How weather can hold the reins

In this city that might as well be a ship at sea, so exposed is it to water on all sides, there may be a need to batten down the hatches to get through the first weekend of Winter Olympics that open Friday night with a ceremony at BC Place.

For the first time, the ceremony will be indoors, which can stand as a testimony to good planning for Winter Games that have been riding out an economic storm for several years and may draw significant anti-Olympic protests during what is expected to be an inclement weekend.

With bad forecasts through Sunday for Cypress Mountain (rain), where freestyle skiing is to begin Saturday, and Whistler (rain and snow), where they hope to have the men’s downhill Saturday and women’s combined Sunday, these 21st Winter Games could get off to the sort of start that would hurt the U.S. Olympic Committee as much as the local organizers.

The future strength of the Olympic movement in the U.S. could be determined not only by how many medals Team USA brings back but by how many people watch them do it.

NBC expects to lose $200 million or more on these Olympics. U.S. TV rights beyond 2012 have yet to be negotiated. The USOC reaped some $250 million from its share of the rights for 2010 and 2012.

“We have a special opportunity with the Games here [in North America] to reach people who it is much harder to reach when the Games aren’t here,” said Scott Blackmun, in his third week on the job as USOC chief executive.

“The better we do from a ratings standpoint, the better off we are in the television discussion. With the bad weather back in the States, we were all thinking that might help increase viewership a little bit, but maybe that will be offset by the bad weather here.”

This is supposed to be the weekend when U.S. audiences find out whether Lindsey Vonn looks as good in a ski racing suit as she does in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue, whether an apparently reformed Bode Miller begins to repair the reputation he left in tatters four years ago, whether the U.S. moguls women who took the top four spots in a World Cup three weeks ago can own the podium at Cypress.

Now Vonn is wondering how much a painful shin bruise will slow her down, and the skiers and lugers may be wondering if they will need boats to navigate their courses.

The winter act of the Olympic ring cycle always has a Wagnerian element: The gloomy earth goddess has the final say.

Yes, there are indoor competitions among the 86 medal events, but 58 are to take place outdoors, which is what the Winter Olympics are about.

As late as 1960, every event was staged outside. Figure skating moved indoors in 1964, and long-track speedskating did not make the switch for good until 1994.

“Sometimes, we think of the Winter Games as everyone huddling before the fireplace,” said Anita DeFrantz of Los Angeles, an International Olympic Committee member.

That image harks back to the days when the Winter Games took place in hamlets like Lake Placid, N.Y., or European ski resorts like St. Moritz, Switzerland, or Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.

Vancouver, population 611,869, is the fourth straight city of more than 180,000 to host the Winter Games, partly because the size and number of indoor arenas needed makes it impractical and too expensive for small cities to bid.

“It’s important we have a lot of people able to experience the Games,” DeFrantz said of the switch to large metropolitan areas.

Canada has another size distinction. It is the largest country, in terms of geographic area, ever to have hosted the Winter Games.

Yet John Furlong, chief executive of the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee, knew a crucial element of the Games’ success would be having Canada regard them as a national event rather than something that belonged only to the country’s westernmost major city

“We thought the project could be a nation-builder,” Furlong said, “and the Games could be a moment where everyone in Canada participated in not just watching this but playing a role in helping it to be successful.”

That role included a torch relay that covered 28,000 miles of Canada, as 12,000 people carried the flame to 1,030 communities. Another facet was the involvement as “co-host” of the Four Host First Nations, the aboriginal Canadians on whose ancestral lands the Olympics are taking place.

There is not unanimous support for the Olympics among the groups that compose the First Nations.

And there is strong local criticism by groups that think the money used for them would have been better spent on alleviating homelessness, poverty and drug use on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

VANOC also was buffeted by an overheated economy that made construction costs rise by the minute, followed by a global recession that affected sponsorship and made the IOC offer to cover any shortfall in the operating budget, although that no longer seems necessary.

Now it must weather a storm of a different nature. Mother Nature.

phersh@tribune.com