Iced Out, with Katie Baker: Hockey Meat, the Disaster of Whistler Blackcomb and Next Year in Vancouver
Why is nobody excited for the Olympics? The Winter Games are less than three months away, but I haven't heard a single elevator wisecrack about curling yet. This worries me. I suspect that many Americans are still reeling from the spectacle of watching over 15,000 Chinese nationals bang drums in perfect sync during the 2008 Opening Ceremonies in Beijing. As threatening geo-military shows of force go, that was far more terrifying than anything Kim Jong-Il has ever done. Each of those drums will be an American head if you don't fix the dollar stat is what these stone-faced proletariats were saying to me that night. Also: we will see your beauty industry and its devastating effects on the female psyche and raise you an innocent seven-year-old girl with mangled teeth.
I can deal with being emasculated by China though. It's like losing a bar fight to a bouncer named Tiny: everyone appreciates the effort and is seriously just relieved you didn't end up dead. But there are no real tough guys at the Winter Olympics, only a bunch of slippery Bradley Cooper lookalikes with names like Lljljlars Krkkynyk who are going to charm your girlfriend with their naturally rosy complexions and then ride her like a goddamn NordicTrack. These guys play ice hockey like the happy little munchkins on a frozen lake that they once were: they glide, they soar, they "use every inch of the ice." They are graceful and fleet of foot. They are really good. They are pussies.
And so the rallying cry of Team USA seems to be: if you can't join them, beat the shit out of them. Brian Burke, the U.S. men's ice hockey team team's general manager (who sounds like a butcher in his spare time), has a vision. "There will be some beef on this team; there will be some muscle," he said back in August. "We'll need some big-body guys, and guys who can win face-offs, block shots—and some bangers. We'll need some beef on the hook among those bottom six forwards."
I know. Hockey people talk really weird. But with apologies to Jonathan Safran Foer, Operation American Beef might be our mediocre team's only real chance at success. There's even something of a method to the meatness, because for the first time in, I think, ever, the games will be played on a smaller NHL-sized rink rather than the roomier "international" ice that those slippery Finns know how to use every inch of. Which means: $10 million in capital cost savings, 500ish additional seats, 13.5 fewer feet of ice width-wise and thus, according to the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences, "significantly more collisions of all types in all categories and subdivisions within categories." (The subdivisions are there to differentiate between poundings "involving the head directly or indirectly.")
In other words, per square inch of ice surface, there will be that much more glass-boarded perimeter against which Brian Burke's Big Body Bangers can subdivide the skull of Lars from Ljungby. U! S! A!
***
The rationale for the smaller rink is nothing more than that it was already there, home to the Vancouver Canuckleheads (a dis I learned in 1994 as a young Rangers fan that comes second only to "Toronto MakeBeliefs" in the annals of searing nicknames for struggling Canadian franchises). But the rink will still be getting a makeover, if only nominally: IOC rules prohibit the corporate branding of Olympic venues, and so the General Motors Place—aka The Garage—will be temporarily and blandly rechristened as the "Canada Hockey Place", as in: "…and we'll see you back here at the Canada Hockey Place right after a few words from Coca-Cola! The official soft drink of Vancouver 2010! And Visa! Proud partner of the Olympic Games! Visa: it's everywhere you want to be!"
According to the most important primary source documentation of our time, Internet Comment Sections, the locals were none too pleased to hear of the change. "Banning a Corporate name?" wrote one Dr. Andrei Smyslov on the CBC's website. "How ridiculous given the Olympics are only about Corporate advertising. Who are they trying to fool?" Word. Even amateur linguists (word!) took offense. "Canada Hockey Place sounds like an English translation from another language that didn't quite make the jump into the lexicon pool," Steve778 lamented. I LOL'd.
There is dark comedy to be found in the fact that a sad clunker of a company like General Motors, now majority-owned by the US Treasury and the Canadian government, is considered too corporate for the Olympics, while another Winter Games venue is snared in the web of a real estate development holding company that is in turn clutched in the talons of a giant private equity fund—and it gets off scot-free.
I am referring to Whistler-Blackcomb, the massive ski and par-tay destination that boasts over 200 trails and 8,000 skiable acres and—far more relevant to the bottom line—6,540 seats across 17 restaurants that will gladly welcome both the Olympic crowds and the free marketing provided by the warm fireside stylings of Bob Costas over sweeping blimp footage onnnn NBC!
You can protest all you want that Whistler is the name of the TOWN! or Blackcomb is the name of the PEAK! and I will look at you calmly and not hear a thing—it's a skill I developed as a bruised and battered country club staffer—because I know in my heart that you are wrong. Whistler-Blackcomb is the name of the brand, a brand that has been developed and managed and focus-grouped to within an inch of its life by Intrawest, the same evil emperor that finds it appropriate to charge unsuspecting n00bs EIGHTY DOLLARS for the privilege of spending one lone day on the icy, shitty, chokingly crowded slopes of another of its brands: Stratton, in Vermont. That place is the worst.
(Picture via.)
Intrawest fancies itself the "Leader in Experiential Destination Resorts", and if you initially misread that as "Experimental" the way I did it's okay because we weren't really wrong. According to a 1999 Forbes article tellingly titled "The Disney of Skiing," Intrawest prefers its properties "meticulously planned, from the serpentine path of the village (it gives a greater sense of discovery than a straight path) to the 20-foot distance between wastebaskets (studies show people will carry an empty wrapper 25 feet before dropping it on the ground)."
I think zero of those studies took place in New York.
***
The story of Intrawest since that Forbes piece was written ten years ago is really just the story of the end of the world as we know it.
The stock, range-bound around its IPO price of roughly $17 for most of the early Naughties, began to take off along with the market in 2005. By 2006, large shareholder Pirate Capital was agitating for Intrawest to put itself up for sale (aw, remember the heady days of activist hedge funds?) because "public markets could not adequately value Intrawest's landholdings, or fully appreciate its complex joint ventures." Stupid public markets! And lo, in swooped Fortress Investment Group LLC with an offer to envelop Intrawest into its dark velvet private cloaks for a cool $2.8 billion, or $35 per share, a 32% premium over the stock's then-current price. Fortress no doubt baked in that hefty extra not because it expected a small explosion in the number of gapers shredding gnar but moreso because it expected a huge explosion in the value of Intrawest's portfolio of… all together now… real estate.
And then, and then, and then and thennnnn…. Fortress Investment Group LLC itself went public in February 2007. But if you were the poor sap who thought it would be a good idea to snag some Fortress in its hot $31 IPO, well then you, pal, have lost 87% of your cash money The stock now trades around $4.
It was trading at $1 last fall, which was when Fortress had a leeeetle beeet of deeeeficulty refinancing the $1.7 billion of debt it had taken on to buy Intrawest. The deal was pushed through at literally the eleventh hour, an experience that you would think would result in a kinder-gentler private equity behemoth. But please, no one ever made any money abiding by The Golden Rule, and so right around that time Fortress callously halted funding to a Vancouver builder named Millenium that had fallen a skosh behind on its scheduled payments.
This 2007 Maclean's article about Millenium's big project (ominously marketed as "Vancouver's Last Waterfront Community") skips you down the same terrible repressed-memory lane that a 1999 ode to Pets.com would have in 2002.
$200 million of orders on the first day of sales! A smirking, Ray Bans-wearing, up-from-the-bootstraps bigwig! Trendy bells and whistles that buyers care about "not one bit!" And, with hindsight, the grim specter of impending DOOM.
Whatever, why should we care? Who wasn't getting financing pulled a year ago? Well, it's just funny cause this particular Millenium development wasn't just any old highrise project: this was the Olympic Village for the very same Games that Fortress hopes to squeeze dollars from. (Cue Al Michaels: "It's a beautiful day here at Whistler-Blackcomb mountain!") But long story short: cleverly crafted contracts included scary language like "completion guarantee" that basically meant that the city of Vancouver, and not Fortress, was ultimately on the hook; and longer story shorter: so sorry, taxpayers!
That this is complicated, and confusing, probably means the IOC is equally bewildered—which is why they don't force anyone to call the mountain Canada Ski Place.
Just last week, Intrawest announced that it was selling off its floundering property Copper Mountain, a place where a younger and much more adorable version of me first learned what it was like to fall in love with an older woman. (If you're out there, Ski Instructor Jenny, call me!) "If this had occurred in the not-too-distant past one might expect the eventual buyer to come from the hotel or real estate sector, but times have changed," understated the editorial board of the Summit (CO) Daily News following the sale. The buyer was the Web 2.0-sounding Powdr Corp, and I haven't yet decided whether I'm going to believe that the chill bro-wner is really just about the skiing, dude. (John Darnaby Cumming? He has climbed Mount Rainier 69 times.)
Anyway! One dude who really is just about the skiing is Lindsey Vonn. I have much to say about her sometime else but just know that you're going to see a lot of this lady in the coming months, which is cool by me because she is smoking hot and just about everything an American woman should be. Her sponsors include Under Armour, and Alka-Seltzer, and Red Bull, and Intrawest nemesis Vail Resorts. And, if you're lucky, YOU. Check her out at the majestic Whistler-Blackcomb resort this February! Onnnnnnnn NBC!
Katie Baker writes mostly about sports and weddings and so the Winter Olympics just kind of seemed like the next logical step.
first!
Wait, is this a thing now? NOOOO
yeah, this has really confused me on other sites. why is it a point of pride to be the "first" to comment on a blog post? doesn't it most likely mean you're just sitting around waiting for your only friend, the internet, to tell you something new? or maybe i'm missing something?
Whoosh, Katie. That was like holding the biathlon on the 90-metre hill.
That was awesome. More please.
You kinda lost me when you started using all those "numbers," but "…with names like Lljljlars Krkkynyk who are going to charm your girlfriend with their naturally rosy complexions and then ride her like a goddamn NordicTrack", among other things, is some grade-A shit, dude. Awesome.
I concur! I want to hear more from Katie "Hobey" Baker.
Wow!
As an ex-pat vancouverite, I have to clarify that actually Whistler and Blackcomb are both mountains (there are two peaks) AND the name of the brand. Whistler-Blackcomb so named because the town is kind of at the base of/in between both mountains. Minor pedantic detail!
Yes yes – sorry if that was not clear. You are of course correct.
Semi interesting side note: Intrawest's big first purchase when they were a baby company was Blackcomb Mountain; they ultimately merged with Whistler ten years later and now there is a hottt peak-to-peak gondola between the two that scares the shit out of me because they don't have the best gondola track record really!
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/worst_case_scenarios/4296470.html
totally – the whole place was always gave one the sense of being just slapped together without much thought to safety, or fun, just maximum profit. And that was before whistler (and also vancouver!) started really glitzing up.
I went to ski school on Blackcomb, as an uncoordinated 6-yr old girl, and spent the day crying because the instruction consisted of being screamed at and insulted by 20 year old australian men whenever you fell over. That same weekend (the weekend my family was going to enjoy skiing, if it killed us), my parents got stuck on a lift for 2 hours and then my baby sister got her hand smashed in a door at what was then the Delta Whistler Hotel and had to get stitches. We never became a family that skiied.
If you have to date a professional athlete, I would recommend a hockey player.
That is all.
Finally! And totally worth the brain freeze!
Making "The Naughties" happen… nice.
I WILL NOT REST.
DID SOME ONE SAY NAUGHTIES?
NAAAAADS. Also, that was AWESOME.
The only human who gets me interested in sports and weddings, even.
I love your stuff about weddings and hockey but I am not sure if I'm fully on board with your private equity coverage yet.
Just a minor quibble from someone who operates in the periphery of the private equity world. Intrawest wasn't bought by Fortress Investment Group, but by funds managed by affiliates of FIG. (See very carefully worded press release
http://media.integratir.com/idr/PressReleases/Strategic%20Review.pdf )
What's the difference you ask? Well, FIG is an investment manager. What it does is manage private pools of investor capital.
Let me give you an example. Say the Gawker writers looked in their couch cushions and came up with $1000 in change and gave it to me to manage (I'm like FIG in this example). I promise to take that money and start a fund called the "Media is Dying Fund". With the $1000, I'm going to short the hell out of any public media stock I can find.
At the same time, the Awl contributors find $1000 in change in pay phones and by stealing Salvation Army buckets. They give me the money if I promise to lend it to start-up blogs. I'll call this fund the "Throwing Good Money After Bad" fund. I give the $1000 to a new (but fabulous) website to finance its operations. In the loan agreement, I tell the website I will give them $250 a month for 4 months on the condition that each month they double their ad revenues.
Since I'm so great with managing other people's money, each fund has agreed to pay me 20 cents of each dollar I earn for them. So now I think I'm some hot shit money manager. I coin myself Tuna Surprise LLC and do a little IPO. The stock in TS LLC represent a share in my income stream (the 20 cents on the dollar) not the underlying assets. There's a correlation of course, but the TS LLC stock could be doing well because the Media fund is going gangbusters even if the Throwing Good Money fund is in the toilet.
So to complete my example, say my Media fund started doing badly. The broker makes a margin call. But I don't have any money! At the 11th hour, we work out a deal and I am not forced to liquidate the Media fund (at a loss) to make the margin call. At the same time, I am getting ready to give the blog-borrower the final $250 of the loan. But I find out the blog's ad revenue has fallen off because of all the traffic going to TMZ to read about Tiger Woods. You would think the near miss with the margin call would have made a kinder-gentler Tuna but you are wrong. As the manager, I can't screw the owners of the Throwing Good Money fund because I feel the Christmas spirit.
Anyway, I'm not sure how Fortress fits into your critique of the Olympics (besides a general dislike of private equity). Although I'm too lazy to read their 10K and confirm this for myself, their funds that bought the equity in Intrawest are probably different from the funds that financed the condo project. Each has a different set of owners (people who dug deep into their couch cushions to invest and eventually want their money back) and the argument feels a little non sequitur. I think the big issue here (as always) is how stupid Olympic hosting cities are to underwrite the Olympics.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&refer=exclusive&sid=adcuriBJeCYM
Also, there is a more general issue of whether leveraged buyouts are evil. Since this is a commie pinko rag I am just going to say yes.
I'm not of the opinion that leveraged buyouts are de facto evil!
Color me surprised.
This is very servicey…thank you!
I now know how to make a fucking steak AND a lot more about managing funds.
I admittedly played it fast and loose with the various Fortress tentacles (If memory serves, Intrawest is one of 10 holdings in their Fund V? Although now that I think about it maybe it is Fund IV? See? FAST AND LOOSE) but yes anyway, thank you for making the distinction.
From some things I read it sounds like the current city administration is blaming the former city administration for the completion guarantee clauses in the Millenium contracts. So props to Fortress for structuring the opportunity to remove themselves from that particular (meat)hook.
Oh it gets better. The hole bloody mess started because they were going partition off part of the development for social housing. A worthy goal, but since the project went tits up in Fall 08, each one of those units would have a value of ~$500 000. So either the city eats 134 of those at cost to the taxpayer, or we sell them, kiss any hope of false creek south being more than a plaything for the rich goodbye. And the taxpayer still gets screwed.
I didn't mean to offend. I think overall it was a great piece. I just love to defend my industry! Or half-heartedly defend it. It is just that sometimes people are quick to blame it all on the evil hedge funders and that has the effect of letting the other wrong doers off the hook. If Fortress refused to advance funds because the borrower busted their covenants – that's a good thing! The "lightening" of covenents in lending was one of the things that got us in this mess to begin with…
Ugh, I should just shut up and go back to my day job.
As someone who does these deals for a living, leveraged buyouts are not evil – most even create jobs! It's the half-assed, unintelligent, failed leveraged buyouts that bankrupt companies that are evil.
WHOA. Remember when we learned that about Tuna Surprise?
I KNOW.
I was almost going to try and offer some counter-advice here, but it all gets blown apart – thanks to the awesome City of Vancouver and its apparently insatiable appetite for debt. But man, you got fiduciary duties all over the place here in this weird synergistic relationship between these two entities, and I don't give a flip how much you try and contract them away. It smells. Hurt me. Please.
Thank you Katie: my interest in the Winter Olympics now goes beyond vicarious thrills of the sort I first found on a Commodore 64 playing EPYX's Winter Games.
Winter Games was the best. That, and Tapper.
Yowsah! I feel like I just stepped off a NordicTrack.
As a Vancouverite (and person working on a bunch of olympic related things), that was awesome. What a tangled web. BLOW THE FUCKING LID OFF IT!
Interesting side-fact! The gleaming kitchens in the luxury condos being turned into olympic housing are totally particle boarded over, as are the sleek hardwood floors (covered in cheap beige berber). Just as well, apparently the amount of fucking that goes on in those rooms towards the end of the games is bananas.
Nothing compared to how much we've been screwed by the hole process.
heh, "hole process"
I'll always remember Whistler because it's as close to Antarctica as I'll ever care to get. Top of Blackcomb, negative 25 F, and snow started down like nuclear fall-out, life 6 feet a day for the next three days. They closed the Gondola and there was no way down and then I ate my boyfriend's index finger before we hiked back up to the summit cafe. Also a peak to peak gondola? Frack, they are nuts.
This is about sports, right?
Not really. It's about a how small Cabal of developers are trying to Dubai, Vancouver and Whistler.
We've got a highway (the sea to sky) which has rock falls with monotonous regularity, we've got an unending round of concord pacific insipid high rises, clogging our streets. And it should be noted it just rained 30 out of 30 days here flooding the rivers and drowning several local municipalities.
But don't worry Yanks, we've got a nice L.A. style gang war going on with drivebys, child executions centered around a family of reprobates known as the Bacons ( leading to all sorts of Bacon's cooked or Bacon will kill you jokes).
Finally good luck meeting a real vancouverite. The city has decided en masse to leave for more hospitable climes, since we're all supposed to get out of the city anyways to make room for more important people.
I'm a newly-minted Canadian, former Yank. The story I liked about the Winter Olympics was how Vancouver passed an ordinance outlawing non-approved signs, even on private property, and allowing the police to remove said signs forthwith, whether located inside one's house or not. So a sign that says, "the Olympics are ruining Vancouver," could be removed, and without any due process.
Great stuff! Citizes paying taxes to support the Games so that their free speech rights can be abused. And don't forget the laser-sound weapon that the Vancouver police department just bought. They claim it's an effective loudspeaker for use with large crowds, though it's stated purpose is to create a loud noise directed with precision that will cause pain (and possibly long-term injury!).
Just more evidence that the Olympics are out of control. They need to be massively scaled back.
The Vancouver cops are obviously preparing for a possible Venom attack.
"…it's a skill I developed as a bruised and battered country club staffer"
I love your vida loca, Bakes.
Needs more bobsledders, who are constantly up to some kooky Eurotrash nonsense. Also! Only one of them is under 220 pounds.
To be fair, the MakeBeliefs (though they certainly suck at, you know, playing hockey) are by no means a struggling franchise. They're consistently the most valuable franchise in the league!
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2008/31/nhl08_NHL-Team-Valuations_Rank.html
True but just wait until the Canadian dollar tanks again.
Like clever New York, Vancouver, aka the "Best Place on Earth", plans to deal with its homeless by giving them one-way tickets out of town: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/article704374.ece
I live here, and the Olympics fucking suck. Voted "no" in the plebiscite. It's a party for rich people. Way too much money is being spent on it when it could be spent elsewhere, like helping our social net. Over 50% of the tickets go to corporate sponsors. I live and work downtown, so going to work I'm sure that I'm going to feel like a Palestinian going into Israel. However, for the first week, I'm on vacation, like most sensible moneyed Vancouverites!
There's going to be a royal shitshow of protests from the left, and major civil liberty oversteps (in the style of our WTO protests where the protestors were illegally pepper-sprayed by the RCMP: http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=M1ARTM0011768 ).
The homeless are being forced into shelters against their will in order to "clean-up" the streets. The police are actively ticketing those that aren't found in shelters at night. And people are being kicked out of their accomodations to make room for pricey Olympics rentals, despite assurances that they wouldn't be.
Oh god, these guys. They ruin every fun Olympic-related thread with their bad-timery. Note: A large amount of the residents of Vancouver are Olympic-level bitching champions.
Dude, they're coming. Just try and have a good time. Get drunk, go to some parties, meet some people from around the world, have sex with a figure skater and/or eastern european hockey player.
Also, the whole "force people into homeless shelters" might also have something to do with that woman who burnt to death on a busy street last year, when trying to warm herself with a candle after refusing to go to a homeless shelter on the coldest night of the year.
The Olympics are an easy target. It's always far more complicated, especially when dealing with Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
Love the "Palestinian going into Israel" comparison! Totally the same thing!
Go for the Scandinavian hockey players instead of the eastern Europeans – taller, with better (fake?) teeth.
So we're justified infringing on people's civil rights because they're poor and one died one time.
There’s going to be a royal shitshow of protests from the left, and major civil liberty oversteps
Ahahaha what little commercial drive fantasyland do you live in? (note for non-vancouverites, commercial drive is where the marxists, lesbians and italians hang out. It's also the local source for Mao-Che Magnets, but I digress)
The whole reason that the olympics came here is that we are so apathetic, stoned, self obsessed that we'd put up absolutely no fuss whatsoever. Indeed most people will burn a couple of blog posts but when it comes to actually doing something forget it. We're all going to hunker down in out Mountain Equipment Co-op sandels, drinking our Waves soy lattes, and be herded around like the canada geese we really are.
Snap! Totally true. Waves is so gross, though.
I take it you're Blenz man then?
Man. Copper Mountain, such weirdly quaint snowy ski vacation memories. It was like a totally different, fuzzier, animal from the rest of the surrounding resorts.
BUT, yes. I'm glad that all of these stories about the corrupt Olympics are coming out now so that we can have forgotten about them when the John Williams score starts getting pumped directly into our bloodstreams via NBC. It's not as if the CBC will be the usual retreat this time around, so it's pretty much Olympic Fever by brute force come 2010.
If my Torino experience is any guide, you should all head for the Russia House as soon as the torch is lit and not leave until the last YVR-SVO flight has departed. I don't remember much, but I think it was fun.
Fuck. I picked a hell of a day to be completely wrapped up in my deadline writing about Vancouver, Whistler and the Olympics for BlackBook.
Or maybe that timing was for the best.
I've been waiting for your input on this one, Hez!
especially because that pic of the sedins is so rosy and hilarious.
Fuck yeah: Stratton burn.
I saw a bumper sticker I liked when I was home in Vermont for Thanksgiving: "Don't Stratton Magic" (Magic Mountain, that is)
This was awesome!