Vancouver’s Olympic and Paralympic experience wrapped up months ago, but John Furlong’s work steering the ship isn’t over quite yet. The head of the Vancouver Organizing Committee dropped by The Vancouver Sun office Friday as he begins a nationwide tour to promote a new commemorative book, With Glowing Hearts, to capture the stories of the people, places and patriotic spirit of the 2010 Winter Games.

“We think the book works as a great piece of history,” Furlong said at a meeting with the newspaper’s editorial team. “It’s a happy book, full of optimism,” he said. The colourful tome, published by Wiley Canada, weighs about three kilograms and contains 400 pages of behind-the-scenes photos, facts and quotes from athletes, volunteers and street-party enthusiasts.

Among the memories is a special page dedicated to Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, who died in a horrifying crash during a practice run just hours before the opening of the Games. It also contains a feature pictorial collection of Games artifacts, from the good-luck charm Hayley Wickenheiser’s son gave her, to the iconic red mittens, and a complete listing of medallists and participant names, from Olympic and Paralympic athletes to the 25,000 volunteers.

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Win an Olympic gold medal as an American, an Australian, an European or an Asian and there’s a very good chance you’ll be set for life financially. Yet, it’s only a handful of highly decorated and visible Canadian amateur athletes who will be able to cash on their Olympic successes. But the latest group of medallists from the 2010 Vancouver Olympics say that while it still takes a lot of knocking, there are more opportunities now than ever before.

“I don’t know if it’s our tax structure corporately or the way we view amateur sport but if you compare it to the U.S. or a country like Australia, you look at some of those athletes and a gold medal pretty well guarantees a million dollars,” says four-time Olympic hockey player Hayley Wickenheiser, who helped land one of the record 14 gold medals at Vancouver.

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 The Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games left a positive legacy not only in sports venues and sustainable buildings but also in a new sense of national pride, sport development and international awareness, according to a report released by the Vancouver Organizing Committee.

The report, prepared by journalist Kate Zimmerman, was commissioned by the organizing committee as the last in a four-part review of the legacies of Winter Olympic Games held in North America since 1980. She had earlier looked at the legacies of the 1980 Lake Placid, 1988 Calgary and 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games.

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Kevin deBruyckere helped lead the 2010 Vancouver Olympics’ Integrated Security Unit, one of the biggest domestic security operations in Canadian history. In Toronto to speak at a disaster management conference, deBruyckere sat down with the Star to discuss some lessons learned that could be applied to the upcoming G20 summit.Responses have been edited and condensed for space reasons.

Q: From a security standpoint, how similar are the Vancouver Olympics and the G20 summit?  A: “It’s a bit like comparing apples and oranges. In Vancouver, we planned to provide security for a sporting event, securing a venue to see 60,000 people enter./

In a safe environment. Whereas, the G8-G20 are totally different. You’re securing an environment to keep people out in order to protect the leaders. . . . It’s a much different environment here. You’ll have world leaders who are subject to overt threats on a daily basis.”

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In my family, we joke that we eat our steaks so rare, with good medical care they would be up and mooing again. The first thing I ask people when I find out they're "from here," is "which high school did you go to?" If I had a horse that tripped in holes.

I would have no problem shooting gophers stone cold dead. I can tell you where I was the night the flame went out in '88, and I like my tickets infield. In short, I am Calgarian . . . which is why I feel disloyal and dismayed to say that I absolutely, positively love Vancouver.

It surprises me not one bit that it scored number 4 on the worldwide list of the best cities to live in. I've been there many times before, but for some reason this time it struck me differently. If you have a child who plays spring hockey, you may have just spent some time in this exquisite city that each year hosts thousands of smelly, brutish teenagers in what is one of Western Canada's largest minor hockey tournaments.

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Commuters who took public transit to get around Metro Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics have stayed with it for their post-Games commutes, according to newly released Trans-Link ridership numbers. In March, transit ridership was up by 19.3 per cent over the same month in 2009, a number TransLink spokesman Drew Snider said was not inflated by this past March's Paralympic Games visitors.

"We didn't have the same service level during the Paralympics that we did during the Olympics because the demand wasn't there," he said. "Even taking the Paralympics into account, we're still seeing a significant amount of what I would call 'hit and stick,' where people took [transit] and then they stayed.

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Commuters forced to take transit during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics may be sticking with their SeaBus, SkyTrain or bus now that the Games are over, according to quarterly statistics from TransLink. Revenue ridership -- the number of people that paid to take a TransLink service -- was up a surprising 19.3 per cent in March over the same month in 2009.

The figure doesn't compare to the staggering 50.7-per-cent hike in revenue passengers during the Games in February of 2010, compared to February 2009. But March's total wasn't just inflated by ridership on the new Canada Line, because the ridership in January 2010 was only up 3.1 per cent over January of 2009.

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Many host authorities justify the spiralling cost of staging a Games by pointing to legacy benefits including increased sporting activity, national pride and economic prosperity such as better housing and improved employment skills. The organisers of London's 2012 Olympics used these arguments to justify its 9.3 billion pound budget.

But a review of 54 studies written between 1978 and 2008 found "there is insufficient evidence to show that major multi-sport events like the Olympics benefit or harm the health and economy of the host population."

The researchers, who published their findings in the British Medical Journal, went on to say that future events could not be expected to automatically provide benefits.

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The Fan-to-Fan Marketplace, advertised by Vancouver 2010 as the safest and most secure way to buy and sell tickets to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games, was reportedly hit by a stolen Visa card scam "involving the ticket purchase side of the transaction" said Renee Smith-Valade, vice-president of communications. She said Monday that VANOC "undertook extra diligence to ensure accuracy due to the circumstances" and delayed payments, reports the Toronto Sun.

She added, "our goal is to send these payments to our cheques issuing company this week, who will prepare the payment and send them out as soon as possible". Smith-Valade said Vancouver Police were involved. The Toronto Sun reports Deputy Chief Steve Sweeney told the police board on March 17 that four Latvians were busted for using stolen credit cards to buy tickets.

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A pavilion showcasing Vancouver's development after Expo 86 opened at Shanghai's Expo 2010 on Sunday, with Premier Gordon Campbell and Treasury Board president Stockwell Day presiding. The three-storey wood and glass Vancouver pavilion is built of green materials, reflecting the city's commitment to sustainability.

It "showcases the development of the city of Vancouver following Expo 86 and the value of B.C. wood as a construction material," Campbell said. China is one of Canada's top lumber export markets. Wood product exports totalled $385 million in 2009, up from $32 million in 2001, according to a government news release.

The Canadian government spent $2.5 million on construction of the pavilion, funded through the $170-million Economic Action Plan investment in market development and innovation.

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