Category — 2010 Olympic Games

From the Rev. Gary Paterson, the minister at St. Andrew’s Wesley United Church, this remarkable sermon on transfiguration, sports replacing religion and the mystery of Olympic spirit: “something bigger than the hustle and bustle and protecting the borders, a dream . . . ”

From an initial scepticism and ambivalence, Paterson found himself changing his perspective at the torch relay and then at the opening ceremonies: “You could feel the hunger in those 60,000 people, to go higher, to be more, to be better than we normally than we are. It was a mountain top peak moment, when people said it isn’t impossible.”

Paterson, partner of councillor Tim Stevenson, would definitely own the pulpit in a preaching Olympics.

First the BCCLA hailing the respect for civil rights during the Games, now this Angus Reid poll showing 70 percent of Metro and Sea to Sky residents now believe the event will have a positive impact on Canada, British Columbia and Vancouver. That’s up 10 points in a month.

Perhaps even more significant: 56 percent said the Games were exciting and not inconveniencing them, up six percent in a month. Thirty-nine percent of transit users say it’s taking them longer to get to work, but only 18 percent of drivers have the same complaint.

Motion to make it unanimous?

Just past the Game’s midway point, this assessment from the BC Civil Liberties Association on the much-anticipated police crackdown: it didn’t materialize. In fact, everything went quite well.

The city's front line against filth: street, sewer and water workers on the afternoon shift, ready to clean Vancouver's streets, National Yard, 2.30 p.m., Feb. 23.

One of the unsung triumphs of the 2010 Games has been the ability of city workers to keep streets clean when more than 100,000 people a day are crowding the downtown core.

The city’s media outlets began to acknowledge the achievement Saturday, when Globe and Mail columnist Christie Blatchford contrasted the “river of vomit” she saw on her way home with the clean streets she experienced on the way back to work in the morning.

The clean-up work continues 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The afternoon shift is made up of about 180 city workers drawn from sewer, water and streets departments, who are ferried to locations around the downtown core to bag and stack garbage, which is accumulating at twice the regular rates.

Between 10 and midnight, an equally-large graveyard shift hits the streets to pick up the stockpiled litter while water trucks flush downtown lanes. The engineering department’s achievements occur under cover of darkness, but the results are obvious to all when the sun rises.

(Their efforts are back-stopped by special crews retained through Vancouver Coastal Health and United We Can.)

If street clean-up was an Olympic event, these folks would be gold medalists.