Winter Olympics (Vancouver 2010) » Wright

Paralympics: Where to watch, from the stands to your sofa

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:02:26 +0000

Televised coverage of the 2010 Paralympics will be a far cry from the thousands of hours international broadcasters devoted to the recently completed Olympic Games.

Whereas hundreds of broadcasters measured their Olympic coverage in hundreds of hours - in some cases filling the airwaves 22 hours a day - just over two dozen companies are left in Vancouver for the Paralympics, and they are counting their hours here by fives, 10s and 50s. And that's the total for the entire 10 days of the Games.

But as far as the Vancouver Organizing Committee and the International Paralympic Committee are concerned, that's not necessarily a bad thing, given it's a vast improvement over past Games.

"Is it good or bad? Well, it is better than what they've had in the past. There wasn't anything for the last two [Paralympics], I think, in this country," said Terry Wright, Vanoc's executive vice-president of Games operations. "We've certainly had an improvement. I think in general broadcasters see the importance of showing something."

But there's no denying Paralympic television coverage is on a vastly different plane from the Olympics, where broadcasters spend hundreds of millions of dollars for rights in the expectation of generating multiple more millions from advertisers. At the Paralympics, broadcasters pay just $25,000 to $50,000 for territorial rights, given viewer demand is so much less.

The goal of Vanoc and the IPC is simply to have broadcasters at the Games; nobody expects to make money off them.

"To be honest, we'd like to get something," Wright said. "Anything we can get, we try to get an improvement on what they paid the time before, just to help the IPC with their long-term goal. But for us the most important thing is to try and get exposure. For all intents and purposes, we were trying to get them to give us a minimum number of hours broadcast. That was almost more important."

Baby steps

The disparity between the hours of coverage is significant.

The Canadian consortium led by CTV, for example, broadcast more than 2,200 hours of coverage during the Olympics, but for the Paralympics it has devoted 57 hours: 30 in French and 27 in English.

The only live broadcasts in Canada will be of sledge hockey games involving Canada, as well as the medal rounds. In B.C., live coverage will air on Rogers Sportsnet Pacific, with the exception of the March 16 Canada-Norway game (which will be live on TSN), and the gold-medal game, which CTV will broadcast live March 20.

Friday's opening ceremony won't be broadcast live, but will be repackaged Saturday afternoon into a four-hour block with a replay of the first Canada-Italy sledge hockey game.

Packaging the broadcasts that way does have some benefits. Vanoc and the International Paralympic Committee will get a large block of important Saturday viewership that will help give the Paralympics exposure, Wright said.

The numbers may be small, but they are still important.

"I think the part we focus on is that we are getting 50 hours more than the last Games," Wright said. "That's what you would call an almost astronomical percentage increase."

Overall, Paralympic broadcast rights have been sold to 10 international consortia or broadcasters. One of the consortia, the European Broadcasting Union, involves 23 companies that cover most of Europe.

Wright said most broadcasters will take daily highlights packages assembled from coverage provided by Vanoc's in-house service, Olympic Broadcast Service Vancouver.

The International Paralympic Committee expects Vancouver to generate more than the 285 hours broadcasters devoted to the 2006 Turin Paralympics, but it hasn't set a firm number of hours, according to Alexis Schaefer, the IPC's senior manager of marketing and broadcasting.

Some European broadcasters plan to cover the opening ceremony live, but most are doing tape-delayed coverage or highlights, he said.

Live-streaming options

The IPC is also significantly boosting its online coverage at paralympicsport.tv, where it will broadcast 150 hours of live and tape-delayed events. It broadcast half that amount in Turin. Live-streaming will begin with the opening ceremony.

"It is going to be a very significant portion, a very significant improvement. Of course we want to drive as many viewers as we can to the coverage," Schaefer said.

Vanoc, which took over broadcast rights from the IPC shortly after getting the Games, is paying the committee $4 million for them. It estimates the incremental cost of putting on the Paralympics over the Olympics at $88.1 million, of which $32 million is coming from the federal government. B.C. is providing $20 million.

Wright said Vanoc doesn't expect to fully recover the remaining amount, which will be paid out of its general operating budget. However, ticket sales will go some ways towards covering the deficit.

As of Monday, Vanoc had sold out a number of high-value events, including the 6,000-seat closing ceremony in Whistler, all of the Canadian sledge hockey games and the gold-medal game, as well as the gold-medal game in wheelchair curling. Many of the alpine sit-ski events have also sold out.

Caley Denton, Vanoc's vice-president of ticketing, also expects all of the roughly 40,000 tickets to Friday's opening ceremony to be gone shortly.

"We've still got a decent number of tickets, but they are going very quickly," he said. "We expect to sell out many of them."

Tickets are still available online and at the Vancouver and Whistler ticket centres, but Denton said he doesn't think Vanoc will erect its fan-to-fan ticket resale website.

A check of online resale sites shows a demand for sledge hockey tickets, but prices are not like what they were for the Olympics, with opening ceremony admissions going for less than face value.

jefflee@vancouversun.comRead Jeff Lee's blog at vancouversun.com/insidetheolympics

Broken, lost athletes’ buses cause Olympic transport chaos

admin — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 01:46:09 +0000

Mark Blinch, Reuters

Transportation woes reminiscent of the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta continue to plague the Vancouver Olympics.

And it's only Day 2.

A bus ferrying reporters to Cypress Mountain for the women's moguls skiing got lost and then broke down Saturday in West Vancouver.

"They give you a map, but you haven't a clue, " said the driver who is from Alberta.

The bus missed a turn, pulled into a mall parking lot and drove over a curb.

On impact, two tires went poof.

A replacement bus arrived 50 minutes later.

Buses carrying Jenn Heil and the Canadian women's moguls team broke down on two consecutive days this week en route to Cypress.

The first bus broke down Monday near the base of Cypress just off the Upper Levels Highway. Athlete buses are considered 'inside the security bubble,' so Heil, Richards and the coaching staff had to wait about 25 minutes for another bus with security clearance to arrive.

The driver on the first bus was not allowed to open the door until the proper security conditions were met.

'I don't know for sure what happened,' said Peter Judge, chief executive officer of the Canadian Freestyle Ski Association. 'I think it was some kind of transmission problem that left the bus not drivable.'

On Tuesday, a bus carrying Canada's stars of the bumps and jumps lurched to the side of the road just beyond the Second Narrows Bridge.

This time, the wait for a replacement vehicle dragged on for roughly half an hour. Officials at Cypress extended the training window by about 30 minutes to make up for the extreme circumstances that delayed the home team.

'It almost becomes bit comical, in some senses, after a certain period of time,' Judge said. 'It ends up almost being something that adds to the joviality and breaks the surface tension a little bit.

'But obviously our coaches are upset ' especially with this happening two days in a row.'

The Canadian moguls team is now driving to the venue.

Vanoc media relations said they had no one Saturday afternoon to provide an update on the bus situation.

Earlier this week, Vancouver Olympic organizers said they were bringing in 99 new transport coaches to use on mountain venues after several transit buses they leased from a California company broke down while trying to climb the steep road to Cypress.

Terry Wright, Vanoc's executive vice-president of Games operations, said last Wednesday that half the new motor coaches would come from Canada, while the rest would be from the U.S.

In addition, at least 25 of the 2,800 drivers hired for the Games quit recently because they didn't like working in Vancouver, Wright said at the time.

With files from Lori Culbert, Vancouver Sun

California transit buses don’t make grade at Olympic mountain venue

admin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:23:33 +0000

Andy Clark, REUTERS

METRO VANCOUVER -- Vancouver Olympic organizers are bringing in 99 new transport coaches to use on mountain venues after they found problems with transit buses they hired from California.

Just two days before competition is to start at the problem-plagued Cypress Mountain venue, Vanoc found itself in more trouble using transit buses that could not repeatedly make the steep mountain grade up to the venue.

"Until we got the equipment here that we planned to use we couldn't test it. On paper it says it will work fine but we decided not to take the risk," said Terry Wright, Vanoc's executive vice president of games operations.

"Some of them are fine, but some of the older ones we feel pose more risk than we are willing to take."

The decision to change out the transit buses for sturdier highway coaches came after buses carrying Canada's Olympic women's mogul team broke down two days in a row on the steep Cypress road.

The incident irritated Canadian team officials, including Peter Judge, the chief executive officer for the Canadian Freestyle Ski Association.

"It's not the kind of hurdle you want to put in front of your athletes," he said Tuesday.

Wright said the transit buses, which were acquired from Shuttle Bus Leasing of Riverside, California, were able to make the grade to Cypress.

It wasn't until they got to Canada that Vanoc officials realized there might be a problem with the lighter transit buses.

"These buses are from California. We only started seeing them 12 days ago," he said. "When you run a big fleet of coaches, you always have breakdowns. We're trying to be precautionary here."

Since they would be expected to make the trip between Vancouver and the mountain at least three times a day, the decision was made to replace the transit buses with sturdier motor coaches.

Half of the new motor coaches are coming from Canada and the rest from the U.S., Wright said.

At the same time, Vanoc has also had a number of drivers quit on them. At least 25 in the last few days have decided they didn't like working in Vancouver, Wright said.

But he isn't worried about the losses, noting Vanoc has employed nearly 2,800 drivers. " We're running at about one per cent attrition right now. Considering that at Turin (the 2006 Winter Games) they had a 30 per cent attrition rate. we're doing pretty good."

A few newcomer drivers have lost their way, he acknowledged.

"We put them all through route training, but we have the odd driver who gets lost," he said. "Especially with new drivers, we run a navigator with them for a day so that they've got someone on board who can show them the city."

jefflee@vancouversun.com

Blog:vancouversun.com/insidetheolympics

Olympic flame fires up New Westminster

admin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:38:06 +0000

Ian Lindsay, PNG

NEW WESTMINSTER ' When you live in a small town, like I do, you know what brings a community together. It might be your town's annual parade, or the news that a developer is tearing down the theatre to make way for a superstore.

Or it might be the arrival of a certain little flame that fires up the neighbourhood spirit, a flame like the one that travelled in a carefully guarded lantern all the way to Canada from Greece nearly four months ago.

Which is exactly what happened, early Tuesday morning, when the 2010 Olympic torch relay hit New Westminster, my town, trailing centuries of symbolism and radiating good cheer

For two weeks in November, I had followed the flame on its magical history tour through Canada's north, writing about the legacy it was building as it cut a swath through the politics and protest of the Games and revealed the heart of the matter ' our shared love of country, our loud and proud patriotism. I was moved every day, at every stop, by the emotion the torch evoked, the effect it had on those who saw it, and those who touched it.

And, now, here it was, on my doorstep.

New Westminster may be smack dab in the middle of the booming metropolis that is Metro Vancouver, but it remains, in so many ways, a quaint little 150-year-old river town, typical of the thousands of small towns through which the torch passed on its 45,000-kilometre journey from Victoria to the North Pole to Newfoundland, and back across Canada, on its way to that big cauldron waiting Friday in BC Place Stadium.

Mine is a town of only 60,000 people and six square miles, with one high school, hundreds of heritage houses and a main street where everybody, it seems, really does know your name. It is a place of history, with pockets of poverty and boulevards of wealth, with a working waterfront and a city hall struggling to preserve the past while plotting the future.

A place where pride is worn proudly.

So when the Olympic flame came to town Tuesday, and began its hand-off from torchbearer to torchbearer, 52 in all, it was something of a big deal.

The guest of honour, transported by the precise procession that is the Vanoc flame convoy, rolled onto Royal Avenue at 10:32 a.m., Day 103 of 106, sandwiched between its journey from Surrey to Richmond, with a pit stop at the Peace Arch.

Within seconds, the flame was lit and aloft, making its way past parks and condos, past the deafening anvil battery, past the local Starbucks and thrift stores, past the mall and the seniors' centre, taking but 45 minutes to weave through town to the celebration site in Queen's Park.

It was carried by New West firefighter Jeff Schiebler, who broke his ankle a month ago, and by wheelchair-bound Kelly VanderBeek, the champion ski racer from Chilliwack, whose 2010 Olympic hopes were dashed in mid-December when she tore out a knee, and who was given a last-minute torchbearer spot by Vanoc.

It was carried, too, by the town's 77-year-old poet laureate Don Benson, who jogged onto a soccer pitch in the park just after 11 a.m. and tilted his torch's flame to light the community cauldron, cheered on by an estimated 10,000 screaming, flag-waving locals, dressed in their reddest best, among them more than 2,000 elementary school students.

They had been waiting in the cool sun for two hours for the torch to arrive, entertained by the Gatka Akhara Sikh martial arts team, the B.C. Girls Choir, the Kathleen Carlsen Highland Dancers, and the Mukutano African drummers, the organizers' nod to the diverse cultural threads that run through town.

Taking the stage, too, were past Olympians like Daniel Wesley, who won 12 medals in five Paralympic Games, and who introduced hometown Olympians like Kathy Taylor, Carmie Vairo and Sandra Hartley, whose athletic accomplishments are buried deep in Olympic history and who, like so many others across Canada, were largely forgotten until the arrival of the torch allowed them to dust off their sporting memories and take a bow.

For Jay Young, chair of the New Westminster torch relay Committee, the day's celebrations were nearly a year in the planning, and if he underestimated anything, it wasn't the turnout, or the fervour.

'We're a proud community, and we like to put on a show,' said Young, who estimated more than 30,000 Canadian and Olympic flags were distributed along the route and in the park.

Staging an event of this magnitude is all-consuming, and Young says he stuck to his budget, which included $55,000 in grant money from the provincial and federal governments. It's been a ride, he says, but he'll be happy to retire the huge torch relay binder he's been lugging everywhere and get back to his parks and recreation job.

For Mayor Wayne Wright, outfitted in an Olympic scarf and snapping photos with taxpayers and the torch gifted to the city by Vanoc, it was his small town at its best.

'I think it's a culmination of 150 years in New Westminster,' said Wright. 'Another highlight that can go into the history books.'

And then, almost as soon as it had begun, it was over.

The torch, carried by a team of 20 young runners, made its way out of Queen's Park and headed to Westminster Quay, where it boarded the MV Native paddlewheeler at 12:35 p.m., in the hands of local youth volunteer Laura Cuthbert, who carried it across the water to Queensborough and another celebration. From there, it wound its way east to Richmond, the opening ceremonies in its sights.

On Tuesday, the Olympic torch came to New Westminster. And we painted the town red.

The Vancouver Sun

sfralic@vancouversun.com