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Long odds and 2010

WMD: The latest Couier column, examining the recently unveiled lottery for seats at the 2010 Games opening ceremony:

Olympic ticket lottery symbolizes out-of-reach dreams

VANOC should put more tickets up for grabs to give working families better chance to participate in party they're paying for

Barry Link, Special to Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, October 24, 2007

For those who have given up hope of buying pricey tickets to 2010 Olympic events, especially the opening ceremonies, there's news. The B.C. Lotteries Corporation announced this week a new lottery (because B.C. residents lack sufficient gambling avenues to part with their money) offering seats to the kick-off event as the top prizes.

As with most lotteries, the cause is worthy and the chance of winning anything of value is miniscule. Money from each $5 ticket will go to amateur athletic organizations, such as KidSport, which helps kids from poor backgrounds participate in sports by paying their seasonal registration fees. Money will also go to travel funds for young athletes and the training of coaches. These are good things.

But if you're angling for a cheap ticket to the Games by participating in this lottery, consider your Wilfrid Laurier a donation only. You won't win a seat. The state-owned bookie that is the Lottery Corp estimates that even with 100 seats up for grabs, your chances of winning an opening ceremony butt post are 1 in 5,000. I'm no deep mathematician, but I'm reasonably sure those are terrible odds. If in my lifetime I had a 1 in 5,000 chance of getting heart disease, cancer, a receding hairline, or a Stephen Harper majority government, I'd be the happiest and luckiest human in the history of the planet.

That's not to say I won't buy tickets. Helping children in sports and the people who coach them is fine. And I'm weak--I can't resist the thrill of scratch and win when buying milk at my local corner store, even though I do far more scratching than winning. But the biggest reason is that a lottery for seats at an Olympic event underscores the same reality painfully illustrated by the many home lotteries in what we now call Metro Vancouver: we can't otherwise afford what is being playfully dangled before us. Just as home lotteries remind us that Vancouver is out of the price range of most families for housing, the seat-lottery's lesson is that the Olympics will be out of the price range for most families for entertainment.

With the cheapest seat running at $175 per person, and the best seats for a mere $1,100 each, the opening ceremonies is admittedly the blue chip event of the two-week Games. It's not the only event to see.

The Vancouver Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games notes that of an estimated 1.6 million tickets to be sold, more than 100,000 of them will be available for $25, and half of all Game tickets will be for $100 or less. Tickets won't be on sale for another year, but projected ticket prices are already advertised on Vanoc's website, including the $25 spots. And it's true: you and your family of four can pay $100 to stand in the snow at Whistler to see Norwegians and Finns you've never heard of zip by during the biathlon, an event made for the dramatic embellishments of TV sportscasting because, as with golf or Frisbee tossing, watching it live is fine progress toward a coma.

The signature Games events, men's hockey, the inevitable women's hockey showdown between the U.S. and Canada, and figure skating, will cost your family considerably more thanks to prices that are a whole lot more Point Grey than they are Collingwood. For almost all medal events, you'll need another lottery to afford a seat.

The cost for Vancouver families to attend 2010 events wouldn't be an issue if the Games and the infrastructure built for it weren't so heavily subsidized by taxpayers, who are being increasingly told they're going to have to dramatically alter their lives for two weeks so that foreign and local elites can use our town for a party. Take the bus, say from Langley to downtown. Start work at midnight. Be obedient to the thousands of security personnel stifling everyday freedoms. If you're on Cambie, you're living much of this now.

Some recognition for what the mass of taxpayers and city residents are and will endure physically and financially is due, and it should be beyond a few crumbs scattered in the direction of the betting hoi polloi. Instead of a mere 100 tickets offered in a lottery for the opening ceremony, make it a few thousand. Install similar lotteries for the medal events people really care about. Most tickets for most events can still be market-based, since the market is a good chunk of revenue the Games require. But give the middle and working classes, those segments of society we once cared about, and even dared to celebrate, a better chance to participate. Wouldn't that fit the Olympic spirit?

Courier catchup

Today's bLINKit: Mike Howell wrote a terrific story about an amateur boxing legend who turned 100 last year. Looks 80. And my column about how I will help the rich in 2007 and use fun words.

More stupid inukshuk

WMD: Further to a previous post on the Canadian segment of the Olympic closing ceremonies: apparently Heppner did have a squad of Mounties with him when he sang the national anthem. (By all accounts, it was a great rendition.) And Cath has noted a relation of a pair of frequent Blinkit readers and posters was one of the technical people behind the segment. I'm not arguing with the technical stuff, it was very good. I loved the video screen turned into an ice surface. I just hated the Heritage Canada/tourism association flavour of it. So very maple syrup, so little Vancouver-Whistler.

Stupid inukshuk

WMD: My thanks to the organizers of the Vancouver 2010 segment of the Turin Winter Olympics closing ceremonies. The Cirque de Soleil-like stilt walking, the acrobatics, the hockey players, the cool giant TV screen ice surface and stuff were impressive. Avril Lavigne was fine, too. And once again we've told the world we're a nation of snowmobile-riding, igloo builders. All the segment lacked was some moose and a couple of Mounties. The video montage at the end, basically a tourism brochure, was hilarious in that it showed a snowbound Vancouver with kids playing in the snow. That happens about once every five years here. And it won't happen in February.

Thursday 1: Re: the NHL season's cancellation

WMD: Yawn.

Thursday stuff: Thieving, racist, divorce-prone evangelicals

Today's bLINKit: It turns out evangelical Christians in the U.S. aren't practising what they preach when it comes to family and moral values, according to this article from Christianity Today, a respected evangelical magazine. They divorce as much as their non-evangelical neighbours, have decreased tithing and donations to charity even as their incomes rose and male evangelicals are more likely to abuse their wives than are males who are not evangelicals. They also fall down on race. The article notes:

In 1989 George Gallup Jr. and James Castelli published the results of a survey to determine which groups in the U.S. were least and most likely to object to having black neighbors—surely a good measure of racism. Catholics and nonevangelical Christians ranked least likely to object to black neighbors; 11 percent objected. Mainline Protestants came next at 16 percent. At 17 percent, Baptists and evangelicals were among the most likely groups to object to black neighbors, and 20 percent of Southern Baptists objected to black neighbors.

OK, they've got some work to do.

And while the corporate sponsorship rebranding of Science World by the megatelco Telus was not met with universal public acclaim, non-profits welcomed the move, writes Catherine Schulmann.

Meanwhile, back in the virtual NHL season run by G4TechTV and EA Sports, the Canucks are in second place, finally, in the Northwest Division and fourth in the Western Conference with 23-18-4. The Flyers lead the league with 31-9-3. The continuing lockout is making real world sports shows desperate: last night, I caught Sports Page running highlights from the G4TechTV league ...

WMD: Bernard asked me about the blog's stats over time ... When I started a year ago, I was getting about 5 to 10 hits a day, then within a month or so it was up to 20 to 30 and within about three to four months it was about 80. Since the fall it's been an average of 100 hits a day and now, for what I'm pretty sure is a blip, I'm getting about 500 a day thanks to interest in the tsunami pic hoax. I don't know about unique visitors, since TypePad doesn't include that kind of stat, or at least if it's there I don't know how to read it. It's nice to get visitors though.

Thursday addenum

My column for Richmond reflecting my distate for the applause given to Todd Bertuzzi at the Cancuks' final regular season game.