A 23 hour day-trip to the Olympics

With all the big news for the next couple weeks being Olympics related, I thought we’d take a bit of a break from the usual hiking news and tell the story of our visit to the Olympics over the weekend.

Having put my name into the lottery for Olympics tickets over a year ago and getting shut out, I was pretty happy to score some last minute tickets to see the luge. CoSport (the people behind the ticketing to the Olympics) released a few remaining tickets that hadn’t sold from their incredibly overpriced vacation packages. While they also marked the prices 66% above face value, I was still happy to be able to go.

Getting to Whistler Sliding Center was quite the journey, but still pretty well organized. After a 3 hour drive from Seattle, we made our way to Vancouver. Since we got our tickets last minute, we had to stop by the CoSport will call office in Vancouver. That completed, we drove over to BCIT to catch the bus to Whistler. While this was one of the first days of the games, it still went pretty smoothly. All the employees knew what to do and the process went like clockwork. A 2.5 hour bus ride and we were at Whistler.

Since the sliding center isn’t in Whistler Village, there’s a couple options to get to the venue. One can take a 25-30 minute walk, a gondola, or an 8 minute shuttle bus. Since the shuttle was next to where the bus from BCIT dropped us off, we hopped on the shuttle. Unfortunately when we got to the top, I was greeted by a rather cold walk across a ski trail in low top hikers before getting to the sliding center.

Due to the unfortunate death of a luger in training (the video of which distastefully looped on every news channel the day prior), the sliding center itself had a pretty somber tone while I was there. There were quite a few hasty changes made to the end of the track to try and compensate for the danger. The organizers had a wood and drywall wall built at the spot that the luger had died. Poles further down the  track had padding added to them, and there were multiple medics stationed at the turn as well as an ambulance on standby.

To further complicate matters, the weather was terrible. It was pouring rain when we arrived around 2:30 and didn’t turn to snow until around 6. Everyone at the event got absolutely soaked. Thankfully, they sold umbrellas at the event. So, I could still take photos.

Watching Olympic events on TV, you get the impression that the Olympics are epic battles between athletes jockeying for position to get the gold. In person (at the luge at least), it’s a much different atmosphere. Of course the athletes are competitive, but they seem to be genuinely friendly with their competitors. The spectators cheered universally for all the athletes (granted, a bit more for the favorites). In this day and age, it was very nice to see people cheer for everyone. Personally, I was particularly happy to see the Indian athlete competing considering the back story with his sled.

Perhaps the more surprising part of watching the luge at the sliding center is the intimacy of the venue. While there’s a large grandstand area at the bottom of the track, most of the track is much less packed. At quite a few points one can get close enough that they could actually reach out and touch the track. It’s quite the experience to watch a world class athlete whip by at 60mph 5 feet away.

Aside from the bus driver getting lost on the way back to Vancouver, the day went extremely smoothly. The Canadians were great hosts and every single one of them that I met was extremely friendly. If you happen to live within traveling distance, there are still a few tickets available for a select few sports for the games. I’d highly recommend you attend the games if you can.