2010 Winter Olympics | Whistler's time is now

WHISTLER, B.C. — Two years from now, the caldron will burn bright over Whistler Village. But for fans of winter sports, the wait to feel the heat of the 2010 Winter Olympics is officially over.

Since Vancouver and its head-in-the clouds partner, Whistler, landed the Games five years ago, British Columbia's first Olympics has been conceptual: site plans, budgets, dump trucks and — this is Canada, after all — obligatory paint-bomb protests from advocates of more and better low-income housing.

This weekend, it got real.

Real in the way you can only understand by feeling the jet wash, in person, from an elite downhill racer like America's Lindsey Vonn, streaking into the Creekside finish at 90 mph Friday to clinch the World Cup downhill title — the first for an American woman since Picabo Street.

Real in an oh-gosh, the-whole-world-really-is-watching kind of way.

The weekend's Whistler World Cup races, which wrap up today with a women's super combined, are a landmark event. They're the first at Whistler since 1995, when international ski officials, tired of fog and rain and/or too much wet snow, finally gave up on early-season races here. And they're the first Olympic test event to draw the world's media, most notably those alpine-snob Europeans, to B.C.'s extremely high-priced, unusually low-elevation mountain village.

Passing grade? So far, oh yeah.

Whistler's persistent threat — coastal, clammy weather, which wiped out an earlier freestyle ski test event at nearby Cypress Mountain earlier this month — never materialized. Race-course timing gear worked. Buses ran on time. All this on a holiday ski weekend expected to draw 250,000 visitors.

More important: Nobody — not even the Austrians — had bad things to say about the race courses, which were deemed appropriately steep, curvy and fast, despite relatively balmy weather.

Americans were borderline gushing.

"It's going to be sweet," ski racer Steve Nyman of Utah said of the Olympic downhill and super-G courses. "It's going to be a rad hill."

Add this endorsement, from Torino gold medalist Ted Ligety — the unofficial long-haired arbiter of cool on the U.S. ski team, now that Bode Miller has packed up his goggles and moved on to ski for the People's Republic of Himself:

"It's a pretty hip town."

Even more so, for certain, with the whiff of Olympism oozing out of its very pores.

Lightposts in Whistler Village are dressed up with banners bearing the Olympic rings — a flag legally flown by just 18 other cities on the planet.

Construction continues at the Olympic Village, built on the site of the former city garbage dump, which was long ago capped but sometimes still belches methane gas odiferous enough to melt the paint off one of those newfangled B.C. Olympic license plates.

They say they'll capture the gas and use it to heat the place. And anyone who gets a whiff of it will agree that they'd darn well better.

Cross-country skiers schuss out along groomed, publicly accessible trails in the picturesque Callaghan Valley — a venue carved with great precision from a first- and second-growth forest previously disturbed only by the hum of snowmobiles.

Snow cats hanging from winches groom the scary-steep landing hill of nearby ski jumps, which gleam in the sun next to a large stone statue of an inukshuk, that Andy Rooney-shaped Games logo. And in a gully between the Whistler and Blackcomb ski areas, work crews and sled drivers quietly, privately test the new bobsled/luge/skeleton course, reputed to be among the most challenging in the world.

Major tests of those venues will come next winter. For the alpine venues — the men's and women's downhill, super-G, slaloms and combined events will take place at Whistler — show time is already here.

By getting venues on track early, Vancouver Games organizers sought to avoid the last-minute surprises that can spoil an Olympics. They also sought to give a decided home-field advantage to their own athletes, avoiding a repeat of a national embarrassment when Canada captured nary a gold at Calgary in 1988 or Montreal in 1976.

Downtown Vancouver's new or modified venues for hockey, curling, skating and speedskating — part of a $1.6 billion (U.S.) overall Games budget — are all finished, or about to come online. And Whistler is similarly on schedule to greet the world.

But that's an entirely different prospect here, in a valley town home to just about 10,000 permanent residents, than in Vancouver, the largest metropolitan area ever to host a Winter Games.

That's why Whistler — which was created as a resort village as part of an unsuccessful bid for the 1968 Games — ironically was one of the last partners to come on board for Vancouver's successful 2010 bid, says legendary Canadian downhiller Steve Podborski, a longtime Whistler resident.

"Whistler as a community ... was really worried that the Olympics would wreck the place," said Podborski, a member of the Games' Organizing Committee. "We're a little town. It'd be easy to get steamrolled. What we wanted to do was make sure that the Games were sustainable, to have it be reasonable."

Result: Ski jumping, which could attract 250,000 fans in Norway, will unfold before 5,000 here. The men's downhill, which routinely draws 50,000-plus at Kitzbuhel, Austria, will be witnessed by maybe 6,000 here.

Two years from now, when the flame is snuffed, Whistler won't be wrecked — it'll be a better place with an ongoing Olympic legacy, thanks to a $110 million endowment from the federal government to keep the world's elite athletes competing at Whistler venues well into the future, Podborski says.

"It shows you that a town of 10,000 can embrace an Olympics," he said. "It doesn't have to be something that's imposed upon you."

Whether that sentiment will be shared by ordinary Whistlerites — if there is such an animal — remains to be seen. But the scope and reach of the first Olympics ever to come this near Seattle clearly transcends international borders.

At a news conference here on the eve of the ski races, Bellevue's Libby Ludlow, a 10-year veteran of the U.S. squad, sat alone at a table while a half-dozen reporters interviewed team superstars Lindsey Vonn and Julia Mancuso at the next table.

Asked about her season, she winced, describing results clearly below her own standards. She has good reason for slowing down, and most of them involve knee surgeries. In her latest one, a microfracture procedure, surgeons bored 30 tiny holes into the end of her right femur.

The idea is to make the bone bleed, spurring a natural covering to replace cartilage long ago worn away. The recovery time is usually two years. Ludlow was back on skis within months.

It only hurts, she says, when she skis, which happens to be what she does for a living. Doctors advised taking a year off. By competing this season, she puts at risk her international ranking, which determines whether she'll still be funded by U.S. Skiing.

Why push it?

"To be honest, 90 percent of the reason I came back was to ski this race, to ski the Olympic course," she said. After a season filled with pain and doubt, she will take home a 44th-place finish from Friday's downhill. And no regrets.

These Olympics are a dream worth the doubt, the fear, the pain and the occasional tears, she insists. Even if that means an artificial knee somewhere far down the road.

That's the pull of the Games.

And it is why the people of Whistler will soon realize that the magical moment the Olympics got real here won't arrive when the torch is run up the Sea to Sky Highway in 24 months.

In the hearts and minds of athletes from Sestriere to Squamish, it's already here.

Ron Judd: 206-464-8280 or at rjudd@seattletimes.com