Reflecting on Vancouver’s Olympic Heart Attack
Photo by Keltie Larter.
A woman dressed head to toe in black with a handkerchief covering the lower half of her face lets me quote her, but she won’t give me her name.
It was early Saturday morning, Feb. 13, and I had just arrived in Vancouver’s Thornton Park for the Heart Attack anti-Olympic rally organized by the Olympic Resistance Network (ORN).
“I’m here today because I’m angry that our government has spent billions of taxpayer dollars to host the Olympics when an increasing number of British Columbians are in need of social programming, drug treatment, housing, and adequate health care, and we’re repeatedly told those needs are not being met because of a lack of funds,” she says. “If there’s a lack of funds to support these people, then our government has no right to spend billions of dollars on a three-week sporting event which will truthfully only serve to further line the already unbelievably deep pockets of big business.”
The woman in black was the eighth person I had talked to, the first seven having either told me they weren’t willing to speak to the media, or just ignoring me.
I had been a part of many protests and rallies over the years, some more peaceful than others, but this was my first time attending a protest as part of the press, and I was surprised and disappointed to note a distinct feeling of hostility in the early-morning air toward members of the media.
Discovering dissent
I had learned about the march from ORN’s Facebook group. The billing for the march said its aim was to “clog the arteries of capitalism and disturb business as usual on the first day of the games” and that this march would “respect diversity of tactics.”
But what did they mean by diversity of tactics?
The group’s website lays it all out—“Diversity of tactics means support for each others’ chosen method of resistance while not threatening the lives of those around us. It is a way by which we hope to create space for the realization of tension, uncertainty, action, humour, and beauty as we strive for new ways to engage with each other and against a common enemy. While we may practice one tactic or action, we do not choose yours. As participants we agree to leave the policing of tactics to our oppressors, not our comrades; we will not attack each other for using methods that are not our own. Through a diversity of tactics we are stronger and more cohesive towards our goal of giving Capitalism a massive coronary.”
I figured what that really meant was that shit was going to get broken, and people were going to be arrested. I wondered if I should have borrowed my roommate’s gas mask.
As I walked around the growing crowd of black-clad, face-masked attendees, volunteer medics and legal observers handed out information about what to do if you got tear gassed, beaten up, or arrested by the police. Meanwhile, organizers handed out maps of the planned route the march would take, including alternative routes should the police attempt to disburse the crowd.
At about 9:30 am, a handful of bike cops looked on as protestors—led by a group of people holding a black banner displaying the name of the Anti-Poverty Committee in big, red letters—began circling the park, practicing changing direction using flag signals. It looked like a small, untrained army preparing to march into battle.
A feeling of determination, apprehension, excitement, and, yes, violence permeated the air.
Your democracy or mine?
Just before 10 am, somewhere between 200–300 people finally headed out onto the street carrying signs, chanting anti-capitalist and pro-democracy slogans, and beating on homemade drums.
As I ran down the street in front of the crowd, I turned around to try to get a good shot of the oncoming march; one of the protestors flipped me the bird and told me to fuck off.
“The media are nothing but a bunch of corporate sellouts!” he yelled.
This, from the same guy who a few minutes before had been chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!” with his fist raised in the air. I wondered if he realized that democracy also looks like freedom of the press; I wondered if he realized that, in fact, democracy couldn’t exist without freedom of the press.
I also wondered why he and other protestors who had been giving me the cold shoulder that morning were intent on making such a public display of their protest if they were opposed to media attention, or how they expected to raise public awareness of the issues surrounding the games without the media.
As the march proceeded downtown there was a substantial increase in police presence. Surprisingly, as the crowd’s energy became increasingly uncontrolled, the hundred or so bike cops mostly kept to the sidelines, righting tipped over dumpsters and newspaper boxes after the march had passed, and at one point surrounding a police car parked in the street for fear of protestor damage.
As I continued to take photographs, I found that my hands had started to shake in response to the rush of adrenaline that flooded my system as the crowd became more unruly.
I watched as a couple of protestors violently shoved a cameraman from one of the larger media outlets, telling him to keep his video camera out of their faces.
Later, I would watch as a riot cop screamed in the same cameraman’s face as he documented the arrest of a protestor.
I saw a pro-Olympic bystander trying to keep a protestor from dragging a newspaper box into the street, shoving her out of the way.
I knew that it was only a matter of minutes before violence broke out. I didn’t know if it would come from the cops or the protestors, or both, but I could feel it in the air.
A few minutes later, as I was calling a friend to update them on the situation, a newspaper box went sailing past my head, crashing into the window of the building behind me. The box came so close to hitting me that I felt the wind blow by the side of my face. I hastily ended my phone call.
The shit had just hit the fan.
Taking a stand
At this point I expected the bike cops surrounding the march to start arresting people. I had also expected the riot police to show up.
In my experience, given the slightest excuse to do so, cops usually react with extraneous amounts of aggression and violence in protest situations.
Although there was definitely an increase in police presence, they didn’t intervene, and the march continued on, dragging more boxes into the road, tagging signs and vehicles with anti-Olympic, anti-capitalist, and anti-establishment symbols, and smashing more windows along the way.
The riot police did eventually show up. There were about a hundred of them, some armed with bulletproof vests and what looked like big, black machine guns.
Someone yelled, “The squad, coming from behind,” and several protestors pulled a long metal ladder from an alleyway and held it up, horizontally, as the riot police marched towards them.
I asked several of the riot police what kind of guns they were carrying and what kind of ammunition they were loaded with, but none of them would answer my questions.
A protestor standing nearby suggested it was probably a combination of the ingredients used to make rubber bullets, as well as rock salt. The addition of rock salt, he said, was so that it would hurt more when you were shot.
As I was standing on a street corner taking pictures of police officers arresting a female protestor wearing a pink wig and a white jumpsuit, several riot police attempted to order me to back away from the scene, raising their batons as if they were going to simply push me out of the way if I refused to do so.
I stood my ground, explaining to them that I had the right to stand on a public sidewalk and that they didn’t have the right to force me to move.
Several protestors who were standing beside me backed me up and the cops eventually backed away.
A police videographer took their place, sweeping his camera the length of our bodies, making sure to linger on our faces. It made me wish I was wearing a face mask too.
What are these people protesting, anyway?
At one point during the final standoff, I saw a protestor who had refused to move out of the street being roughly pushed over by police officers, after which he remained on the ground, sitting quietly with his legs crossed under him. I later saw that same protestor being handcuffed and—none too gently—lifted into the back of a paddy wagon.
After the cops had arrested a few people, most of the crowd disbursed. As I was walking away from the scene I came across a group of protestors hurriedly taking off their black garb and face masks.
I asked them why they were getting changed and they told me they were afraid of being arrested on their way home while they were in smaller groups.
There was talk of reconvening at another protest later that afternoon, but I had had enough excitement for one day, so I decided to head back to the ferry home.
As I walked back past some of the places where damage had been done, I heard people on their way to go check out the Olympics express shock and disapproval of the protestor’s actions, and confusion as to why they were protesting in the first place.
It wasn’t the first time I had heard people say they didn’t understand what everyone was protesting about and that the protestors should make their message clearer if they wanted to be heard.
It’s no surprise that so many were confused as to why people were protesting the games. For one, many protestors had different reasons why they were opposed to the Olympics. Some disagreed with the amount of money spent by the province to host the games, some were opposed to the sponsorship of the games by corporations they say have committed crimes against the planet, others wanted to shed light on the fact that the Olympics were being held on unceeded native land, and thereby proclaim their disapproval of colonialism.
But these reasons were not adequately portrayed by the mainstream media, who pay outrageous amounts of money to have the right to cover the Olympics in the first place and who, let’s be honest, don’t want to piss of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in case they decide not to grant them that coverage next time.
Everyone’s a spinner, baby
When I later watched media coverage of the Heart Attack march I was surprised and disappointed to hear spokespeople for those who attended claim that all of the people who were arrested were peaceful protestors.
I personally saw two of the people who were arrested vandalize buildings and vehicles along the way. I did, however, also see two other people get arrested who were simply standing their ground on public property as police told them to move.
But whether the people who were arrested caused damage or not, it stands to reason that if you choose to take part in a protest that’s advertised as one which would “respect diversity of tactics” and then march down the street as part of small army of protestors dressed head to feet in black with their faces covered, smashing windows and tipping over garbage dumpsters, someone is going to get arrested. And it might just be you.
Griping about who did what afterward damages a movement’s credibility.
I was also disappointed, if not surprised, to hear a spokesperson for the Vancouver police label protestors as “criminal elements” who were “intent on committing violent acts including damage to property, including assaulting passersby.”
That’s not a fair or realistic assessment of the situation. Later on, in the same press conference, the police spokesperson admitted that no police officers or passersby were injured during the march.
Despite my disappointment, I’m glad there are those within our communities who are willing to actively stand up for what they believe in, risking personal injury and arrest to do so. They are an important part of any healthy democracy.
The late revolutionary and author Abbie Hoffman once said that you can measure a democracy by how it treats its dissidents. Then again, he also said that the first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
On the ferry back home, I ran into an old friend and we got to talking about the Olympic protests, and whether the Heart Attack march had been effective in delivering their anti-Olympic, anti-establishment, anti-colonialism message and educating the public about the dark side of the IOC.
She suggested that a more effective way of garnering positive public support and delivering a clear message about the issues surrounding poverty and homelessness would have been to gather a thousand people together with their sleeping bags to spend a night sleeping on Robson Street.
I can’t help but think that maybe she was right.
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