To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, the Whistler Museum presents our latest temporary exhibit, featuring stories and artefacts of the volunteers and community members who made the Games a unique experience in Whistler. Join us opening night to share your own tales of 2010 and show off your Olympic memorabilia (we’re betting a lot of you still have those red mitts and blue coats)!
Doors open at 6:30 pm, Friday, February 28. Free admission.
Catering (cash bar and complimentary snacks) provided by the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre with the support of the RMOW.
Over the coming weeks, there will be plenty of opportunities in Whistler to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games (including the Whistler Museum’s next temporary exhibit highlighting the volunteers of the Games, opening Friday, February 28!). While many people may still be wondering how a decade has passed, this week we took a look even further back, to when the first Olympic bid was submitted by the Garibaldi Olympic Development Association (GODA) sixty years ago.
Following the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California, a group from Vancouver very quickly organized a committee to explore the idea of hosting the Games in the Garibaldi Park region. The California Games ended on February 28, and in March GODA invited Sidney Dawes, the Canadian representative to the International Olympic Committee, to assist in the search for an Olympic venue. Cliff Fenner, the Park Supervisor for Garibaldi Park, also assisted in the search, which included reconnaissance flights, snowmobile explorations, and test skiers. London Mountain (now known as Whistler Mountain) was chosen as “a highly desirable area”, and by November 1960 GODA had put together a bid for the 1968 Olympic Winter Games which would have seen all events take place within the Whistler valley.
A group heads out to explore Garibaldi Park in search of an Olympic site, 1960. Cliff Fenner Collection
Creating a bid for the chosen site meant planning to build an entire Olympic site from scratch. Alta Lake, as the area was known at the time, was comprised of a few lodges, summer cabins, and logging operations. The valley was accessible by rail and courageous drivers could make their way up via service roads in the summer. According to the 1968 bid book, prior to exploring possible Olympic sites, the provincial government had already spoken publicly of extended the highway that ran from North Vancouver to Squamish further north to Pemberton.
Other services we often take for granted today had also not yet reached Alta Lake. The list of venues and facilities to be built in the valley for 1968 included not just sporting venues, but also a water supply system, sewers, sewage disposal, a substation for power supply, a fire station, and a hospital.
An official pamphlet promoting GODA’s 1968 Olympic bid.
Though the prospect of building all of this was daunting, in the bid book GODA pointed out that it had been done before, for the British Empire and Commonwealth Games that were held in Vancouver in 1954. As they put it, “Here, too, a project was begun with nothing more than an idea, a desire to hold the event here, and an enthusiasm that made the project become a reality… Given the go-ahead, work will begin to transform the Whistler Mountain area into one of the finest sites ever developed for the Olympic Winter Games.”
This site became the gondola base, today known as Creekside, but before 1965 it was pretty bare. Wilhelmsen Collection
As we know, the 1968 Olympic Winter Games were not held on Whistler Mountain (they were held in Grenoble, France), but that did not mean that all of the work of surveying, planning, and negotiating with provincial powers was for nought. Instead, GODA formed a sister organization, Garibaldi Lifts Ltd., to develop Whistler Mountain as a ski resort, Olympics or not.
Like the bid for 1968, a tremendous amount of work was done in a relatively short time in order to open Whistler Mountain for skiing in January 1966. The ideas and enthusiasm of GODA were finally fulfilled in 2010 and, though it took muck longer and looked very different that they had first planned, it five decades the Whistler Mountain area had been significantly transformed.
Over the past few weeks, as we’ve been working on our temporary exhibit Construction of Whistler Village: 1978 – 1984, we’ve also been thinking about Whistler Village could have looked like if earlier proposals had gone forward. Before development of the village we know today began in earnest in 1978, town centres for the Whistler area were proposed in various different styles and locations. Three of the earliest of these plans predated the Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW), and were proposed by the Garibaldi Olympic Development Association (GODA), purpose designed to host the Olympic Winter Games.
GODA first put forth an Olympic bid in 1963, with hopes of hosting the 1968 Olympic Winter Games. At the time, they proposed to build a town centre at the base of the lifts planned for Whistler Mountain, today’s Creekside. This idea of a planned town centre continued to be developed by further bids.
In 1968, GODA submitted a bid to host the 1972 Olympic Winter Games. The plans from this bid placed the town centre at the same location as today’s Whistler Village. According to a painting currently on display at the Whistler Museum, this town centre would have included a large plaza area with a view of the proposed ski jumps on Whistler Mountain, an airport, and a landing area for helicopters, as well as lodgings and retail spaces.
The proposed town centre for the 1976 Olympic Winter Games, as they imagined it would have bee seen by skiers. GODA
Neither bid was successful, in part because Whistler Mountain had not yet become firmly established as a ski resort. By 1970, however, when GODA was putting forth a bid for the 1976 Olympic Winter Games, Whistler Mountain had become better known and the available amenities had increased significantly since 1963. Garibaldi/Vancouver was selected by the Canadian Olympic Committee as Canada’s official national bid for 1976 and a full IOC bid was developed. This has left behind lots of official material that gives insight into the Canadian Olympic organizers and their vision of the Whistler areas as an Olympic venue, including architectural drawings for a proposed town centre in the official 1976 Vancouver/Garibaldi bid book.
Some of the elements envisioned in the architectural drawings done for the 1976 Olympic Winter Games. GODA
According to the bid book, a prominent selling point for this proposal was the idea of a single-host area, with all events held within four kilometres of the town centre at the base of Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains.
The town centre envisioned in the bid book is not too different from the 1972 bid. Ski Jump Plaza provided views of the ski jumps on Whistler Mountain and was accessible through a pedestrian concourse. The concourse was to be lined on either side by tall, angular buildings and lifts beginning at the concourse would carry skiers and spectators up the hill. Close by would be an ice rink, biathlon course and other Olympic venues.
The ski jump planned for the base of Whistler Museum. GODA
The proposed town site for the 1976 Games was very different from the village that was designed just eight years later, but certain elements, such as a focus on pedestrians and lift access to Whistler Mountain are defining features of the village we know today.
We’ll be learning more about how Whistler Village came to be this Thursday (October 24) during the first of a three-part storytelling event on Whistler’s history. You can find more information about the Legends of Whistler event here.
On Thursday, February 15, the museum was thrilled to welcome John Rae, Mo Douglas and Kristen Robinson (KR) as our speakers for Behind the Games: Creating the 2010 Olympic Experience.
The three began the evening with a look at the years of planning, partnerships and collaborations that went into creating not only the Olympic Bid but also the Games themselves. Hosting the Olympics is a huge undertaking and, like anything you plan for, it seems some of the best stories are the ones that you don’t expect.
KR, Mo Douglas and John Rae at February’s Speaker Series.
From the volunteer staying in Birken who was determined to come work the Olympics despite a recent kidney transplant to the absurdity of asking the RCMP to please pull over and ticket speeding VANOC cars who were enjoying being the only ones on the road to knocking on the doors of the National Japanese Olympic Committee to borrow mittens for a medal ceremony, the stories of the three speakers demonstrated that some things cannot be planned for.
KR was the festival director for Whistler Live. The Whistler Live team had the task of planning, creating and broadcasting programming for 8 to 15 hours every day of the Olympics in six different venues, all controlled from one studio. This included live performances, interviews, street entertainment, photography, films and, of course, the Olympic sports. According the John Rae and KR, scheduling the programming began with the sports which included trying to find a way to show all Sea to Sky athletes. Other content was slotted in around the sporting events. As competitions and other events could be postponed and rescheduled without too much notice, running Whistler Live was a delicate balancing act, one John Rae described as “a chess game that was being played every day.”
The Whistler Live stage and screens in crowded Village Square. Photo: Anastasia Chomlack/RMOW
The first day of Whistler Live didn’t entirely go smoothly. First, the horses that were supposed to lead the parade of Canadian athletes into Village Square went home sick. The rest is best put in KR’s words.
We’re just trying to get this group back and we’re learning how to switch out the CTV feed and the Hairfarmers were playing, and that was great, and then all of a sudden, we’re kind of getting into our groove, and this big [notice] on the screens comes up and it’s like ‘I’m sorry, Bell Expressvu is no longer in service.’
After running to the studio, where people were running to fix the problem, KR was told by the director “I want you to run to the stage, and I want you to start talking, and I don’t want you to stop until we fix this.” Thankfully the Whistler Live team was able to return the feeds just as the Canadian team rounded the corner into Village Square. The next day it was discovered someone at Bell in Toronto had noticed Whistler Live had multiple accounts on the system and were consolidating them, taking away the feeds.
We’d like to thank everyone who came out on Thursday, especially our speakers. Keep an eye out for more untold stories of the Whistler 2010 Olympics.
