Iced Out, with Katie Baker: Hockey Meat, the Disaster of Whistler Blackcomb and Next Year in...

Iced Out, with Katie Baker: Hockey Meat, the Disaster of Whistler Blackcomb and Next Year in Vancouver

by Katie Baker

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!

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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.

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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.