Despite proof positive that there's no substitute for the Real Thing, that the actual Olympic spirit will triumph over the synthesized imitations, corporations still buy pieces of the Olympic dream. Coca-Cola has paid billions to be the official soft drink. Athletes are signed to Team Visa, or Team McDonald's. In return for their generosity, the International Olympic Committee invites them into the gates of Olympia, to set up shop. The golden arches are in every Olympic Village, despite evidence that mass consumption of McDonald's food is hardly conducive to athletic pursuits.

The IOC guarantees its top sponsors "clean venues," meaning that no competing or non-affiliated logos will be found anywhere within them. Press rows are full of silver computers with the glowing Apple blacked out, to placate worldwide partner Acer.

Or on the venues themselves. The downtown building where the Vancouver Canucks play, General Motors Place, is called Canada Hockey Place for these 17 days. GM was not interested in paying the tens of millions of U.S. dollars to secure that kind of cozy relationship with the IOC, and as the company's been asking for American government bailouts lately, it's not really in a position to.

Nike doesn't pay enough to get through those gates. The company is not a part of IOC's worldwide sponsorship program, and so its only way into the venues is on the uniforms of athletes from the individual National Olympic Committees it sponsors. In the concourses of BC Place, home of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies and the nightly medal celebrations, giant murals featuring BC Lions football players are scrubbed. A long, lengthwise logo on the side of a shoe -- it could not be anything other than a swoosh -- is covered in black tape.

If you desire a beverage, however, you have a choice -- Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Sprite, Coca-Cola... or Coke subsidiaries Dasani or Vitamin Water. Or Coca-Cola.

Security checks at the gates shake out any non-Coke products, and they also filter out all the Starbucks cups from the one-per-block locations all over Vancouver. Coke's new coffee arm, Far Coast, is the only way for spectators to get coffee or hot chocolate -- but its messy orange and black logo is completely indistinguishable from farther than two feet away. It probably hasn't registered at home, over the television.

During the Nineties, even when Coca-Cola virtually hosted the Summer Games in its hometown of Atlanta, it had to be a lot more subtle about its presence inside the venues. Water bottles and tanks featured Dasani's dynamic wave device with the Olympic rings -- stealth target marketing at its best, especially since the brand and its logo received thousands of repeated impressions on American TV. Nowadays, it's hardly uncommon to see athletes chugging from logo-covered bottles -- a symbol of Coke's new power over an IOC that has been struggling to maintain, much less grow, its sponsor base.

So I believe that this logo creep in the venues -- and outside too -- doesn't come from greed or over-commercialization. It's a far more interesting dynamic than that. Ironically, it's a function of desperation in a general global recession. Olympic sponsorship is neither a buyer's nor a seller's market, but one that's shrinking. Johnson & Johnson and Maulife did not renew after Beijing 2008, and the IOC fell short of its $1 billion TOP sponsorship goal for this cycle. All of this means that the IOC has to give over more power to those who stay.

The evidence of slippage is clear. Twenty years ago, or even 10, the IOC had better choices of electronics sponsors than Acer, Chinese mass-manufacturer of flimsy and quickly-obsolete computer equipment. Former industry giant IBM ended its affiliation in 2000.

Much as the Olympic bosses have to wean themselves off American television money and America itself, they probably should adjust away from being reliant on "TOP" sponsors, and make the Movement more resilient against fluctuating economic conditions. Perhaps it will do so by managing smaller limited deals with an increased number of national and regional entities, instead of a few big deals with a handful of top global corporations. The IOC loses power over its precious brand, the purity of those five beautiful rings, when it's chasing the big money to cover massive budgets. That's something every individual worker in the developed world (not only athletes) can understand -- it's why we commute, doing things for money that we don't necessarily want to do.

But for now, we're still stuck in an overlap between the globo-corporate Olympic age and a potential period of fiscal reason and sanity. And we can only take our fun where we can find it.

At the start of these Games, standing in a long line to enter the worldwide sponsor playground of Live City, I hatched a challenge for myself. Some way, somehow, I was going to sneak a bottle of Pepsi into a venue.

There's nothing particularly subversive, or punk, or No Logo about trying to get a product from one massive corporation past a slightly more massive corporation. It's a simple test. And unlike trying to bring an actual weapon to the Olympics, the worst thing that could happen is that the bottle would be confiscated, like all the others.

Vancouver, as has been noted in this space before, is a major metropolis of 2.5 million people, and the Games have been somewhat swallowed up here. There are hundreds of thousands of people in this area who have gone about their lives during the Olympics as if nothing has changed. As such, the IOC and VANOC logo police would have an impossible task if they tried to ensure their top sponsors a truly clean city -- there are many 7-11 stores sprinkled throughout downtown, and competing products are readily available there. That's where I bought my Pepsi.

I made my first attempt on the evening of Day 2, when I returned to Live City. I put the bottle in the front pocket of my oversized coat. I made it through the metal detector (because I didn't buy a can), but the volunteer patdown uncovered the secret. It was confiscated, but not for the reason I thought it would be.

"You can't being opened bottles inside," the bluejacket said. "They have to be sealed." I'd taken a sip while standing in line.

On Day 3, I tried to bring a Pepsi bottle (unopened) into BC Place for a nightly Vancouver medal ceremony that featured a Nelly Furtado concert. This time, I put it in my over-the-shoulder trail bag. I'd noticed that bag checks were random, and I figured I had at least a 66 percent chance.

But my bag was singled out. A young volunteer pulled the bottle out. It was obvious that he was new on the job.

"Is this one of those that isn't allowed?" he asked his nearby supervisor.

"Ohhhhh yeah it isn't," came the reply. I feigned ignorance myself, made a few indistinct grunts, and passed into the dome without my illegal beverage.

I attended the two-man bobsled heats at the Whistler Sliding Centre on Day 9. That's when I finally cracked the code. I bought a Pepsi bottle from a down the back of my pants, under my coat, where I knew they weren't patting people down. Once I learned how to walk without waddling, I got in line. Bag check, metal detector, patdown... I was in.

But I made a key mistake. As I took the bottle out of my pants and set it up in front of an Olympic sign for a proof-positive snapshot, I didn't see the security man in back of me.

"Excuse me, sir," he said as he approached me from the side. "I'll take that, please."