"No Olympics on Stolen Native Land!"

I just returned from the Olympic Torch Relay event down at the Old Port, here in snowy Montreal.

A stage was set up in Place Jacques-Cartier to celebrate the torch's arrival and while Olympic and Coca-Cola and RBC organizers rushed to get everything in place, about 200 hundred-or-so protesters crammed into the area in front of the stage with tubas and trumpets and drums and tambourines and made it known that they did not support the games and the money being spent on them and the land being appropriated for highways and games infrastructure and the scary amount of privacy being lost in Vancouver under games legislation that allows peoples' homes to be searched for anti-Olympic and anti-Olympic sponsor material.

They were there to Shame the Flame.

Me? I didn't know.

Let me begin by saying long ago, I was a demented little national sports freak and I literally leapt for joy when the Olympics rolled around. I would never cheer harder than for any athlete who wore the red and white and represented our country. I'd wake up early on Saturday and Sunday mornings -- and even weekdays!!! -- and sit in front of the television slurping sugary cereal and watch our rowers compete in Barcelona, or biathletes in Lillehammer, and whenever one of our athletes won a medal, I would rejoice and watch the replays of their races or events and their medal ceremonies over and over, and then run over to my sports page, which held the medal counts and update them with my pen as they were updated on the TV. I thought Silken Laumann and her gigantic gums and teeth were the greatest, and Myrian Bedard and Sylvie Frechette deserved to be pictured on our money and Michael Smith was the world's greatest athlete and I had a major crush on Joanne Malar.

There are only a few 'I remember exactly where I was when that happened' moments in my life so far, but when Donovan Bailey stormed back after a terrible start and won gold and broke the 100m world record in Atlanta, after a race that was mired with false starts and bizarre drama -- so much that I felt like I was going to vomit -- I remember jumping up and down on my couch and screaming at the top of my lungs on that sunny July day and nearly scaring the shit out of my sister, who was down the apartment hall outside and ran to our door to see what happened.

In so many words, I was an Olympic junkie.

But something turned along the way. It may be that I'm getting old and I see the economics that come into play with events of this size and perhaps realize in what areas OUR money could be better spent to serve us. Or it could be that I don't believe in the 'Olympic spirit' anymore, where it's all become about picking up sponsorship dollars and less emphasis is put on sport. It may be that I'm cynical that everyone is doping, while less and less are getting caught, as the designer drugs stay ahead of the designer detectors. Or maybe it's the fact that I'm not even sure the world's best athletes are competing, since to be able to make the games, you have to live a fairly privileged life and come from a privileged background (ski passes aren't cheap). So so many can't afford to train all their lives. And the winter games are even worse, because pretty much each event requires buying equipment and having access to expensive facilities, something which many unfortunately don't have. Who knows, the world's best speedskater may be living in Paraguay?

So while I will cheer like mad during the hockey tournament, and probably throughout the rest of the games because I am a gigantic sports fan, the Olympics clearly has lost its innocence, at least to me.

But am I against the Olympic Games and was I ready to protest a torch relay?

The people protesting made some great points about how the money being spent putting on the Olympics would be better spent on social institutions or on building houses. The protesters rallied against the police taking homeless from downtown Vancouver and trying to quick-fix clean-up the downtown East Side. They also said the security budget for the games was approaching $1 billion, and would leave a legacy of Closed-Circuit TV cameras to keep an eye on the city's residents.

And they played the tuba and yelled catchy chants and beat drums and it was all very funky and I would start to shuffle my feet and nod my head and it kind of felt like a party. And when the music stopped, everyone put their black noisemaker thingees in the air and it sounded like a bunch of geese honking at the same frequency. I moved closer and closer and wanted to join in. I was moving in. I was starting to see the Olympics for all it is...

But then the protesters started in on their sexy issue and I backed off.

"No Olympics on Stolen Native Land!"

Obviously, I'm against this as well. Highways and infrastructure are going up on land that Canada hasn't settled with First Nations in B.C. and that's definitely wrong. But call me crazy, I really felt there was something very hypocritical going on at that rally tonight, with a bunch of white people chanting their displeasure about the Olympics happening on "stolen native land". I mean, when you look at it, wasn't the protest happening on stolen native land? Who were these people to complain about something happening on stolen native land? Isn't the school they study at built on stolen native land, along with their houses and the houses of their parents and grandparents, if you really look at it?

And where were all these people championing this cause before the Olympics were given to Vancouver? I suppose it's great that this issue is getting publicity now, but to me, this protest seemed like something people were doing because it was popular. I wondered how many would still speak up about this after the games were over.

So I backed off. A lady came by and handed me a pamphlet and when I pointed out the contradiction, she brought up the unsettled land argument and said it was literally getting stolen. I couldn't help but think about the land claims North of 60 and seeing how, often times, the government does not hold up their end of the agreement, which sort of makes me wonder what settling the claim even really means.

The chanting kept on and kept on and some girls gave me a sticker with a smile and the police moved in to try to move the protesters who held their ground and kept chanting "No Olympics on Stolen Native Land" and eventually I just couldn't get over the hypocrisy and so I left, and walking away, past the Coca-Cola and RBC tents, I saw a bunch of kids with their parents, bundled up, hoping to see the Olympic torch, which still represented pride and hard-work and excellence, not the greed, corruption and consumerism it does for us. And the kids could barely see over the hoopla down in front of the stage.

Not that it really bothered me, either. But at the end of the day, I found I wanted to protest the games, but not because it was something sexy to do.

So I walked away from it all.