This past week the so-called Olympic Torch Relay passed through Nova Scotia, and more importantly for me and this article, directly passed my home in Dartmouth, as it did for the 1988 Olympics in Calgary.  I remember standing on Waverly Rd for the ’88 relay as a 7 year old boy, so excited to see and maybe even touch the torch on its way to open the games.  I didn’t get to touch the torch that year but I ran beside it (within arms reach) for a few minutes, just long enough to see the flame and absorb its radiant energy into my sponge like childhood brain, hoping that someday that energy might carry me to the Olympics.  It did not.

As a 7 year old amateur sport enthusiast I watched every moment of the ‘88 games, or as much as physically possible, oozing excitement no matter what event was on the TV.  I watched subsequent Olympics with the same enthusiasm and aspired to be an Olympic athlete someday.  I guess you could say that, as a child, I was full of the Olympic spirit.  Unfortunately, my more recent memories of and thoughts about the Olympics and the Olympic spirit are far less positive. 

In 2002, 14 years after my first experience with the Torch Relay, I found myself spending Christmas in Lac Brome, Quebec, a short drive from where the Torch was passing through Vermont on its way to Salt Lake City.  Fourteen years is a long time, and like everything else in the world since 1989, the Torch Relay had been drastically altered (at least according to my childhood memories).  No longer was the relay about the Olympics, or instilling the Olympic Spirit into children so that they too might be inspired as I once was.  No, it was now about the almighty dollar and how best to make as much as possible from the Olympics via advertising.  Sponsors were now the main focus.  Not the athletes, not the Olympic flame, nor the Olympics themselves, not even the Olympic spirit was as important as ads and money.  These were my thoughts as I watched the Olympic flame pass by me in 2002 surrounded by Coca-Cola everything. 

I’m not saying that the first corporate sponsored Olympics wasn’t a money making opportunity for someone, it surely was, as they have been ever since.  I am merely pointing out the shift that is gradually taking place from celebrating amateur sports to celebrating...