Or so you would think:

Vancouver 2010: Where the main event is merchandising

The fact that I can’t remember a single Olympic mascot of the past speaks to the grand ambition of the Vancouver 2010 team, who have clearly consulted with a professional firm to a specific end: A kid-friendly, merchandise-begging, license-breeding, profit-generating set of adorable mascots.

No proletarian, pick-some-stupid-fourth-grader’s-idea-campaign here, no sir. The kids are going to want something to distract them while their parents watch Olympic curling, and those distractions are going to be an adorable bear-thing wearing a totem pole and blackface, a sasquatch bearing earmuffs and Uggs and an inukshuk tattoo on his bicep, and a happy raccoon-rat-winking thing with a cow-lick who is probably “the girl”. I hear that they were going to include a Killer Whale with a scarf around his neck, but that it was too stereotypical.

Mock as I might, I have no problem with Vancouver trying to find something sugar-coated and marketable to support their Olympic event. It’s certainly the exact opposite of London 2012’s abortion of a logo, the key concepts behind which appear to be “enrage the audience” and “exclude the un-pretentious.” I’m not entirely sure how jagged shapes that vaguely look like “2012″, the five rings and the venue’s name — all gracefully wrapped in a tasteful color scheme that screams 1989 — made it all the way to print without a single person committing suicide, but you get the feeling that there’s hostility behind it.

Seriously, can you think of a less palatable, more difficult image for any event to adopt? Can you think of a single packager, retailer or vendor who’s going to be happy about including that visual object as part of their (inevitable, required, mandated) Olympic promotions? It’s the only explanation that makes sense: The logo could be a brilliant counter-attack against the commercializing of the games, forcing the most inconceivably horrible logo down the throats of the businesses who will be competing to sponsor it. Take that, corporate dogs, the London Games cries, Sully us with your “endorsements” and we’ll sully you right back.

That, or there was heavy abuse of psychotropic drugs among the committee.

Meanwhile, in British Columbia, we get mascots who resemble escapees from Animal Crossing:

Which, if nothing else, gives us the comfort that in Vancouver, we know they’re abusing psychotropic drugs.