MAVERICK VANCOUVER, B.C., MAYOR FACES OLYMPIC-SIZE CHALLENGE

VANCOUVER, B.C. -- Sam Sullivan's city spreads from the windows of his
16th-floor Yaletown condominium, his life mapped behind, below, beyond.

Born and raised on the city's Eastside. Paralyzed in the mountains.
Depressed and suicidal in subsidized housing. Saved by a self-help
book and an epiphany.

Emerged from the darkness, the old Sam gone. Invented ways for
disabled people to hike and sail and even, yes, wave the Olympic flag.
Became first a city councilor and now mayor of everything below his
window.

Another day awaits. The drug addicts and prostitutes concentrated on
the Downtown Eastside constitute what a U.N. official recently called
one of the world's worst slums in an affluent city. The civil workers'
strike continues in its 10th week, libraries closed, garbage
uncollected and city facilities shut down.

And preparations for the 2010 Winter Olympics loom always. Facilities
need building, roads need paving, time keeps passing, tick, tick, tick.

In less than three years, the world will descend on Sullivan's city,
thousands of journalists and billions of readers and watchers and
listeners. And every day until then Sullivan must confront one
question: What enduring image of Vancouver will emerge?

His 15-year-old husky barks in the living room. His girlfriend
prepares scones and espresso in the kitchen. Sullivan readies himself
for another day that will determine his legacy. But first, he must get
from bed to wheelchair, sliding and wiggling between deep breaths.

"It's all balance," he says, smiling.

A life rebuilt

In January 1979, on the Cypress Mountain slopes that will host
freestyle skiing and snowboarding at the Olympics, Sullivan, then a
19-year-old daredevil, attempted to ski full speed between a friend's
legs.

He didn't make it, crashing to the ground.

Sullivan lay there, on his stomach, hands outstretched. He felt like
his body was expanding rapidly, then contracting into the fetal
position. But he hadn't moved at all. That's how he knew he had a
broken neck.

At the hospital, doctors put Sullivan in traction, drilling
still-visible holes into his head, holding his spine in place,
reattaching the fourth and fifth vertebrae.

Four months in the hospital. Fourteen months in rehab. Plenty of time
to stew over everything he lost. The week before his injury, Sullivan
went skiing in the Rocky Mountains. The morning of it, he played
Beethoven on the piano.

And now, a quadriplegic, his dreams of becoming a concert pianist
dead. Surgery allowed him to lift his head. The recovery process started.

"I had to learn everything," Sullivan says. "Again."

Sullivan breathes on his own but is mostly paralyzed from the neck
down. He has full use of his biceps and interior deltoids, but not his
triceps, legs or feet. He uses a protruding bone on his wrist to
operate his BlackBerry and can hold things, lightly, with his hands.

He lived for two years with his parents, then moved into low-income
housing. Nine of his friends there committed suicide. Sullivan
considered it himself.

Eventually, he decided that Sam Sullivan needed to die, and he killed
him -- the old Sam, at least in the symbolic sense. The new Sam
started fresh, unburdened.

He bought a book, "How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life." He
did the exercises outlined, set small goals, solved little problems,
made to-do lists. His first victory? Putting his socks and shoes on.

One day he woke up, showered, dressed, ate and wheeled himself down to
the bank to cash his $392 welfare check. He arrived just as the bank
manager locked the door. Never late again, he promised.

He replaced old practices with more efficient ones. In place of the
old sequence, left sock -- right sock -- left shoe -- right shoe,
Sullivan found a way to put both on the same foot at the same time.
This saved six minutes. Calculated over his expected life span, which
Sullivan generously estimates at 92 years, that translated to a few
months saved.

He stopped boiling tea and started drinking tap water. That saved
another 30 minutes. These new efficiencies saved Sullivan enough time
to build a life, to attend college at Simon Fraser University
(favorite class: linguistics) and earn a degree in business
administration.

"And then one day I woke up," Sullivan says, "and I was
mayor."

A mix of a man

Sam Sullivan, 47, admits he confuses people. He believes in the ethics
of bootstrap capitalism -- individual initiative, free market, low
barriers to trade and investment -- yet he's also the poster child for
the social-welfare system and a supporter of a liberalized drug policy.

He doesn't fit into the tidy boxes reserved for politicians -- right,
left, liberal, conservative -- following instead policy grown out of
life experience. He says, "People with money make things happen." He
also says, "Homeless people, the down outers, they identify with me."

He studies Ancient Greece, astronomy and quantum theory. He learned
Italian, Cantonese and Punjabi. He watches French cartoons. He loves
chamber music and counts Zionist thinkers and Canadian philosophers
and the Bible among his influences.

"I call him the man on the fire wheel," says B.C. Lee, a City Council
member. "I asked him where he gets all that energy. He told me, 'I
spend all my energy walking around.' He doesn't walk at all."

At home, surrounded by friends and family, Sullivan is quiet and
subdued. At dinners he hosts on weekends, surrounded by artists and
writers and musicians, he comes alive. At work, surrounded by
political advisers, Sullivan prefers a long-term approach, even with
another election approaching next summer.

Says his girlfriend, Lynn Zanatta: "He's got two personalities."

Says his friend and mentor, Abraham Rogatnick: "He's a curious paradox."

Sailing, apparently, explains all this.

"In sailing," Sullivan says, "the wind is going this way, you can
actually go that way, using the wind. You can use the contrary forces
to propel you ahead."

Contrary forces, more than anything, explain Sam Sullivan.

A matter of control

Earlier this summer, on English Bay at the Jericho Sailing Center, a
quadriplegic man sits in a Martin 16 sailboat Sullivan helped design.
The man controls the direction of the boat and moves the sails by
sucking and blowing on a straw. They call this the "sip and puff" technique.

"It gives them control," says Daniel Maldoff, an employee of the local
Disabled Sailing Association, which Sullivan helped found.

Control. That's what Sullivan sought when, while living in subsidized
housing, he wrote a pleading letter to an engineering society. One day
soon after, an engineer showed up and took Sullivan to lunch. Over the
next six months, they revolutionized his life.

Previously, Sullivan used body parts -- elbows, head, whatever -- in
attempts to hold open his freezer. The engineer fashioned a clothes
hanger Sullivan could hook on his refrigerator shelves. Previously,
Sullivan spent weeks with curtains closed. The engineer cobbled
together homemade curtain openers so he could reach them.

Suddenly, everything seemed possible -- let there be light! --
including TV dinners.

"I could solve problems," Sullivan says. "When you're an able-bodied
person, you don't really have a lot of focus. When you're disabled,
you have to plan everything."

So Sullivan founded six nonprofit groups that allow disabled people to
fly ultralight aircraft, make music, hike with assistance and sail. He
won an Order of Canada honor for his work.

The mayor often resembles Inspector Gadget. At ceremonial
groundbreakings, he digs with a shovel that's attached to his
wheelchair. He used a catapult-like contraption to throw out the first
pitch at a local baseball game, shaking off the catcher, firing a strike.

Then there's the chair itself. It weighs more than 300 pounds, tops
out at about 7 miles an hour and is reinforced with steel and
heavy-duty tires. His staff begs Sullivan to use a driver more, but he
insists on rolling everywhere, including a mile across the Cambie
Street Bridge to work, BlackBerry attached near his right arm, day
planner on his lap.

Sullivan saved his most rousing invention for the grandest stage in
sports. In Turin, Italy, at the closing ceremony for the 2006 Winter
Olympics, he found himself weaving across the stage, a special device
attached to his wheelchair allowing him to wave the Olympic flag. The
image was beamed to an estimated billion people, and on later trips to
Rome and Florence, the mayor was mobbed in the streets.

"So emotional," says Rogatnick, a former professor at the University
of British Columbia, who accompanied Sullivan to Italy. "There was
something charming about the way he did that."

Sullivan embraces disability with the same zealousness Franklin
Roosevelt, the most famous disabled politician of the 20th century,
tried to hide it.

But this presents another conflict, an internal tug of war where
Sullivan must at once champion his disability and downplay it. He
talks wistfully about making Vancouver the most accessible city in the
world. He also wants disabled people to live full lives, to manage
their disabilities.

The same idea, in this world of contrary forces, applies to drug
addicts.

A new view of addiction

On the streets of the Downtown Eastside, back when Sam Sullivan was a
city councilor, he met Michelle, a 20-year-old prostitute and heroin
addict. In the interest of understanding addiction, he said he gave
her money to buy drugs. He calls this a political statement. Critics
call it something else entirely, painting a mad scientist using drug
addicts as lab rats.

Sullivan eventually developed a theory about drug addiction that stems
from the social history of physical disability. He says disability
started as a moral issue, the disabled shamed for their sins or
shortcomings. Next came the medical model, disability as sickness, and
that meant medical professionals and bureaucrats controlled the lives
of the disabled.

"And then," Sullivan says, "maybe 50 years ago, somebody says, 'Excuse
me. I'm not sick. I'm disabled.' Sickness is a short-term problem you
can fix. Disability is a long-term problem you manage."

The management model grew from there. Sullivan sees parallels in the
way society views drug addiction. He says addicts can live full,
productive, happy lives -- same as cigarette addicts, food addicts and
caffeine addicts.

He calls drug addiction as a moral issue "medieval," "primitive" and
"crude." He says addiction as a medical model -- just fix yourself,
try harder -- would be the same thing as society forcing him to walk.
After his skiing accident, Sullivan felt that pressure from his
family, and he used to sit for hours, trying to move his toes. Then he
moved to the management model and it changed his life.

"I get a lot of leeway because it's obvious," Sullivan says. "But
those people on the Downtown Eastside don't."

Vancouver has always taken a progressive approach to drug addiction.
Sullivan inherited the Four Pillars model -- prevention, treatment,
harm reduction, enforcement -- started by former Mayor Philip Owen.
And he's adding to it, in hopes of repairing the Downtown Eastside in
time for the world's arrival in 2010.

Vancouver already has the first safe-injection site in North America,
needle exchanges, methadone programs and a trial that gives free
heroin to 60 addicts. Next, a $10 million program that could treat
1,000 addicts in three years with substitution drugs -- Sullivan's
idea, the same concept as the nicotine patch.

Between the substitution drugs and a plan for increased subsidized
housing on the Downtown Eastside, Sullivan hopes the area looks
different in 2010. Residents worry they will be forced out of the area
because of the Olympics.

The question that needs to be answered before then is how these
theories and programs will translate into practice. Will the
substitution drugs work? How much housing? Can the Downtown Eastside
really be cleaned up?

Patrick White dives in Dumpsters in the Downtown Eastside, living
among an estimated 5,000 addicts packed into 16 blocks around East
Hastings Street. He wants you to see another side of Sullivan's city.
He wants you to see the alleys where one could argue drug use is
either concentrated or contained or both.

"These alleys, we'll walk through, you'll see," he says. "That's
Calcutta back there."

White moved here after he says SARS wrecked his event-marketing
business in Toronto. He lost his business, home and wife. The story of
Vancouver is in front of you, he says, in this alley, on these
streets. He pauses. "You can smoke crack here," he says. Another
pause. "You can watch me fix later if you want."

White moves toward the alley behind Hastings. It smells of feces,
urine, rotting flesh. A man stands on a couch, drops his pants,
screams. Dirty needles litter the ground. Garbage all around.

"How can you host the 2010 Olympics when the [Athletes'] Village is a
five-minute walk away?" White asks. "And what if they close this
place? Too many people are going to be dropping dead."

A challenge looms

Every time Sam Sullivan steals a glance at Lynn Zanatta in their
trendy Yaletown condominium, he smiles. They met in the old
neighborhood when they were kids, after he learned to skip rope just
so he could meet her. They held hands at a haunted house in fifth
grade and hiked Seymour Mountain on one of their first dates.

Eventually, both married other people, but they always stayed in
touch. Even when Zanatta spent 18 months in Southeast Asia, she wrote
often. Sullivan kept every single letter. They got together after a
chance meeting a few years back.

"All this," he says, "my whole life, was to impress
her."

Another day awaits. Contrary forces once again. Lately, the mayor must
monitor the city workers' strike. A group dumped garbage last month
outside his condominium in protest to the strike and the Olympics.

Sullivan is also taking a beating in the local and national press. A
Globe and Mail column from October 2006 called the last Olympics
Sullivan's "shining moment," adding "it's been downhill since."

And always, the Olympics loom, less than three years away, evidenced
by the cranes and construction around the city.

More than anything -- more than the EcoDensity initiative, where condo
builders put up gardens and parks and cultural centers; more than
Project Civil City, aimed at reducing homelessness by 50 percent by
2010; more than tax freezes for local business and ports -- Sullivan's
legacy will be tied to the Winter Games.

Every day until then Sullivan must confront the question of how
Vancouver will be remembered.

The most livable city in the world, as ranked by a recent poll? The
most accessible city in the world? As a model for future Olympics,
full of improvements and subsidized housing and a clean Downtown
Eastside? Or for its seedy underbelly?

Sullivan doesn't know the answer, only this: "The world," he says,
"will be watching."