The Jetpacker

Here are some interesting facts about the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver…

A record number of countries will be represented: 82. This includes the Winter Olympic debuts of the Cayman Islands, Colombia, Ghana, Montenegro, Pakistan, Peru and Serbia.

Vancouver will be the warmest city to ever host the Winter Olympics. Winters in Vancouver usually don’t drop below freezing, averaging 41°F in February.  Check out this video about weather during the Olympic period.

Vancouver LOST in the first round of bidding. The three finalists to host the 2010 Winter Olympics were Salzburg, Austria, Pyeongchang, South Korea, and Vancouver.  Pyeongchang won the opening round of bidding with 51 votes compared to Vancouver’s 40.  Salzburg was eliminated, and in the second and final round of voting, Vancouver pulled out a narrow victory over Pyeongchang 56-53.  To add insult to injury, Pyeongchang actually won the first round of bidding for the 2014 Olympics, but AGAIN lost in the second round by a narrow margin to Sochi, Russia.

The Opening and Closing Ceremonies will be held at Canada’s first domed arena, BC Place. This will mark the first time that any Olympics — Winter or Summer — has held these ceremonies indoors.

Vancouver will be the most populous city ever to hold a Winter Olympics. With over 2.1 million people in the Vancouver metro area, it’s the third largest city in Canada behind Toronto and Montreal.

Since the National Hockey League began allowing its players to participate in the Winter Olympics, no city with an NHL team has ever hosted the Games… until now. Most of the men’s hockey games will take place at GM Place (tentatively renamed Canada Hockey Place), which is normally the home of the Vancouver Canucks.

The 2010 Winter Games will also mark the first time that Olympic hockey matches will be held on an NHL-sized rink instead of an international rink.  Both rinks are identical in length, but an NHL rink is 13.5 feet narrower.

The torch relay route will be the longest within one country in Olympic history. The Olympic flame will travel approximately 28,000 miles over 106 days within Canada before arriving at BC Place for the Opening Ceremony.  By comparison, the torch relay when Canada last hosted the Olympics in 1988 spanned only 11,200 miles… and that still stands as one of the longest routes in history.

Speaking of the Olympic flame, the 2010 Winter Games will mark the first time in history that the Olympic cauldron will be lit indoors.

The Winter Olympics differ from the Summer Olympics when it comes to nomenclature and numbering:

a.) The Winter Olympics are only numbered when they are actually held whereas the Summer Olympics are numbered consecutively whether they are held or not.  So when the 1940 and 1944 Games were cancelled due to World War II, the Summer Games maintained its consecutive numbering whereas the Winter Games weren’t counted.

b.) The Winter Games are not actually considered an Olympiad; they are only referred to as “Games.”  The Summer Games are referred to as “The Games of the 28th Olympiad” whereas the Winter Games are referred to as “The 21st Olympic Winter Games.”