News and Features
Security Breach
By Jesse Spencer published Dec 1, 2008
An Olympic skeptic gets forensic with the price of 2010 security. We have no idea, he suggests, what we’re in for.
Shaw spends much of his time in a small, cluttered office in a research building near Vancouver General Hospital. A professor of ophthalmology at UBC, he's spent the last four decades-at the University of California (Irvine), Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Dalhousie in Halifax, and, since 1988, here in Vancouver-studying neuroscience. He's particularly interested in the progression in mice of a neurological disease related to one discovered on the island of Guam, called ALS-parkinsonism-dementia complex. "With any neurological disease, like Alzheimer's or ALS, to figure out the causes in humans you're usually starting with a diagnosis, then trying to work backwards toward potential causal factors," he says. "It's rare that you get to start with a healthy animal and study a disease unfolding in real time."
In his free moments, Shaw, 58, turns his attention to what he considers a disastrous local disease that's been unfolding since 2002: the 2010 Winter Games. His book Five-Ring Circus, published earlier this year, makes the case that the International Olympic Committee is a well-oiled corporate machine peddling exalted notions of global sportsmanship to rake in handsome profits. In the host cities, he argues, suppliers and developers make out like bandits, generally at the expense of taxpayers. The book is flawed by hyperbole, ad hominem attacks, and rabid anti-Olympic rhetoric-Shaw's active in the antiglobalization movement as well as the NO GAMES 2010 coalition-which makes it easy to dismiss. But the book is also full of research and revelations. He brings a hound's nose and a scientist's rigour to his analysis; you put the book down enlightened and disturbed.
Many of the projections the Vancouver 2010 Bid Corp. put together to land the Games, says Shaw, and that VANOC now uses to reassure us they'll come in on budget, were-to put it politely-optimistic guesses. "Did you catch that line to the effect that ‘these projections are based on the assumption of no economic downturn before 2010'? How could they make that assumption? Why wouldn't they suggest different outcomes based on differing economic scenarios? Where's the due diligence?" The worst misrepresentations, he believes, relate to the cost of security, which VANOC originally budgeted at $175 million. Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day has since allowed that it could go much higher.
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VANOC has released a new security budget and it looks like Shaw wasn't far off: http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/090220/canada/canada_us_olympics_vanc...
