50 years later. I think that if you look at the history of the Olympics, you will find that not a lot of people talk about the Olympics in a particular city 20, 30 years later--although I will remember Roberto Luongo.