Vancouver loses, who cares about hockey?

Last night was depressing, not because the Canucks lost, but because Vancouver lost. As Peter Mansbridge posted on Twitter.

Vancouver taking a beating on US morning tv and much overseas tv coverage. All that good from post-Olympics vanishing fast.

There 1,000+ pictures on flickr and I’m sure as many people that will be trying to deconstruct why rioting happened in the first place; I’ll offer a few observation too.

-During the series when people left downtown after watching the game, they left a huge mess behind which tells me that some people have very little respect for public space.

-While the vast majority of people left downtown after the game, peacefully, about 1000 or 0.6% of the 1500,000 that came to watch the game downtown caused problems.

-Looking at many of the pictures online, it seems like this 0.6% came downtown to cause problems no matter what as many didn’t even have Canucks jerseys and came prepared with tools to wreak havoc.

-The majority of the 0.6% were young, drunk males.

-I know that it’s always easy to blame the media, but I have the wonder if all this talk about a potential game seven riot caused a self-fulfilling prophecy. Last night, I had to take the SkyTrain back from downtown Vancouver (where I work) around 10pm to Surrey. Normally there are few losers on the SkyTrian at night, but last night every loser from Metro Vancouver was coming back from rioting downtown. Many were talking about how they were hoping for the riot that the media speculated about to be “part of history.” And before people go blame the “Surrey Crowd”, I can tell you that these losers got off at all stations and stops from Downtown Vancouver to Downtown Langley.

Before the riot last night, people had rediscovered downtown Vancouver as the cultural core of our region. I had lunch along Granville Street before heading into work yesterday. It was a very positive atmosphere and a real sense of community. The worst thing we could do as a region is go back to “No-fun City”, but trust has been broken and I fear that 1,000 people have not only damaged property, but the psyche of the region which will take years to heal.