Afternoon Crowd Light At Community Torch Celebration

Sunday, February 26, 2006 02:41 PM

Ice sculpture on display outside CN Centre as part of today's event

Once again, the real events going on in Turin, Italy kept organizers of a the local 'Community Torch Celebration' scrambling to adjust their scheduled plan of events.

When Canada's Olympic Men's Hockey team failed to make it into this morning's gold medal game, members of the local Spirit of B.C. Committee changed the start time of this morning's event from 5am to a pancake breakfast opening at 7:30am.

Then, the highlight of the local events was to be a live broadcast of the passing of the Olympic flag to Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan around 2pm our time, but the Closing Ceremonies in Italy were ahead of schedule and that event happened shortly after 1pm. Local organizers were planning to show a taped hand-off at the preset time, instead.

There were very few people in the stands just before the broadcast was set to air.

Although members of the local speedskating club were getting set to show off their talent on-ice.

As promised, there were activities to keep the kids happy.

A 'torch' building booth was set up and the youngsters could have their faces painted.

The largest gathering was outside at the ice oval, where a number of people took part in their own 'olympic' activities.

For John Rogers, the local event was an opportunity to continue to hone his ice carving skills. Rogers already does chainsaw and fine carvings, but is just branching into ice. He began sculpting his frozen blocks at around eight this morning and two mishaps later (one sculpture broke, as did a blade), he had this masterpiece installed at the entrance to CN Centre about three hours later.

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