Vancouver, BC — Tuesday, February 16, 2010
In an attempt to be a bit more consistent in my posts, I’ll try covering three topics each day: the sports events, the atmosphere of the Games, and the philately.
Sports: First, let’s catch up on happenings early this morning … I mean REALLY early this morning. We had 5:50 am bus tickets to Whistler for the Men’s Alpine Super Combined Downhill event. The upside: in a driving rain we still managed to make it to the bus stop with time to spare. The downside: no sooner had we alighted from the car, an Olympic volunteer informed us that the event had been postponed due to weather. We found out later that the Alpine skiing event had been postponed to Sunday the 21st … unfortunately too late for us to attend.
A good example of a registered Olympic cover postmarked on the date of Canada's second gold medal -- this time in the Women's Snowboard Cross event.
Philately: All of a sudden, this unscheduled free day gave us the opportunity to start doing some serious philately. The first stop — Vancouver Main Post Office. Once Canada Post realized the silliness of a rotating schedule of postmarks, things fell into place.
The post office set up a special Olympic area in it’s main lobby where one could purchase all the various Olympic stamps, souvenir sheets, and first day covers without having to stand in lines. Long tables were set up nearby with all 24 event cancels freely available to the public. Interestingly, the post office permitted use on any item with or without a stamp. Most visitors appeared to be collecting the cancels on blank sheets of paper.
Thomas Lippert (IMOS), Brenda and Bob Farley (SOC), and Norm Jacobs (SPI) enjoying a coffee at Blenz coffee house in Vancouver.
In order to obtain the round Olympic City cancel for Vancouver, it was necessary to take your covers or cards to one of the clerks at the retail counter (not the Olympic counter in the lobby). In this case you had to have stamps on your item to use the Olympic City cancel (most people weren’t even aware this existed). The retail counter was also the place to create a registered cover (as shown above). The clerks were well aware of what serious philatelists were after and permitted registered covers to be taken out to the lobby so an event cancel could be applied, after which the cover had to be returned to the retail clerk for mailing.
“Birds of a feather flocked together” shortly after noon as philatelic friends from Europe showed up at the post office. Bob and Brenda Farley of the U.K.-based Society of Olympic Collectors arrived along with Thomas Lippert of IMOS, our German sister society. Already there was another IMOS member, Klaus Fink, who was busily attending to philatelic pursuits. Along with Norm Jacobs, my Olympic traveling partner from SPI, we trouped down to a nearby coffee house.
What kind of message was VANOC sending by preventing Olympic visitors from getting "up close and personal" with the Olympic flame?
Atmosphere: Now we get to the point of my subject header for this entry. There’s no denying that overall, VANOC did an admirable job of planning and executing these Games. But then there were those times when they really shot themselves in the foot. The siting of the Olympic cauldron was one of those instances.
Surely when a site for the cauldron was chosen, the basic Olympic security plan was already in place. Yet, somehow they managed to place the Olympic cauldron — which according to the rules of the International Olympic Committee is to be prominently displayed in a public place during the Games — in a non-public plaza adjacent to the International Broadcast Center. Not only that, the entire plaza was cordoned off with a 10-foot high chain link fence AND covered with opaque cloth. When we visited on Tuesday night, the cloth had been removed, but the chain link fence remained imprisoning the Olympic Flame. Despite the howls from the media, mayor of Vancouver and the public, that chain link fence never came down.
Okay … that’s quite enough for one entry. Ciao!
