Here with Andrew

My friend sent me a really interesting article today.

“In these Olympics, Canadians only paid attention to Canada”

Take a read through it if you have some time, especially if you followed the Olympics closely recently. My friend and I discussed it a bit but here are some of my points.

• As with most huge claims, I think the writer of the article might be overgeneralizing a bit. I’m sure many Canadians were very amazed to see some of the performances from athletes from other nations other than Canada, not that the article doesn’t support this necessarily.
• It’s typical for a nation that is hosting the Olympics to be proud of the athletes that come from their nation. Thus, it doesn’t seem to me that we’re doing anything necessarily “wrong”. I haven’t researched very far back into Olympic history but hasn’t this been the case for many nations and host cities before? Correct me if i’m wrong.
• It’s not very fair to compare us to China’s SUMMER Olympics in terms of ticket sales. Maybe on an overall basis as a host city for the Olympics but there are too many other factors that influence this including but not limited to venue sizes and budget set by the host city and the IOC.
• The newspapers and media, particular Vancouver ones, are likely going to be putting information that they think the public want to hear. Of course they want to hear about the achievements of gold, silver, bronze medalists from other nations. But being part of the Canadian culture, we can connect and relate with fellow Canadians that are doing well at the Olympics as well. I think this is why it seems like the media seemed flooded with Canadian related Olympic achievements.

I definitely think this writer brought a good and different perspective so major props for that. I didn’t think too much about it at the time so this was a good eye-opener. I guess you can say I was caught up in the excitement of the Olympics being here in Vancouver as well. But this offers a good perspective to consider. I do think we could have done a better job welcoming the world, at least explicitly , maybe.

What do you think?