The 2010 Vancouver Olympics and Canada’s War in Afghanistan: The Intersection of Sporting Spectacle and the Politics of Precariousness

Abstract

As Canada prepared to host the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games, a sporting spectacle whose central ideological purpose historically has been the promotion of peace and international goodwill, its government continued its controversial war in Afghanistan where Canadian Armed Forces had been engaged since 2001 and whose presence there was increasingly becoming mired under allegations of complicity in the torture of Afghan detainees. Drawing on Judith Butler’s post-9/11 work on framing and the differential rendering of some (but not all) lives as both precarious and grievable, we critically examine what came to be the intersection of the 2010 Games and the government of Canada’s attempts to neutralize the detainee-transfer crisis that was set to engulf the country’s political and military leaders. Both the 2010 Winter Olympic Games and Canada’s Olympic Torch resolution would be politically manoeuvred to address this crisis as part of the government’s broader framing strategies associated with its enduring detainee crisis and war in Afghanistan.