Volunteers, spirit of generosity stood out at bleak Beijing Olympics

Editor’s note: In this season’s final Proudfoot Corner, on the story behind a Toronto Star story, we look back at a feel-good feature from the Beijing Olympics:

It’s sometimes easy to forget it happened in 2022, even for the very few of us who attended. The Beijing Olympics, for a lot of Canadians, were an afterthought. Contested about six months after the COVID-delayed Tokyo Summer Olympics in a time zone that’s not conducive to North American prime time, it’s possible they were diminished by Olympic fatigue, not to mention the absence of NHL players. Certainly they were overshadowed by unrest in the streets of Ottawa that happened around the same time.

They took place in a carefully constructed bubble that essentially kept the Olympics at arm’s length from the city that hosted them. Fourteen years earlier, when the Star sent a team to cover the Beijing Summer Games, my colleagues and I had been lucky enough to experience the city. We ate in the restaurants. We explored the narrow alleyways. We walked the Great Wall, and even slid from its heights on a kind of warm-weather bobsled.

But this time around, the Beijing experience was wholly different. We arrived and departed from a massive airport that was, but for the Games traffic, spookily shuttered. Our travels were limited to hotels and venues within the fenced-in and heavily guarded Olympic perimeter. The police guarding the hotel where the Star’s contingent stayed stored a sample of grim-looking riot gear near the entrance, a shield and a club, in case anybody got any ideas.

And the logistics, impeccable in 2008, were less than seamless. Venturing to the alpine events, not to mention the sliding centre where luge and bobsled were contested, was an epic trek. The good news was organizers touted the merits of a new connection between Beijing and its outlying mountains on a high-speed train. The bad news was that after disembarking at the rail station, the rest of the journey, still a hike, involved quality time on more than one slow-speed bus.

Don’t get it wrong, no one’s complaining. Covering the Olympics is a pleasure and a privilege. And sometimes it’s the travel snafus and small indignities that bring the best stories. And just like the saving grace of the Games is always the athletes, who never fail to remind us of the vast powers of the human spirit, a reporter’s saving grace is usually the volunteers.

The volunteers I’ll never forget manned the bleak parking lot where media heading to the mountains waited for the next bus. They were young and energetic, a man and a woman who were students at a nearby university and spoke English with confidence and curiosity. On my trip to write some stories about bobsledding, they offered candy and water.

They commiserated about the bracing wind and sub-zero cold. And when they realized a reporter from Canada would be spending the coming hour otherwise alone on a barren expanse of pavement, with no shelter in sight save a porta-potty, they roused a sleeping off-duty bus driver and implored him to open his bus as a respite.

If big-event sports has mostly morphed into a heartless machine with an insatiable appetite for money, the Olympics, when you’re on the ground, can still seem like a mom-and-pop shop staffed by caring folks who treat visitors with kindness and interest. Those volunteers made an hours-long trek seem a lot shorter.

And they made sure a sports writer made it to the sliding centre, where I did some reporting on a memorable angle. One of the toasts of the Beijing Games was Jamaica’s four-man bobsled team. Once immortalized in the movie “Cool Runnings,” based on the tropical foursome’s unlikely journey to the 1988 Calgary Olympics, Jamaica was making its first appearance in the four-man Olympic event in 20 years.

Chris Stokes, president of the Jamaica Bobsleigh Federation and a member of that groundbreaking Calgary team, told the Star that Jamaica only qualified for the Games thanks to the generosity of Canada’s bobsled team, which lent the Jamaicans the sled in which they competed at the Olympics. In this season of giving, in this ever-more cutthroat world, it remains a gesture of sportsmanship and goodwill worthy of praise.

On the Corner

Robert Martin of Wasaga Beach has been a supporter for more than 20 years and donates $50 in memory of Maple Leafs forward Billy Harris and Roy Gandy … Donations of $105 each came from Walter Snow of Toronto, Gordon Mackay of Collingwood and Barrie’s Worden Teasdale, a longtime supporter who gives in memory of Kathryn Teasdale … Oakville’s Walter Ruediger returns with $100 in memory of “our wonderful Pepper” … Scarborough is in the house with $80 from Susan and Warren Boswell, and $200 from Sean Koukal in memory of Harry Koukal … Mississauga’s Lorne Wallace returns with $25 in memory of John, Mary, Bob and Nora … Finally, to wrap up the season’s final round of donations, we have $105 from Maple and $100 from Toronto, from readers who chose to remain anonymous.

Once again, thanks to everyone for your generosity!

Proudfoot Corner is the sports department’s contribution to the Toronto Star Santa Claus Fund, which solicits donations from readers and provides Christmas packages for thousands of needy, deserving children. Donors to the Corner see their names appear in boldface in the Saturday sports section.

Dave Feschuk is a Toronto-based sports columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @dfeschuk