VANCOUVER -- I live in the United States. I was born there, I hold an American passport, and that's where all my belongings are located (other than the few I currently have with me). There are hundreds of thousands of Americans like me, in America, and quite a few of them are phenomenal athletes. Enough that the medal standings at Vancouver 2010, as of this writing and virtually guaranteed to continue through until Sunday, is led by the USA.
But we are not the majority here, not by any stretch. Even though these Games are being held just a half-hour's drive from the Washington state border, I've found it difficult to find any fellow Americans at all. In Robson Square during the Opening Ceremony two weeks ago, I didn't see a single U.S. flag. There were only a few among the tens of thousands at the nightly victory ceremonies I attended. In four days at the Whistler resort up north, there were very few Americans along the walkways and in the shops; in fact, I saw more Norwegians and Swedes. After the USA hockey team beat the Canadian hosts last Sunday, there were only a few celebratory American fans in the streets of downtown Vancouver, glum Canucks had them outnumbered by at least a 3,000-to-one ratio. And in my survey of the Cultural Olympiad and the Games' exposition aspects this week, I encountered not a single countryperson.
Of course, I did find them eventually. They're at the venues, and they're in large groups in hotel lobbies and bars. This shouldn't have surprised me at all, because I've seen this play out in Barcelona and Sydney and Athens too. The tendency of American Olympic-goers abroad is to go from competition to competition to hotel, and miss everything between. It's another symbol of my country's bizarre relationship to these festivals -- for all the money the United States pumps into and pulls out of the Olympic Movement, I can't think of another nation on earth that gets less out of it.
For the past quarter-century, the No. 1 source of revenue for the IOC has been American television; with the exception of CBS and Turner's joint coverage of the Winter Games in the 1990's, it's mostly been one network bidding against itself. NBC paid $2.2 billion to exclusively broadcast Vancouver 2010 and London 2012 to U.S. audiences. (Comparatively, ABC paid $317.5 million to show both Sarajevo and Los Angeles 1984!) That's 52 percent of the IOC's total income from rights fees for this Olympic quadrennium.
The effect on the IOC has been very tangible -- in recent years, it has opened a lavish Olympic Museum at its Lausanne, Switzerland headquarters and entered the business of loss-leading brand extensions like the Youth Olympic Games. More subtle and applicable to actual Olympic atmosphere is the effect of American Olympic television on its consumer audience. With the exception of quick travelogues and regional cooking segments, the Games are presented as nothing more than a series of sporting competitions.
So it's no wonder that most Americans who come to the Olympics shuttle between beds and bleachers, flicking through the competitions with a real-life remote control.
Television can define the experience, even for those who make the trip. On the evening of Day 6, I stood at the end of the skeleton run at Whistler Sliding Centre with a group of Canadians for an hour before the first heat, staking out a good place to take in the action. As a sled approached the exit area, a man in a grey coat charged into the midst of our SRO section, holding a cell phone in one hand and waving with the other.
"Can you see me?" he yelled into the phone. "I'm at the finish. Can you see me? I'm in a grey coat, and I'm waving. There I am, just now! Did you see me? Am I on? Oh, I'm not? The camera went by me fast... it was focused on the sled."
"Excuse me, sir, excuse me," a lady in a red jacket peeped quietly, her plea falling on a covered ear. "You're squishing me against the fence."
The Canadians have generally been very polite and yielding, as is their famous custom. I've overheard a number of these cross-border conversations, and they tend to lead like this: "We're so glad you could make it. What have you seen so far?"
One by one, the stories of Olympic glory come out. There are tales of judgment, of perceived quality, of expectations met and unmet. These reports are about the service in restaurants, scratchy sheets at the hotel, not understanding curling, but all of you are so nice and we've had such a blast. Instead of accepting oneself as a small part in a greater whole, the Olympics somehow becomes a gift shop.
This is, of course, a sweeping cultural generalization, not too structurally unlike the negative ones that many Americans manage to come away with after every Olympics -- despite every opportunity to transcend them. Stereotypes about the French, or the Russians, or the Koreans or Chinese will continue. And I've been lucky enough to sit or stand with some great families and entourages of athletes, like when I found myself at the two-man bobsled heats next to Team Holcomb, the friends and family of the "Night Train," all waving their American flags and yelling their lungs out for the USA. People like these live the Olympics every day and every night, and will do so long after the television audience moves on to other things.
Indeed, for most Americans, these Winter Olympics serve as a sports consumer experience to fill the space between the Super Bowl and the televised college basketball playoffs... and it's definitely not as good or relevant as it used to be, you know, back then.
While I cheer for my country and cut a check every year to the U.S. Olympic Committee (against my better judgment) to help fund athletes like Steve Holcomb, I'm not too proud of America's recent contributions to the Olympics. In 1980, we pioneered the mass boycott, which helped stall the Movement for an entire decade. At Los Angeles 1984, we sold the Games to Coke and McDonald's, and Atlanta 1996 featured a french-fry box cauldron. Government reaction to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks made Salt Lake 2002 a security state, and the trend has continued to this day.
More recently, the USOC has clashed with the IOC on big revenue issues -- American podium domination is made easier when the home team gets 20 percent of global sponsorship money and one-eighth of American TV cash, thanks to deals brokered back in the boycott days. And it's at the point where the two sides are here in Vancouver, trying hard to make nice in hotel rooms.
But the IOC and other NOC's are getting tired of America's act, and they're in a much better position to show their dissatisfaction nowadays. The New York and Chicago bids for 2012 and 2016 were barely acknowledged, and U.S.-centric sports of baseball and softball were recently removed from the Olympic program. The IOC is radically changing its focus to be more compact and efficient, hold more economically sensible and sustainable Games, and to be far less reliant on the United States.
The biggest challenge facing the Movement in the next decade is how it deals with a massive decrease in American television dollars, now that that is a guaranteed eventuality, and the biggest question is: how irrelevant will America be in the Olympics' future? After the failed 2016 bid, NBC sports chief Dick Ebersol said,
"This was the IOC membership saying to the USOC there will be no more domestic Olympics until you join the Olympic movement." I've come to realize that in my lifetime, there might not be another Olympics held in my home country.
My opinions, or my urgency, aren't shared by a lot of my countrypeople. I'm one of the very relative few who jumped the border to attend these Winter Games; most have elected to stay home and watch on NBC, and it's the same severely limited experience many Americans are having up here. (After having to stay home and become an Olympic zombie two years ago, I know how that goes.) For most Americans, the Olympics have lost their power of transcendence, and could they ever again bring the nation together for a feel-good moment in a troubled age? Certainly not like they did 30 years ago, when the U.S. hockey team beat the Soviets in a "Miracle on Ice" that sparked a coast-to-coast wave of patriotism and pride.
On the evening of Day 13, I strolled around noisy downtown Vancouver. It was a sea of red flags and sweaters, honking horns everywhere, strangers high-fiving and hugging. Canada won a national record-tying four medals that day, but more importantly, the home team had blown out the Russians 7-3 at Canada Hockey Place in the men's quarterfinals, headed for a Friday semifinal against the Slovakians. Five hours after the game was over, block after block was full of maple leaf flags and Roots toques and Team Canada jerseys with the names of numbers of their heroes: Iginla, Pronger, Luongo, Crosby, Getzlaf.
The spectacle was exhausting. At 11 p.m., I ducked into a little by-the-slice pizza shop on Granville Street.
"All this for a quarterfinal?" said the middle-aged man behind the counter. "I'm boarding up my windows if they make it to the gold medal game. I've never seen so much Canadian stuff in one place at one time in my entire life."
The Games won't lift Canada out of its recession; instead, the true picture of the debt load of Vancouver 2010 on the province and country will not be fully known until we're all back home. But national unity through sport... what's the going rate for that?
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Sportswriter 
