Next stop - Vancouver

Well, it has been far too long since my blog, so a little house cleaning to bring you up to speed.

It’s the first day of March and I am on a United flight venturing towards Vancouver, BC, Canada – sight of the 2010 Paralympic Winter Games. I will be working as part of the US staff delegation form March 1-24th. The Games themselves do not start until March 12th. So why head out so early? Well, my main responsibility with these Games will be to work at the Vancouver airport, YVR, helping take care of athletes, coaches, and staff as they arrive and depart from various parts of the US. It’s a similar assignment to one of the many roles I played in Beijing during the 2008 Games (which seems like just yesterday, can’t believe it was a year and a half ago!).

The main differences this time around:

- Working with 50 paralympic athletes as opposed to 600 able bodied Olympians
- Working with about 75 staff members versus hundreds
- Working by myself at the airport with the support of the VANOC staff (Vancouver Organizing Committee), as opposed to working with another USOC employee and a translator. Although Canadian English might be tricky, I don’t know how I can navigate the “ya know’s”, “a-boot’s”, and “eh’s”.

I also seriously doubt I will have to contend with scores of media trying to get the first pictures of our athletes.

Although the Paralympic Games have been around since 1960, there is little fanfare surrounding them in the US. Most people immediately think of the Special Olympics, which is nothing like the Paralympic Games. Rather than working with mentally challenged athletes, Paralympians are athletes with physical disabilities like missing limbs, spinal injuries causing paralysis, and various other degenerative diseases that limit and/or challenge an athletes physical capabilities.

The Winter Paralympics feature far fewer events and sports – you have sled hockey, curling, alpine skiing, cross country skiing, and biathlon, that are spread over 10 days, as opposed to 17.

Rather than being housed in high performance training center built entirely for the US team like we had in Beijing, I will be living in the Olympic/Paralympic Village this time around, which I am pretty excited about. I didn’t make an Olympic team as an athlete, so this will be the closest experience I get to actually being an Olympian/Paralympian in the Village. We’ll see if all those rumors about vending machines for prophylactics and Caligula style orgies are true – or at least extend beyond the Olympics and feed into the Paralympic Games.

As for Vancouver, I love the city. I had the opportunity to visit in October last year and found it to be one of the most beautiful, enjoyable cities I have ever been to. The city is relatively small, only about half a million in population, and the layout resembles an older suburb. Not many highways or interstates. The downtown area sits on an island and is all high-rise glass. This gives a futuristic, Jetson vibe. I half expect to see cars zooming through the air, spitting out kids in glass shoots heading to school. But alas, not quite yet.

The social scene seems pretty cool and young. Great restaurants and bars. Although, I doubt I will see much of that scene during my time in Vancouver.

In any case, I plan to keep a running log of all that I see and experience here. Stay tuned. Follow some of my live-time updates on Twitter – www.twitter.com/T_Fools2000. For more info on US Paralympics, visit http://www.usparalympics.org/ and/or www.teamusa.org/Fanguide (a site I helped create!).

Enjoy and be well my friends!