GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Vancouver’s mayor called it “embarrassing and shameful” after frenzied ice hockey fans angry over the 4-0 loss of the Vancouver Canucks to the Boston Bruins in the finals of the Stanley Cup 15 June trashed the city centre Wednesday. Police struggled with the mob element in the crowd of 100,000 gathered to watch the game, using tear gas and pepper spray as well as non-lethal stun grenades.Two police cars were totalled and a number of people were treated in hospital, most for tear gas inhalation, but there were also a handful of more serious injuries. The scale of the damage is being assessed Thursday.
Links to other sites: Globe & Mail, Guardian, UK, Vancouver Sun
Pre-television: swimmers training for 1912 Stockhom Olympics (Photo, ©2011 International Olympic Committee, by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – The Beau Rivage in Lausanne will be bustling with sports and TV executives Monday and Tuesday 6-7 June, as intense bidding gets underway to win US broadcast rights for upcoming Olympic Games. Day’s end Tuesday, after a cocktail party where the bidders will socialize while waiting for news, should see the winner named—or just possibly, everyone adjourned to come back another day with another bid.
The stakes are high for all concerned: US rights provide about one-third of all IOC (International Olympic Committee) revenues for the Games and about half of the TV revenues, according to USA Today. The US Olympic Committee, whose senior executives are in Lausanne for the bidding, receives 12.75 percent of the rights, according to Insidethegames.
The Beeb will be watching closely for the impact on world Olympics coverage
And the BBC in London is watching closely because this week’s bids could have a major impact on their ability to continue covering the Olympics, reports the Telegraph in the UK.
The IOC is hearing bids from three networks, ESPN, Fox and NBC, who are vying for the potentially valuable TV broadcast rights to two and possibly four Olympic Games after the 2012 London Games.
“Nothing else in US sports costs so much and has so many variables. Airing the Olympics means selling millions of viewers on largely unknown athletes in sports few Americans watch,” USA Today sums up.
The city of Vancouver, Canada, is likely to have a “shortfall” of C$40-50 out of the $578m it loaned to the company that built the Olympic Village for the Winter Games held in British Columbia in 2010. The money was loaned to Millennium Developments to buy land from the city and build the village. The company has been in receivership since November 2010 following the sharp fall in the real estate market left the company with unsold apartments.
The amount owed and that the city will be able to collect was an election issue during recent municipal voting, and it now appears that the shortfall for total repayment will be considerably less than the $1 billion Vancouver’s then-new mayor, Gregor Robertson, suggested in 2008, according to the Vancouver Sun, or the $150m sum recently suggested by other politicians.
The condo units’ prices were cut by one-third in March 2011, to encourage sales, but shortly afterwards a group of owners who bought into the village before it was built sued the city to get their money back, citing a list of problems.
Links to other sites: The Province, The Globe & Mail
Geneva: just short of perfect, says the Economist Intelligence Unit
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Geneva and Zurich are not among the 10 most liveable cities in the world, according to the annual survey by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), although they do rank 11 and 12, with scores over 95 percent. Vancouver, Canada holds the top slot for the fifth year in a row with 98 percent.
But to say the Swiss cities are not faring badly in the survey “is an understatement in extreme,” Jon Copestake, editor of the report published 21 February told GenevaLunch. “The top tier of liveability is any city with a score of over 80 percent. Geneva and Zurich achieve scores well over this and less than 5 percent below a perfect score.”
The only weakness they might have may “relate to cultural availability—the availability of good quality theatre, music or sports events compared to larger cities,” Copestake notes.
Vancouver a breath away from perfect
Vancouver had an unchanged score in the annual rankings: 98, based on an assessment of 30 factors that include stability, health care, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure. A score of 100 would make a city “perfect” whereas a 1 would render it “intolerable”.
Harare, Zimbabwe is at the other extreme of the scale from Vancouver. The report notes that it “is the lowest-scoring city at just 37.5%. Despite celebrating 30 years of independence in April 2010, the situation remains challenging across all indicators. Despite hopes of elections in 2011, stability and healthcare scores of just 25% and 20.8% respectively highlight a bleak situation.”
The EIU survey is one of two widely regarded reports that are designed to help companies determine compensation packages for employees working abroad. The other is the Mercer “quality of living” report where Zurich and Geneva ranked second and third in 2010.
How and where liveability thrives
City Mayors in February 2010 ran an article about the previous year’s EIU survey where it noted that 8 of the top 10 cities are in English-speaking countries. [italics theirs] “The EIU report, which describes the concept of liveability as simple, is written for business people from western countries and used to work out hardship allowances as part of an expatriate’s relocation package. The report’s authors say that the survey quantifies the challenges that might be presented to an individual’s lifestyle in 140 cities worldwide. Seen from such a western perspective, it is therefore not suprising that the survey’s lowest ranked cities are all in developing countries.”
Copestake told GenevaLunch that the English-speaking factor should be kept in perspective: “The top 10 is largely English speaking because it is largely made up of cities from two countries—Canada and Australia.” Both have very specific conditions that help liveability thrive, he points out. “They have mid-sized cities, large distances between cities and a low overall population density. As developed world locations this lends itself to liveability—they have a developed infrastructure which is not overburdened with people but are large enough locations to support a strong cultural availability.
“This is also a contributory factor for the reason Swiss cities do well. If the information was sorted by country it would be that only 3 of the top 10 countries are English speaking,” a much lower indication of bias, says Copestake.
Fifa named best for press facilities for 2010 World Cup by world sports journalists
Rafael Nadal wins US Open 2010 (photo, Ella Ling)
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The AIPS (International Sports Press Association) has named Rafael Nadal the world’s top male athlete and Blanka Vlasic the top female, in its annual sports awards. Nadal, Spanish is the number one tennis player in the world and Vlasic, from Croatia, has won 18 of 20 high-jumping competitions in 2010, and she currently holds the world indoor and European titles.
The AIPS named Fifa, the world football federation, as the organization providing the best media facilities, at the 2010 football World Cup matches in South Africa. The IOC, International Olympic Committee, was second, for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games. The AIPS and the IOC are both based in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Ten people were wounded, two critically, in Vancouver’s west side in what the police call an “outrageous display of gang violence” early Sunday morning 12 December. An assault rifle was found next to an abandoned taxi in the 3800 block of Oak Street in western Vancouver. Six men and three women were receiving treatment in an area hospital, as police guarded the entrance to the emergency department.
Police were questioning five people, but had not filed charges. The shootings come after an unusual lull in gang activity but police had warned that tensions were on the rise after recent violence. Vancouver was rocked in 2009 by several high-profile killings related to the city’s gangs.
Links to other sites: Globe & Mail,Vancouver Sun
An informant who in 1999 told Vancouver police a second-hand story about Robert Pickton butchering a woman and storing body parts at his pig farm in western Canada recounted the story publicly for the first time Monday 23 August on CTV News. Pickton was convicted in 2007 of murdering six women, a grisly saga that gripped the nation during his trial. Leah Best, in her 50s, heard the story from a close friend who said she witnessed Pickton cutting body parts. The friend, who received money from Pickton for drugs, refused to acknowledge the story to police and she was not initially considered a reliable witness. Once Pickton was arrested, in 2002, she gave police details and became a star witness in his mass murder trial.
Best, on television Monday, said she believes some of the women could have been spared had Vancouver police acted on the information she gave them. Pickton, age 61, told an undercover police agent he had killed 49 women, and he was charged with the deaths of 20 women in addition to the six murder convictions for which he is spending life in prison, with no possibility of parole for 25 years (Canada’s harshest sentence).
Links to other sites: CTV News, The Globe & Mail
Swiss top 16 countries for honesty, Nation Brands Index places country at 8
Zurich, Switzerland 2010: a nice place to live, says Mercer
Update 16: 30 [Video] Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Zurich and Geneva once again come in second and third in the Mercer city quality of living rankings, following Vienna, Austria and just ahead of Vancouver, Canada. Mercer notes that these are not quality of life but quality of living rankings based on measurable criteria.
Calgary, Canada was named the best eco-city and Baghdad was at the bottom of the heap as the worst city for quality of living.
Mercer, which advises companies and staff on international workplace issues, has one of the most respected city rankings of the many produced. They rate 320 cities once a year using 10 categories and 32 criteria.
Switzerland also comes out top in a survey on honesty recently run by Reader’s Digest, where 1,000 Swiss were questioned as part of a survey of 16 countries.
Overall, 91 percent of Swiss questioned would return a wallet they found, while worldwide the figure was 63 percent. Russians came out worst in the survey, but in general the stronger the economy and the less poverty, the more honest people are, according to the survey’s results.
And the Nations Brand Index, which is used by Presence Swiss to measure outside perceptions of the country, rated Switzerland a strong number 8 for 2009.
Links to other sites: 20 Minutes (Fre), Readers Digest Switzerland
How are cities ranked by Mercer?
Vancouver, Canada (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland’s Christoph Kunz won the gold medal Friday 19 March for the Men’s downhill at the 2010 Winter Paralympics in Vancouver, to add to the silver medal the 27-year-old from Bern won earlier in the week for the super-G event. Second place also went to the Swiss, thanks to Michael Brugger, 27, from Fribourg.
Links to other sites: TSR (Fre), Yahoo France
Swiss chocolate, to help celebrate Canadian gold at the Olympics
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Canadians may have loved their Olympic Games primarily for the sports, but the Winter Games 2010 also brought other great things to town. These included four tons of Swiss cheese and two tons of Swiss chocolate, consumed at the two Swiss Houses that were opened for the event.
Presence Switzerland says 60,000 guests visited the two locations between the opening ceremony 5 February and the closing ceremony 28 February. Some 1,700 fans registered on the Facebook account.
The two locations where a hub for the Swiss Olympic team, sponsors and partners and were also a meeting point for fans.
Swiss Emmental cheese
The Swiss House project was sponsored by Presence Swiss, which promotes Switzerland abroad. The project was subsidized by the federal government to the tune of CHF1.5 million.
The Vancouver Winter Olympic Games are over and it’s back to business as usual in British Columbia, Canada, starting with the budget. Finance Minister Colin Hansen presents the new budget 2 March. He said during a photo opportunity where he played wheelchair rugby to draw attention to upcoming Paralympic Games that it will be a belt-tightening budget, with little room to maneuver and stimulus spending coming to an end.
Link: Globe & Mail
Rapidly changing winter weather, Swiss Alps
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – “And now the mountain weather forecast for the next two minutes!” Such extremely short-term weather forecasting might be a thing of the future, but scientists are gathering and studying data in Vancouver, Canada to help them reach that point. The 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Canada are hosting one group of experts whose specialty is not a sport, but very short term weather forecasts, called “nowcasting”, which make predictions up to six hours before an event.
A team of scientists from nine countries assembled by the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization and Environment Canada is conducting a weather research and development project called the Science and Nowcasting of Olympic Weather for Vancouver 2010, aka Snow-V10.
Nowcasting has already been used for Olympic Games, but in summer, at the Sydney 2000 Games and the Beijing 2008 Games. The prediction of winter weather in mountains is more difficult because conditions change rapidly with time and altitude.
Vancouver, BC, Canada (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland held its own against Canada in ice hockey 18 February in the Winter Games, giving Canada a 3-2 victory, but in a penalty shootout. The Canadians were widely expected to win easily: they have a strong young team, are skating on home territory and they were still bruised from their 2006 Winter Games loss to underdog Switzerland in Torino.
Background, Washington Post
Lindsey Vonn’s win in the Women’s Downhill and Shani Davis’s in the Men’s 1,000m Speedskating pushed the US to the top of the gold medals list at the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver with four, while Germany, Korea and Switzerland each have three. Vonn is the first American to win the downhill, reports Reuters, and Davis the first man to win the 1,000 at successive Olympics.
Lindsey Vonn puts on fine show
Dominique Gisin's crash affected other skiers (photo: Olivier Morin/AFP/Getty Images)
Gold winner Lindsey Vonn (sstock photo: ©2009 US ski team)
Vancouver, BC, Canada (GenevaLunch) – American Lindsey Vonn took gold in the Women’s Downhill at Whistler mountain, in a race marked by her excellent performance, four crashes on the undulating course and wide gaps between skiers’ times. Vonn, with a time of 1:44.19, finished an impressive .056 ahead of fellow American Julia Mancuso, who won silver. The bronze medal went to Austrian Elisabeth Goergl, a full 1.46 behind Vonn. The best performance by a Swiss skier was Fabienne Suter’s. She came in nearly two seconds behind the winner, for fifth place, a remarkable performance considering that she came close to crashing and managed to right herself dramatically.
Racers appeared affected by the series of crashes that started with Swiss skier Dominique Gisin. Her spectacular wipeout left the crowd silent while they waited, then cheered when she sat up: she walked away from the course, in tears, but on her own.
Dario Cologna in Diableret, October 2009 (photo: ©2010 Swiss Ski)
Dario Cologna accepts Credit Suisse sports award in December 2009 in Basel
Vancouver, BC, Canada (GenevaLunch) - Dario Cologna captured a third gold medal for Switzerland, in the 1,500m men’s free in cross-country skiing, with a time of 33:36.3. Cologna’s wine makes Switzerland the country with the most gold medals in the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. Italian Pietro Piller Cottrer took silver, with a time of 34:00.9 and Lukas Bauer won bronze for the Czech Republic, finishing in 34:12.0.
The 23-year-old Cologna, from canton Graubuenden, has already made it clear, according to the Swiss Olympic Committee, that this race was just serving as a warmup for him to next Saturday’s 30km pursuit event.
Links to other site: dariocologna, Swiss Olympic Committee
© Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
Update 13 February 09:15 Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Georgia’s athletes, wearing black armbands and with a black ribbon on their flag, received a sombre standing ovation from the 60,000 people attending the opening ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver. Their countryman, luge athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili, died Friday 12 February while training for the Olympic Winter Games. The death of the 21-year-old is reportedly the first during a Winter Games. The IOC (International Olympic Committee) in Lausanne issued a statement saying that he died at the Whistler Sliding Centre and that the circumstances of the accident are being investigated. “Mr Kumaritashvili died after crashing on the last corner of the course during training. Doctors were unable to revive the athlete, who died in hospital.”
Early news agency reports say that he hit a beam after flying out of the luge at 144kph, but Olympics organizers have not officially confirmed this, although the IOC footage as a reposted video is publicly available on YouTube, showing the official clock.
The luge event will still take place as planned Saturday, Vancouver Games officials say, but the course is closed until then for a police investigation into the accident.
© Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
The Vancouver, Canada police department announced the arrest of 14 people related to the city’s gangs, and said up to 125 charges were being filed against them. Police Inspector Brad Desmarais spoke of a “cancer” on Vancouver’s streets, but that the arrests had crippled a gang led by “men who have a sociopathic disregard for morals, right and wrong, and common decency.” The arrested men included reputed gang leader Manny Buttar along with many of his associates. A woman was also arrested and charged with hiring a gang member to kill her ex-husband.
Links to other sites: Globe & Mail, Vancouver Sun
Kitzbuehel, Austria (GenevaLunch) - Swiss veteran Didier Cuche completed a rare double when he won the downhill on the classic Streif course Saturday 23 January, perhaps the most prestigious of the World Cup skiing circuit. The 35-year-old Neuchatel racer had won the Super G the day before. Cuche beat Slovenian slalom specialist Andrej Sporn by 0.28 seconds with Italian Werner Heel next. It was his third downhill victory at Kitzbuehel, following on from 1998 and 2008. The other Swiss stars, Carlo Janka and Didier Defago were well back. The race was the last before the Vancouver Olympics, which start 12 February.
Links to other sites: Swissinfo
Lara Gut, skier, out with injuries for much of the 2009-2010 season
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Skier Lara Gut, the new young sensation of the 2008-09 ski season, will not be part of the Swiss team skiing at the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. She has been recuperating from hip surgery following an accident during training in October. Her recovery and intensive “dry” training has gone well, Swiss Ski reports, but she will not be able to start training on skis until the end of January, too late to be in shape for the Games.
Barbara Ann Scott, a diminutive 81-year-old with a girlish smile, carried the large Olympic torch into Canada’s Houses of Parliament in Ottawa Thursday 10 December, to warm applause. Scott was Canada’s sweetheart when she won the Olympic figure skating gold medal in St Moritz, Switzerland in 1948. The torch is wending its way to Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.
Links to other sites: The Globe & Mail, Olympics Vancouver 2010
Stewart Butterfield and friends and friends in Vancouver, Canada who had a failing online gaming startup in 2003 turned their attention instead to photo-sharing, and the company, Flickr, that they created was so successful that Yahoo paid $30 million for it just months later. Now Butterfield is turning his attention – and money – back to the gaming business, to create a massive multiplayer game under the name Tiny Speck. Details are secret but the Globe & Mail in Canada notes that “Tiny Speck, started by a quartet of the original Game Neverending /Flickr team, including Mr Butterfield, wants to do for online gaming what Nintendo Co Ltd’s Wii did for video game consoles.” Gambling? apparently not. Global bridge? not exactly.
Links to other sites: Globe & Mail, Tech Vibes, Tiny Speck
London, England (Economist Intelligence Unit) – The annual Economist liveability survey of 140 cities worldwide ranks Vancouver in first place with an almost perfect 98 score out of 100. There are four European cities among the top 10. Vienna is in second place, Helsinki in seventh, just ahead of eighth-tied Geneva, Sydney and Zurich.
Vancouver and British Columbia in Canada have had a too-large dose of winter in the past two weeks, with heavy snow and ice that have resulted in blocked roads, power outages and major transport headaches, including hundreds of stranded airline passengers. Officials say the lessons from this winter are being kept in mind as planning for the 2010 Olympics continues. The Globe & Mail
