ABSTRACT
Introduction In February 2010, Vancouver celebrated its hosting of Canada’s second Olympic Winter Games. It proved to be a sustained celebration of Canadian culture and identity, one underscored by striking national and international television ratings. Front and centre in the festive atmosphere of the Vancouver celebrations were Canada’s national symbol, the red maple leaf. It was everywhere in the city’s public space: on the omnipresent flags flying throughout the city, imprinted on the hundreds of licensed articles on sale in stores and kiosks, painted on the faces of thousands of Canadian Olympic visitors and embellished on the uniform paraphernalia of every Canadian Olympic athlete. That the ubiquitous nature of the red maple leaf as the symbolic expression of Canadian national identity owed a formative Olympic precedent that reached back over a century was most certainly unknown to Vancouver’s Olympic revellers. Perhaps that fact alone provides an incentive for a mission of discovery, one pursued on the following pages. Thus, it is the intent of this essay to pursue the argument that the introduction of the red maple leaf as a national symbol of Canada, with respect to the logo’s initial international debut, the Games of the Fourth Olympiad celebrated in London, England, in 1908, provided the first in a series of succeeding international Olympic occurrences that lent sustenance to a greater Canadian movement towards national self-identity and commensurate erosion of sympathy for and influence of British ‘Imperial’ dispositions.
