After the Super Bowl, the next sports spectacular to take over television screens will be the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Super Bowl Sunday is imperial Rome, all armor and battle formations, while the Olympics are still classical Greece: all torches, wreaths and moral uplift. The Super Bowl is a unique display of American exuberance. The Olympics have a more solemn function: to channel the lethal energies of modern nationalism into a peaceful competition for gold medals.
The Olympics have done their part in replacing war with sport as the way nations earn respect. Modern nations compete by branding their identities, and hosting the Olympic Games is the biggest branding opportunity a nation ever gets. The Beijing Games unveiled China as a global power. The Rio Games in 2016 will do the same for Brazil. The Sochi Winter Games in 2014 will showcase the raw power of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
If you’re not trying to demonstrate raw power or announce your arrival on the global stage, however, hosting the Games presents a challenge. We Canadians are immensely proud of our country, but we try to be soft-spoken about it, so we aren’t looking for the Vancouver Games to be a grandiose exercise in self-promotion. Instead, we want to demonstrate that we’re a people the world can count on. We’re proud that we brought in the Games on time and on budget. The venues are ready. Apart from some nail-biting about whether there will be enough real snow for the low-altitude venues, there have been no last-minute panics. The Olympics let us tell the world: Ask us to do a job, and we get it done right.
Instead of giving rein to Olympic grandiosity, the Vancouver organizers have tried to rein it in. Many of the venues are deliberately modest in scale and have been grouped together to minimize their environmental footprint. Visitors will take the Canada Line, Vancouver’s spiffy new light rail system, instead of taxis. Buses will replace cars as the way up to Whistler, site of the big downhill events. Offsets have been purchased to pay for the Games’ carbon emissions. We hope visitors will come away thinking Canada ran the greenest Games.
The Games will also mark Vancouver’s emergence as a global city. Canadians hope that visitors arriving in Vancouver for the first time will be awed by the city’s sublime mountain and ocean setting, its diverse yet integrated population and its status as a multicultural metropolis facing out to Asia.
The Olympics are branding Canada to the world, but they are also branding Canada to Canadians. At first we grumbled about the cost and did not take ownership of the whole expensive spectacle. But as soon as the Olympic torch relays began this fall, Canadians started lining the route by the thousands to see Olympians and other local heroes carrying the torch aloft through their communities. From Alert, the northernmost community on earth, to the American border and from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island, the torch relay has brought the country alive and brought it together.
The Games have also changed Canadian attitudes toward competition itself. We’ve always had talented athletes, but we let other countries give theirs more support. A while back, the government initiated a multimillion-dollar program to invest in Olympic gold. Now Canadian athletes have world-class sports psychologists, coaches and training facilities. The snowboarders have aerodynamic experts to work on their boards. The curling team can model their shots in a wind tunnel. Canada has hosted the Winter Games before — in Calgary in 1988 — but has never won gold at home. Nothing less than a top-three finish in gold medals will satisfy the Canadian Olympic team this time.
Canadians’ newfound competitiveness has caught the eye of Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s master of faux outrage. He blasted “the syrup suckers” up north for denying American speed skaters practice time on the Olympic skating oval. “Canada is cheating!” Colbert thundered. Canadians thundered faux outrage right back. Of course, all chauvinism aside, we Canadians think American speed skaters will need all the help that Stephen Colbert can give them.
The Games will showcase a more competitive Canada. Now Canada waits to see whether the new spirit will pay off, especially in hockey, the national game and ruling obsession. Canada will have the home advantage in the Games, and every player takes the ice knowing that only victory will do.
The question is how individual athletes in the Canadian men’s, women’s and Paralympic teams manage the pressure of all our pent-up national expectation. That is finally what makes the Games uniquely compelling. The real drama is not the battle between countries as much as each individual competitor’s battle with himself or herself. Nations can pitch the Olympics as a battle between nations, but the spectators know this is a very human, very individual drama. Some competitors will draw inspiration from the crowds, and some will be crushed by the pressure. Canadians will be watching, because we are proud of our country’s best, but also because we know that what is so great about sport, what lifts it above just a branding exercise for nations, is that it is ultimately about human beings battling with their limitations and finding their own unique and mysterious way to win.
Michael Ignatieff is leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. He is a former contributing writer for the magazine. His latest book is “True Patriot Love.”
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Apologies for the sap-filled headline, but there's really no way to talk about the performance of Canadian figure skater Joannie Rochette on Tuesday night without delving into emotive prose. If you have a heart, Rochette's performance surely tugged its strings. 
