My 2nd Olympic Experience

On Friday I went to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics for the second time. This time, I was going after winning the ATCO Celebrating Excellence contest in which I had to write an essay about how I celebrate excellence in school, swimming and all other parts of my life. ATCO awarded a one day trip to the Olympics to one boy and one girl in each Provincial constituency in Alberta. What's amazing is that I was the boy winner for Edmonton-Strathcona, and the girl winner was Jade Robinson, who was also in my class! During the very exciting 20 hour day, we went to a hockey game between Sweden and Belarus, visited Alberta House for lunch, got to explore busy downtown Vancouver, and go to the Victory Ceremonies for that night. All that, and then to come back at 2am in time to get up for swim practice at 6am!



Our day started at 7am at the airport where I met up with my friend Jade who was the other winner in my constituency.



When we arrived in Vancouver, we immediately were bussed to go see the Olympic Torch. This time, we were able to see the torch a lot better than when I was in Vancouver the previous weekend. I'm not sure if we were just in a different place, or if they actually lowered the fence or something, but we got much better views of the torch which was great!



As we walked to Canada Hockey Place to see the hockey game, we were quite the site with many dozens of people walking down the street wearing identical red jerseys. Some people actually stopped to take pictures of us as we walked through downtown Vancouver!



It was very exciting to be in GM Place (renamed Canada Hockey Place for the Olympics) during an Olympic hockey game! The game was also a lot more exciting and interesting than I had anticipated! I thought that Sweden would win be a landslide, but Belarus actually played quite a good game. Sweden was winning 3-0 halfway through the game, but then Belarus started to pick up the pace and soon the score was 3-2. You could hear everyone cheering for Belarus to tie up the game so that we could see an overtime win, but Sweden scored the last score which ended the game at 4-2.
I noticed and learned a few things during the game. First of all, did you know that Ice Hockey was first played at the Olympics during the 1920 Summer Olympics?! Also, I noticed that during the game between plays, ABBA seemed to be the music of choice, probably because that band's home country was playing the game.
It was quite exciting and after seeing that hockey game, I was surprised to find myself watching the Canada vs. USA game tonight, which, to mine, and probably the rest of Canada's disappointment, we lost.



After the game, we were taken to Alberta House for lunch and after that, we had 2 hours of free time to roam downtown Vancouver. My mom and I walked up Robson street and wandered around the busy Granville street to see the activities there. All over downtown there were Canadian flags hanging from buildings to support our athletes.

The whole experience was great and very exciting, but there were some things that were disappointing and that made me question the whole consumerist approach that the Olympics have taken on in these past few years. For instance, during the second intermission of the hockey game, I tried to phone my dad, which proved to be quite difficult. This was because neither my mom or I have a cell-phone and GM Place didn't seem to have any pay phones! We later learned that all the pay phones were actually covered up because the pay phones were Telus phones, and Bell is the sponsor of these Olympics. This meant that I had to use the Information Centre's phone.

Of course, there were also many other eye-opening things that I noticed, such as many protesters downtown, which I will write about in a post once the games are over. All in all however, it was a great experience and it sure was a lot of fun!