Today in Verbatim, This contributing editor Andrew Wallace interviews Dave Zirin, sports editor of U.S. progressive weekly The Nation and host of Edgeofsports.com, a blog and radio show that examines the collision of politics and sports. He’s the author of several canonical books on that topic, most recently of A People’s History of Sports in the United States, and before that wrote What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States and Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports.

As always, this is a transcription of the biweekly This Magazine podcast, “Listen to This.” You can hear the whole audio interview here, but we’d also encourage you to easily subscribe to the podcast through iTunes so you never miss an episode.

Q&A

Andrew Wallace: You were in Vancouver prior to the Olympics and I read your piece in Sports Illustrated. I was wondering if you could elaborate on the sense of discontentment that you experienced there before the Games.

Dave Zirin: I was there just a couple weeks before the start of the Games and what I found, walking around the streets and just talking to people is that it seemed to finally settle in on people just how much the Games were going to cost, how much of an inconvenience it was going to be, and just how shut out of the party a lot of them were going to be.

I spoke to one person who was so excited, and had been saving for a long time to go to one of the hockey games, just to find out that he wasn’t even close to what it would actually cost to get a ticket to go. That sense, you could see it just weighing on people in a really serious way. Also, this is a media term, the optics were just terrible. When I was there it was announced that funding for physical education programs were being cut, letters were going out to 800 teachers because of budget overruns. To have that on the front page of the local newspaper while the top flap was all about Olympics, Olympics, Olympics, happy, happy, joy, joy, it definitely bred a feeling of discontent.

Andrew Wallace: But do you think now, we’ve had the Games for the last two weeks and the hype machine got in motion and with the spectacle and excitement of it do you think that all of that will be forgotten?

Dave Zirin: Well it’s interesting; I think a lot of it was forgotten during the Games because there’s a rush. You’ve got so many people there and it’s such a big party, but if history is any guide, now is when you’re really going to get the second shoe dropping because the bill is going to come due. The amount of money, all the accounting is going to be on the table.

When Vancouver first got the games, one local politician said publicly that according to his figures and his estimates it would be a $10 billion influx of funds into the city. PriceWaterhouseCooper, the independent accounting firm, said right before the games started it would probably be more like less than a billion. That’s a huge drop off, now what are the final figures going to be? Once the dust is cleared and all the accounting tricks and obfuscation has been cleared off the table. That’s usually when you see politicians losing their chops, so we’ll see what happens.

Andrew Wallace: Right, one guy, Christopher Shaw with No2010, he said that he thought it would be the equivalent of the Montreal, maybe not equivalent in scope, but of the Montreal Olympics which everyone calls “the Big O” because I think with all the interest, they were still paying back over $100 billion in debt to the city.

Dave Zirin: Yeah that’s right, in Montreal, the lead up to the Games was similar. I mean it’s so interesting, you go back and you look at previous games and it’s always the same promises and it’s almost always the same results too. Before the Montreal Olympics a local politician said that Olympics cause deficits about as often as men have babies and yet, the Montreal Games of course, it didn’t get paid off until 2006. It took 30 years to pay off the debt. Will Vancouver be that bad? It’s hard to say, but one of the things is that the Olympics, and the financing of the Olympics, is always held hostage to the larger economic forces in society and in the world and I think that’s one of the things that really hurt in Vancouver is that this was the first “post-global recession” games and we’ll see what kind of effect that has in the long run.

Andrew Wallace: What do you think the implications could be for future Olympic events then, because I think what’s really interesting is what happened in Chicago recently, that their was such a backlash to that bid, right? So are we seeing a change in the tide there of how people feel about the Olympics?

Dave Zirin: Yeah, I mean I also think one of the things you’re going to see is the Olympics rely heavily on the BRIC countries and their satellites. By BRIC countries you know: Brazil, China, India (and Russia), and I think that their going to rely on countries where dissent can be smashed with as little publicity as possible and where a lot of these projects can be pushed through with as much hypocrisy as possible. I think that’s going to be the unfortunate future of the Olympic games unless we really do have international solidarity movements for people who want to keep the Olympics out and I think that’s going to be the only thing that leads to what I think is the only sensible solution for the Olympics which is to have a permanent winter and summer site and to eliminate the bid process all together.

Andrew Wallace: That’s interesting, what problems would that solve?

Dave Zirin: Well it would end the bidding process and that’s where you have the root of the IOC’s power and the root of a lot of corruption and lies that surround the Olympics.

See, the best way to understand it is that the IOC is like McDonalds headquarters and what they demand of every city is that they be a franchisee. That means if you’re a city and you decide say, democratically, through your city council that you’re going to have strings attached to the Olympic bid, that you’re going to have civil society at the table, that’s a favourite phrase, but at the end of the day though, if the IOC says “well, actually no,” then that’s just the way it is.

I spoke to a lot of people in Vancouver, very well meaning progressives who were pro-Olympics when they first heard about it, precisely because they got a ton of promises from local politicians about this seat that the table. But it was a mythical seat at the table and they became fierce Olympics opponents precisely because they were shut out of how a lot of the infrastructure spending would happen. And I think that’s the reality of the Olympics and if you had a permanent site it would just eliminate this kabuki theatre all together. Being on the International Olympic Committee would be little more than a ceremonial post, which is what it should be instead of what it is now, which is a position of a frightening power almost like a free-floating state with absolutely no oversight.

Andrew Wallace: And with charitable status right?

Dave Zirin: Yeah exactly, a non-profit that makes billions, I don’t even know how that works.

Andrew Wallace: So what do you think that means for say something like Rio? I mean, how does the progressive movement get in there and start speaking to the issues that could happen in Rio, because you know the things that are exacerbated by the Olympics are things like police corruption, political corruption and those are endemic problems in Rio right?

Dave Zirin: Yeah, huge issues in Rio with police brutality, huge issues of gentrification particularly the clearing of the favelas. I mean there’s already been a very dramatic gun battle where a police helicopter raided one of the favelas and someone in one of the favelas got a lucky shot off and the helicopter hit the ground—huge fire, explosion, right outside of Rio itself. I think the Rio example is going to be really interesting because, on the one hand you have a Brazil of that is ground zero to the World Social Forum movements in Porto Alegre, you’ve got the worker’s party in Brazil, that’s sort of on the one hand. But on the other hand, you also have the World Cup coming to Brazil just two years before the Olympics. They’re going to be able to push through a lot of the infrastructure, spending and policing that they need to do for the World Cup and that’s going to be interesting because it’s one thing to oppose the Olympics in Brazil. It’s another thing to oppose the World Cup. That might be a much tougher political needle to thread.

Andrew Wallace: That all being said, if we look at the Olympics that just happened, do you want to point out what you think your three most significant stories within the Olympics that went beyond the X’s and O’s of the field were?

Dave Zirin: Yeah, one, first and foremost, is the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili, the Georgian luge slider, which really resulted from the fact that he and the other luge sliders had no access to be able to practice at Whistler because of Canada’s Own the Podium campaign. And the fact that the people who were in charge of the International Luge Federation, the FIL, they created this track up there in Whistler that, for a year, people have been warning about, that it’s too fast and it’s too dangerous, it’s too much like trying to turn luge into the X-games, some wacky spectacle of lightening speed.

So people were talking about it for a year, and the predictable happened, somebody died. And the Olympics just go on as if it didn’t happen, including NBC news, issuing a dictate to NBC sports to stop showing footage of Nodar’s death. They didn’t want it ruining the party. But it symbolizes so much of what’s wrong with the Olympics. The Olympics speak about standing for these ideals of ethics and sportsmanship, but in reality it’s “go for the gold all the way and go for network profits all the way,” and it’s an absolute farce. So that’s a big one is Nodar Kumaritashivili.

But there are other stories that complemented the Olympics as well. Not all of them are bad stories by any stretch. The other ones I would say though are like the protest movement that occurred, the fact that for all the debates and discussions about the protest movement, organized largely through the Olympic Resistance Network, I mean it was something that was an Olympic protest movement that was open, and out and on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, so they got a remarkable about of publicity and I think really put a marker in the ground for future cities.

So those are stories that I’m going to remember that took place off the field of play. Beyond that too, I’ll just throw another one out there, It was really quite shocking the amount of homophobia by broadcasters against U.S. skater Johnny Weir and how accepted it was. I mean, like broadcasters saying over the air that he should be gender tested, all kinds of things like that. That he was ruining figure skating. It’s just unbelievable; he wasn’t macho enough for figure skating? Are you kidding me? It’s just ridiculous; to have that amount of homophobia in figure skating just really set my eyes back.

Andrew Wallace: Were you impressed with how Weir came back? I thought his comments in the interviews after the original homophobic comments were made were quite interesting and quite strong.

Dave Zirin: Weir’s never been shy, that’s for sure. He’s never been shy, but I still regret he didn’t make it to the top five. He came in sixth, because Lady Gaga was going to come and perform, and be there in person, so that would have been a lot of fun. So we were denied that.

But I think it’s still an important story because of these issues. Particularly the issue of gender testing in Olympic sports, its something I’ve written a lot about in the last year with South African runner Caster Semenya being a part of that story and it’s something that the International Olympic Committee–you can tell they’re trying to shift away from it in a number of ways, but as of this interview we’re doing right now, I mean they still have a Neanderthal view of gender testing. Although they’re moving it away from having it in their rules that the idea of being a “man” is this inherent advantage in sport, which is at least somewhat of a step forward. They still operate on a very strict gender binary and haven’t quite figured out what to do with people who don’t fit into their little compartments.

The Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games open tonight with much fanfare, pomp, jollity, glee, grandeur, ceremony, flourish, and setting things on fire. We’ve spent, oh, about the last six weeks moaning about the whole thing, from the overblown budget to the bogus environmental claims, the sponsor bloat to the unsettled aboriginal land claims, the out-of-control homelessness in Vancouver to the erosion of civil liberties, blah, blah, blah. Hearing ourselves complain about it is almost as irritating as hearing people (and there are plenty of them out there, apparently) saying how wonderful it’s all going to be. Our friends and families—and maybe you, too—are sick of hearing our complaints, and the whole mess is going to go ahead anyway, no matter what we do or say.

So: Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re just going to shut up about the whole thing for the next two weeks. Live and let live. The news is going to be absolutely chock-a-block full of Olympic blather, and while we probably can’t tune it out, we can opt not to be part of the problem. Therefore, This Magazine’s website will be, starting today, a totally Olympics-free zone, continuing through February 28. We’re not going to talk about it, not going to complain about it, not even going to acknowledge the Games’ existence. We’ve said what we have to say. Drop by and say Hello if you need a little refuge from the media carpet-bombing you’re in for everywhere else. See you on the other side!

Jacques Rogge's bank of Olympic televisions (artist's impression).

When Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, checks into his Vancouver hotel suite a few weeks from now, he will find (as he flops, exhausted, no doubt, from the strain of private jet travel) a “video wall,” paid for by the citizens of British Columbia. The bank of televisions are a requirement of IOC regulations, which state that the president must have enough screens to be able to watch every Olympic event underway at any given time—simultaneously.

The white-glove treatment being extended to Count Rogge of Belgium and the 111 other IOC members—the clutch of industrialists, backwater bureaucrats, tinpot generals, and dissipated royalty who preside over the Olympic “movement”—puts the economic reality of 2010 into sharp and sickening perspective.

Somehow in this country it became perversely more politically viable to spend $1.98 billion widening B.C.’s Sea to Sky Highway for a two-week international event than it is to implement a national housing strategy to aid Canada’s estimated 300,000 homeless (Canada is the only G8 country without such a plan). Today, more than 600,000 Canadian children live in poverty, a number that hasn’t budged since 1989’s doomed Campaign 2000 parliamentary pledge to eradicate child poverty by the turn of the millennium—yet $900 million will be spent on security costs, battle-hardening Vancouver against the Olympic crowds. The opening ceremonies of Vancouver 2010 are budgeted at $58 million, while the B.C. provincial government cut $20 million in arts funding just last summer.

It’s not possible to draw a direct line from the ledger that pays for renovating the Vancouver Convention Centre ($883 million) to the one that dictates that Canada pays among the lowest unemployment insurance rates in the industrialized world. But in a national sense, it is sad to contemplate the collective priorities expressed by these decisions: to choose the splashy over the prosaic; the grand, short-lived gesture over the incremental improvement; the rich and famous over the poor and marginalized. Or to furnish a Belgian count’s plush hotel room with more televisions than one man can watch, while thousands sleep in the street.

This edition of Verbatim is a transcript of Andrew Wallace in conversation with Harsha Walia of the No 2010 campaign. The original podcast of that interview is available here. Andrew is also joining us as a blog columnist, writing about the intersection of sport and society with Game Theory. The first column appeared yesterday. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes for new interviews every other Monday.

In today’s Verbatim, Harsha Walia talks with Andrew about the present circumstances of the Olympic protest movement on the eve of the Games, and the future of the social organizations that have met and collaborated to critique the event.

Q&A

Harsha Walia: The Olympic resistance network is a network that was established approximately two years ago in Vancouver Coast Salish territories to basically build resistance to the Olympic games. The games were costing $7 billion while public services are being cut. The games have resulted in an approximate 300-fold increase in homelessness in Vancouver’s downtown east side, which is the poorest neighbourhood in Canada.

So there’s a lot of growing discontent around those two issues in particular about the Games. But for us, we also have a much more radical analysis around the Games as a corporate industry, where we’re seeing corporate sponsors getting sweetheart deals. They’re getting bailed out, in the context of the economic recession, as workers are losing jobs – corporate sponsored projects with the Olympic village are getting multi-billion dollar bailouts.

And also, an anti-colonial analysis which is that the Games are being held on unceded Coast Salish territory throughout B.C. and that the Games have provided an even greater impetus for the ongoing theft of native land for development projects like ski resorts.

Andrew Wallace: And can you explain the slogan “No Olympics on Stolen Native Land”

Harsha Walia: Yeah, there are several pieces to it; one is the obvious, which is that the Olympics are taking place on unceded Coast Salish territory.

Andrew Wallace: And can you explain what “unceded Coast Salish territory” means?

Harsha Walia: Coast Salish territory are the indigenous territories that Vancouver is in, so Burrard/Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish, and Lil’wat, which is in Whistler area, and so Coast Salish is actually the anglicized name given to all the different indigenous nations, of which there are many, along the costal area of B.C.

Unceded is the legal reality, let alone the moral reality, that B.C. in particular is all untreatied land. So from a legal perspective B.C. is still unsurrendered indigenous land. There are no treaties that have been signed, with minor exception, in the province of British Columbia. So that’s the specifics of “unceded.” “Stolen” is a much more popular term, which is that all of Canada is stolen land and we all reside on occupied indigenous territories.

So that’s the basis of “No Olympics on Stolen Native Land.” It’s something that VANOC (Vancouver Organizing Committee) and IOC (International Olympic Committee) and all the Olympic elites know because they know that this resistance to the Olympics is so strong in indigenous communities that they have had to create the Four Host First Nations which is basically a native corporate body made up of a few token indigenous people. But Four Host First Nations primarily employs non-native people and it’s a corporation. It’s a business, and so that corporation does not necessarily represent the consent of any of the indigenous people. It’s just called the Four Host First Nations, but some of the Indian Act chiefs – and as we know the Indian Act system is a colonial system that particularly facilitates the selection of chiefs that are in line with the government agenda.

So it’s something that they know very well, the government elite and VANOC know very well, and that’s why they’ve tried to have the Four Host First Nations as a façade of native consent to the Games. That’s why “No Olympics on Stolen Native Land” really foregrounds and highlights the fact that the Four Host First Nations certainly does not represent all indigenous people and that there’s a groundswell of indigenous resistance from urban to rural communities.

Andrew Wallace: And since we’re talking about the Four Host, on the website you said or someone said, “They’re either ignorant of the issues, or greedy.” Which is a fairly harsh critique. What is the bone contention with Four Host, because it does represent some.

Harsha Walia: I don’t know about the ignorant or greedy comment, and it’s not even about specific individuals, although specific individuals come to light. Phil Fontaine for example, who is the former Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations and through the AFN gave grand consent to the Olympic games is now a formal advisor to the Royal Bank of Canada and is working closely with corporate interests.

The Royal Bank of Canada is the most devastating, finance is the most devastating industrial project on the planet. Which is affecting primarily indigenous people. The issue in terms of the Four Host First Nations is to highlight the fact that, first of all, no body of people represents all indigenous people. Native 2010 resistance or indigenous resistance doesn’t claim to represent all native people so certainly Four Host First Nations cannot claim all native people

Andrew Wallace: What are the larger goals of this. Clearly, the way you’re speaking and the vocabulary you’re using goes beyond just the Olympics. It seems part of a larger social movement. So what does ORN want to achieve?

Harsha Walia: I think that is really important because a lot of what we get [from people] is that “yeah, well the Games are coming anyway.” So for us it’s like “yeah we’re going to do our best to make sure the Games don’t happen entirely without a hitch.” That everyone who comes to this town and international media and people in this city and people in this province know that the effects of these games are not all positive.

In fact they’re only positive for real estate developers and the corporate and government elite. (We want to) do our best to try to engage people with why the Olympic games and the Olympic industry are negative. But much beyond that, our goals around protesting, disrupting, boycotting, all of those – and educating about the Olympic games are about building strength for social movements in the long term.

Seeing how things like the Games are rooted in processes of capitalist exploitation and things like exploitation of labour, ongoing colonial extraction of resources on indigenous land, environmental degradation, militarization, $1 billion in security.

The Olympic games facilitates this police state for Canada, so it’s seen as this moment of exception where “oh my got let’s spend off this money” because we’re so worried about a terrorist attack. In many ways it’s no different than all these Western States who use fear mongering to spend billions of dollars to fortify a military police state. So all of these kinds of things are going to be here after the Olympics are gone.

One thing that we’re very much aware much aware of, we’re anti-Olympics, but we see this as a struggle that is going to continue beyond the Olympics. Homelessness will still be on our streets after the Games are gone. We’re still going to be in debt after the Games are gone. All the CCTVs, closed circuit television cameras are going to be here when the Games are gone.

Andrew Wallace: What you call a “Police State,” can you give examples of, and explain, what do you mean by that term? How does it become a police state?

Harsha Walia: For me, the police state that we’re seeing is an encroaching police state. There are many of us who would argue we already live in a police state, particularly for people who are the most marginalized or people who live in poverty, people who live on the streets, folks of colour, etcetera. But increasingly in British Columbia, we’re seeing this police state affect everybody.

Attacks on civil liberties, so to give some examples: in Vancouver bylaws are being passed that greatly restricts basic freedom of speech. There are signage bylaws, some of which because of public opposition are now being turned. But things like saying you can’t have any anti-Olympic signs in your doors or you can’t wear anti-Olympic t-shirts. If there’s an anti-Olympic sign in your window you could get fined $10,000, all these kinds of crazy bylaws that really affect basic civil liberties and freedom of speech.

There was an elderly gentleman who clipped out something that pissed him off about the Olympics, a budgetary expense because there is so much money being sunk into the Olympics, and he sent it to his MLA and the next day he had the Vancouver integrated security unit at his door asking him questions.

So part of this police state is that as part of the Olympics we have this Vancouver Integrated Security Unit, which is RCMP, CSIS and the Vancouver Police Department who have basically tasked themselves to spend vast amounts of money to basically interrogate people who are opposed to the Olympics. This includes people like this gentleman, to people who are much more active in an activist role.

So we’ve had a Vancouver Integrated Security Unit visit the homes and work places of at least 60 activists without arrest warrants, without any real basis for a visit. They basically want to interrogate and intimidate people, in violation of their basic civil liberties.

Andrew Wallace: You work here, in the downtown east side, and these are the people — the worry is — who will feel that effect the most. So on a day-to-day basis, have you seen it, just walking the streets and talking to people? What are the stories that you’re hearing?

Harsha Walia: Absolutely, you’d be hard pressed to walk in the downtown east side and find anyone who supports the Olympics. The primary reasons for that are that one, people are directly experiencing homelessness and whether or not it’s directly traceable to the Olympics the reality is those are the facts. You know, a 300 per cent increase in homelessness and a housing crunch ballooned in this neighbourhood. Second of all, an increase in criminalization of poor people. We’re seeing an increasing number of cops on the streets; there are beat cops who just patrol the streets everyday. People are given tickets for ridiculous things, so you get a bylaw ticket for $60 if you spit on the street. If you Jaywalk you get a ticket, you know these things don’t happen in other neighbourhoods, even though these bylaws are technically on the books, they’re only enforced in this neighbourhood.

Andrew Wallace: How do you achieve change in a more concrete way besides just building the analysis, is there anything that ORN is planning on doing, or is doing?

Harsha Walia: The gauge of success is not just been whether or not we stop the Games, I think there gauge of success is multi-fold: One, is just being able to strengthen our social movements because there is going to be a long-term impact of the kind of work that we do and I think there has been successes.

So for example, there have been some housing victories that have been won in this neighbourhood. There’s certainly not enough, but they have only come because of resistance to the Games and the increasing amount of poverty and homelessness as a result of the Games in the downtown east side.

Some of the changes that we’ve seen in response to some of the bylaws that I was mentioning, the proposed bylaws affecting civil liberties have come because of resistance to the Games. So I think it builds a spirit of vigilance at a basic level for people to be vigilant about the kinds of things that are being passed by the government and the impact of corporations on our society. A greater number of British Columbians, at varying levels, are much more critical and skeptical of these kinds of things and that’s the first step to building a more politicized consciousness and action.

Andrew Wallace: It seems largely, the public debate around things like the Olympics is just in two very extreme absolutes, you’re either for the Games and everything that comes with it, or you’re not.

Harsha Walia: I don’t know if that’s true. I think it was true for a long period of time, but we’re increasingly seeing people who are just discontented with the Games and they may not be opposed to the Games in the sense that we as activists are where we also have these other kinds of analysis. Recent polls suggest that upwards of 40 – 50 percent of British Columbians think that the Games are bad for B.C. from an economic perspective. So they don’t necessarily have a social justice perspective, they have an economic perspective and at least have the analysis that the Games don’t benefit ordinary British Columbians. Part of that is the recession, but not just that, even prior to that we were seeing this small emergence.

Andrew Wallace: So you’ve seen a transformation in their thinking:

Harsha Walia: Yeah, I think so, and polls would indicate the same. So everywhere from small merchants and small businesses that feel impacted by the Games because large corporate sponsors are getting contracts and advertising space. I think there is generally, increasingly a sense that the Games are an industry and that there really is no benefit of the Games for ordinary British Columbians, which was the whole ideology of the Games, was that the Games benefit everybody.

Andrew Wallace: So after the Games, what happens to ORN? What do you guys do? Because the Games are going to happen.

Harsha Walia: Yeah, the Games are going to happen. We’re going to do our best to make sure the Games don’t go as smoothly as they would like. After the Games I’m sure part or our time and our resources will go into legal defense. We can expect massive, massive police oppression during the Games. There’s no reason to believe Vancouver will be any exception to prior Olympic games. And again, $1 billion going into security measures, already a huge amount of police surveillance and intimidation of activists, so there’s no doubt there will be a lot of people suffering from police oppression.

Vancouver 2010 Anti-Olympic mascot Bitey the Bedbug. Photo by Lotus Johnson.

On January 11, a coalition of advocates in Vancouver’s downtown eastside voiced a cheeky cry for Stephen Harper to prorogue the upcoming 2010 Winter Games. Though more marketing ploy than genuine call to action, the move is nonetheless a signal of things to come. In the few remaining days before the Olympic torch arrives in Vancouver, protestors have vowed to ramp up anti-Olympic activity. And, of course, the IOC, VANOC and even the City of Vancouver will be doing whatever they can to stop them.

But just as the call to prorogue packs more bark than bite, Olympics protests scheduled for the lead up to—and during—the Games will likely amount to little more than well-meaning disruptions. The window for real change on anything Olympics-related closed a long time ago, and Vancouver’s infuriating “Olympic Bylaws” make doing anything remotely radical prohibitive. The spectacle that comes with the Olympics offers an important opportunity to raise awareness for the plight of Canada’s poorest postal code, Native land claims and the egregiously irresponsible use of public dollars that is the 2010 Games—but grassroots advocates already need to start looking to the future. Yes, the Olympics is here now. But what happens to that progressive momentum once the Games has come and gone?

When I spoke to the Olympic Resistance Network’s Harsha Walia in her cluttered downtown eastside office over the holidays, she called the Olympics a “social catalyst.” Activists of all stripes, with varied missions and agendas, have come together in protest. The problem, though, is that Vancouver 2010 has given birth to the organizations at the front of the anti-Olympics movement right now—No 2010, 2010 Watch and ORN—as the 16-day event comes and goes, so too will they. Other established advocacy groups have continued to champion their own causes, using the Games as a flagpole to rally around, and it is the efficacy of their efforts in the Olympics’ wake that will present a chance for actual reform.

Because the real legacy of the Games won’t be the revamped Sea-to-Sky Highway or new sports infrastructure in Richmond. And it certainly won’t be the 250 units of social housing the city has promised from the freshly constructed athletes village. The real legacy will be debt. Crippling public debt. According to 2010 Watch’s Christopher Shaw, the Olympics are quickly shaping up to be Vancouver’s very own “Big Owe.”

And that debt could put more pressure on existing grassroots groups, especially when funds are cut and the world’s eyes aren’t on Vancouver. Sport can be a powerful platform for awareness—but it also comes with a short attention span. It’ll be difficult for the organizations that have been so vocal in the run up to the Games to maintain the force of their voice once the Olympic spotlight has moved on.

However, with another large-scale sports event taking place on Canadian soil in five years—the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto—there exists a ready-made excuse to preserve the cohesion and unity of purpose the anti-Olympics movement has created. If the fervent opposition to Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics and the trepidation around Rio receiving the same Games is any indication, the public is increasingly aware that global sports competitions are not the benign, benevolent forces they’re billed to be. The world is starting to understand who really reaps the benefits and who really pays the costs. And, perhaps, that is where Olympic detractors should be looking. Perhaps that could be the 2010 Games’ “other” legacy.

It’s no doubt that clashes between protesters and police will end up being the big story of the 2010 Olympics. There are new bylaws on the books, the usual International Olympic Committee rules, our own Canadian Charter rights, and official statements from the Vancouver Police Department—and they all contradict each other.

So, how do you know what’s legal and what’s not? We tried to sort out all of the different rule-books for you — but we got stuck, too.

Here’s what you can (Y) and can’t (N) do — depending on which authority figure’s watching at the time.

Click to enlarge:

Vancouver 2010 Do's and Don'ts

“The whole purpose behind Pride House” — actually a conference room at Whistler, B.C.’s Pan Pacific Hotel—“was really to create a dialogue about homophobia within sport,” says organizer Dean Nelson on the phone from his Whistler home. People are definitely talking: Pride House has been on the cover of the Globe and Mail and in the New York Times in the months leading up to the Games. Nelson has been a fixture of the Whistler gay scene for 15 years and knows how to throw a party: he’s been involved with Vancouver Pride for years, has opened six hotels of his own, and works as CEO of GayWhistler, the company hosting Pride House.

Traditional Olympic pavilions like Canada House and France House are invite-only, but Pride House will be open to anyone, gay or straight, Canadian or not. It’s intended to be a haven for anyone who wants to know more about being gay in Canada, needs advice on coming out, or is considering leaving a country with antigay laws. Staff from LEGIT, a group that helps refugees gain immigration status for their same-sex partners, and national lobbyist EGALE will be on hand to offer advice. Now the question is whether anyone will show up to take advantage.

Gay and lesbian athletes are a touchy subject in professional sport. In his book The Metrosexual: Gender, Sexuality, and Sport, Australian academic David Coad describes sport’s silent, generalized homophobia. His 2008 survey revealed the U.S. had only six openly gay professional athletes; Australia and the U.K. each had one; and Canada had a handful of out athletes—but as in other countries, most came out after retirement.

Nelson hopes Pride House will become a permanent Olympic fixture: London is prepping its own version for 2012, but for Russia in 2014—where homosexuality was delisted as a mental illness just 10 years ago—it might be a harder sell. But Pride House’s very existence is aimed at changing attitudes, Nelson says: “If an athlete wants to use it as a forum to make a statement, or find the support and counselling that they need, they have that available to them for the first time in their professional sporting career.”

Our guide to some of the sponsors who want their name associated with the biggest, sportiest, Spandex-iest show on earth. Click to enlarge!

Official sponsors of Vancouver 2010

The problem with the official budget is that it excludes Olympics-related infrastructure costs, like the Sea-to-Sky Highway, despite the fact that the Games are the only reason that money’s being spent.

If we include infrastructure and other Olympics-related costs, the total bill for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics is at least $9.2 billion—although no one will know the final bill, realistically, until the games are long past. VANOC intends to recoup some of their costs selling off the Athlete’s Village after the Games end—but the recession and subsequent tanking of Vancouver’s real estate market makes that plan increasingly dubious.

Here’s our independent tally of the real cost of Vancouver 2010:

Christopher Shaw. Photo by Flickr user The Blackbird. Used with permission.

Christopher Shaw’s day job is professor of ophthalmology at the University of British Columbia, but since Vancouver launched its bid for the Olympics more and more of his time has been spent campaigning against the Games—first as the founder of No Games 2010 and now as lead spokesperson for 2010 Watch. Shaw’s book, Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games, argues that those responsible for bringing the Olympics to town are those with the greatest financial stake in it: the developers and realtors who profit from the Olympic infrastructure. Far from being about sports, Shaw claims that the true pillars of the Olympic Games are dodgy real estate deals, huge profits for a select few, and a really big bill for everybody else once the Games have left town.

This: You just came back from the torch ceremony. How did that go?

Shaw: From my perspective, I thought it was pretty lame but then I’m pretty jaded. For me, it’s sort of offensive on top of everything else that you have what can only be described as a Nazi propaganda tool being run through the streets as if it’s brotherhood and friendship and kittens and puppies and rainbows. Commentators weren’t recognizing it. They were saying the torch goes back to Ancient Greece, but it doesn’t; it goes back to Germany in 1936. They invented the torch as a propaganda tool and, ironically, ran it through many of the countries they were later to invade.

This: How did you first come to oppose the Olympic Games?

Shaw: I first came to be an opponent back in 2002. I had heard that Vancouver was being shortlisted and when I saw people lining up in favour of the bid, that instantly made me suspicious, because when you see the ostensible political left and right joining forces it’s either something really good or something else is going on. I thought, “Maybe this demands a little more scrutiny.” I did a commentary for the CBC thinking that would be my one shot to say, “It’s not financially what you think it is.” Then it just blossomed, and when Vancouver was shortlisted and turned in their bid book, I began to devote more scrutiny to the whole thing and started No Games 2010, which, once the Games had been awarded, defaulted into a watchdog role.

This: What is 2010 Watch’s goal?

Shaw: The best we can achieve is making the running of the Games very painful with the purpose of drawing attention to things that need to be addressed, like poverty and homelessness, and educate other cities so that if they are thinking of going down this path they have the information, which we did not. The other thing is that we hope through our lawsuit to strengthen the charter. The municipal and provincial laws against ambush marketing are violations of our charter freedom of speech, and we hope to strike them down.

This: Tell me more about that lawsuit.

Shaw: The city passed an Olympic and Paralympic signage bylaw in July, and the province has recently — in a bill before the legislature called Bill 13—expanded the powers of Vancouver, Whistler, and Richmond to enforce an anti-marketing bylaw. The city of Vancouver maintains in their bylaw that you cannot go into so-called celebratory zones with a sign that has a stick on it, because presumably it could be used as a weapon. You can’t pass out leaflets, you can’t have a voice amplification device. You can’t demonstrate, in other words.

This: Part of your book is about the people who were responsible for bringing the Games to Vancouver, and their own financial stake in that outcome. Who was involved with the initial bid?

Shaw: The initial bid was mostly realtors, and then they handed off the Bid Society to [real estate developer] Jack Poole’s Bid Corporation, which was stuffed with developers, realtors, and a few athletes for cosmetic reasons.

This: Who is getting rich from the Vancouver Games?

Shaw: Well, the developers do, and certainly the high-end hotel sector does okay. Anybody near a celebratory zone as well; it’s all the people outside those zones who are getting the shaft. People won’t be able to get to them, they won’t be able to get their deliveries, traffic will be massively disrupted. If you’re a small restaurant away from the main area, you’re going to find it hard to continue your business.

This: Will the government injecting money into these big development projects have a trickle-down effect on the rest of the economy though?

Shaw: That’s the theory; it just turns out not to be true. In a number of Games it’s like an Obama stimulus project: if you throw in enough money you’ll get this runoff effect. And to some extent that’s true—but not with the kind of things they end up building. For example, if they said, “We have $6 billion we don’t know what to do with, so we’ll build hospitals and schools,” they generate outcomes everyone uses and permanent jobs. But building a luge run just doesn’t do that, or any of the special sporting facilities. It does during the building of it, but then it ends. All the construction projects are done now so it’s demonstrably both here, and in London, not a long-term economic stimulus.

This: Who are the biggest losers in the Games?

Shaw: You and me, and our kids and our grandkids. This is going to be the Big Owe: we’re going to be paying this for 30 years. The Olympic adventure has cost Vancouver a considerable amount of money, and some of it will never come back. The operating budget is a $60-million deficit, and there’s no way the city can keep the 250 units [of the Athlete’s Village] that were going to be social housing. They have to sell them. Basically, the province is paying for Vancouver’s party.

This: One number that’s still unknown is the security cost. What’s the current estimate?

Shaw: The current number is $900 million. I suspect that’s a vast underestimate, but the problem is we’ll never know because they routinely hide the number. The newest trick with security things at the federal level is to walk it into the privy council and all of a sudden it gets stamps with a 30-year exclusion, and getting to the bottom of that is going to be a problem. The province is equally squirrelly. I just requested some email communications between [B.C. Finance Minister] Colin Hansen and Annette Antoniak, the former secretariat to the Olympic Games for the province, and much of it is censored or excluded based on half a dozen exclusivity loopholes in legislation. So $900 million would probably be a low-end estimate. The last three Games were well over a billion. Athens was $1.5 billion. London, who knows?

This: And where’s the money coming from?

Shaw: Well, from three levels. Of course city taxpayers for policing. The rest of it falls supposedly on the provincial and federal government. That’s probably true for things like the RCMP, although the province is still pretending $175 million is correct, which it’s not.

This: There are some things that are odd about the Games’ organizing body, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), such as not paying taxes. How do they swing that?

Shaw: They swing it because they make it part of the contract with the city that they have to be exempt from any kind of taxes in the country where the Games are held. They somehow managed to convince the Swiss government that they are a nonprofit organization, and nonprofits don’t pay taxes. Also, nonprofits don’t get audited, so the IOC sails through life with no one looking over their shoulder. They are a law unto themselves. The IOC also dictates whether categories of people can exercise their equality rights. The IOC does not have ski jumping for women, and a number of woman ski jumpers sued the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) saying that, because of the Charter, if you’re putting on a ski jumping event for men, there has to be one for women. VANOC claimed they were unable to do anything about it because they were a subsidiary of the IOC, and the IOC could dictate how the events were going to occur. The judge said that it may be true that this is unequal, but that there was nothing he could do. That was a ruling that essentially weakened the Charter.

This: Another issue is the Native land claims. Is Native land being co-opted for the Games?

Shaw: Native land has been co-opted for the Games. First Nations hosts did not have anywhere near consensus. In St’at’imc areas definitely most people were against it and the band leadership went ahead anyway, and money changed hands that went to the leadership. Then of course there are the co-opted Aboriginal symbols and culture: it’s convenient to use Indigenous cultures for cute things like mascots, without doing anything about the problems of those societies, because tourists think the Natives are cute and fuzzy. We can have them dance for tourists, but God forbid we get them decent job prospects or get their kids into decent schools or recognize their sovereign claims. There are a lot of words about how inclusive the Games are meant to be, but the reality is very thin.

This: Do you think that despite all the expense and scandal the Games are still valuable as a celebration of sporting excellence?

Shaw: The Olympics are ostensibly about competition at the highest level, better understanding among people, and the world coming together to play beach volleyball. To some extent I’m sure that’s true, but I don’t think it’s unique. When I go to neuroscience conferences I sit down and chat with people from all over the world. I don’t think the Olympics is the only way countries get together, and the Olympic Truce is nonsense. A few months back someone asked [Olympics CEO] John Furlong to ask if the Canadian government would seek a truce with the Taliban during the Games and Furlong said it wasn’t his business, and the government wouldn’t even think about it.

This: Are we seeing the same patterns for the London Games as in Vancouver?

Shaw: Yes, absolutely everything’s the same. The cost overruns may be even worse, the security costs, the massive deceit about what’s going to happen. They are already cannibalizing money from arts and culture to pay for cost overruns. Security is going to be a nightmare because they’ve chosen for the Athletes’ Village location an immigrant population, and it’s going to be surrounded by a lot of these people. So they’ve parked it in an area they’re terrified of.

This: What is the Olympics going to mean for homeless people in Vancouver?

Shaw: I think they’ll be pushed further and further out of the downtown core. They will be continue to be marginalized and a lot of them will find it very hard to move around and live their lives during the Games because police are going to be shuffling them around. I think impacts will be huge and governments at all levels will say, “We’d love to help but we are now in deficit,” without actually blaming it on the Olympics. Any future solution will be pushed further down the line, and I think people in the streets in 2009 will be on the streets in 2012, and it’ll all be traced back to governments claiming they can’t afford to do anything. I think that will be the legacy for them.

This: Do you think the Games are salvageable? Is there a way to rein them in and make them the simple sporting festival they used to be?

Shaw: Yeah, there is. Get the IOC out of the picture and put it in the hands of the athletes, and have the athletes negotiate with communities. Or park it in one place and don’t move it. If it came back to the same city that had paid for the infrastructure and absorbed the cost it might actually make some money. But that would fly in the face of the real purpose, which is to generate money for the IOC. Why would they give up this golden goose? I’m also not all that sure that the Olympics hasn’t gone past its best-before date. I’m not sure any kind of mega-events, given global warming and given the costs, are even reasonable anymore. Someone said recently that Rio in 2016 might be one of the last Games. They’re going to bankrupt their city, they’re facing ferocious problems in their slums, and it might finally be the message that it’s just not doable anymore.

[This article originally said Chris Shaw was an assistant professor at UBC. He is, in fact, a full professor. We regret the error.]