Ray Mey has provided counter-terrorism designs for past Olympic events.

“At one time, the winter Olympics were smaller events (compared to the summer games),” says Mey. “The challenge was dealing with the mountains, the cold, and winter environment.”

But, that’s changing. The winter Olympics are still the smaller events, but the gap is closin, as winter games become larger, attracting more people and countries. Summer games have approximately 220 countries participating but winter games participation has notched up with Vancouver’s 2010 expecting to draw 80 plus countries and 40 plus countries to the Paralympics.

Past winter games in Torino (2006) drew 81 countries, Salt Lake City (2002) 78, Nagano (1998) 72, and Lillehammer (1994) drawing 67. Also, winter Olympics host sites are no longer smaller cities or remote locations that “back-drop” to a larger city, says Mey, involved with Olympics from 1996-2006 and a security advisor to the Chicago Bid Committee for the 2016 summer games.

Major cities have become focal points for winter games such as Salt Lake City/ County (population of 1.2 million), while Greater Vancouver has a population of 2.1 million. Securing larger population areas “brings whole new challenges that are more akin to those of the summer games,” he says.

The challenges have essentially doubled up to include both winter conditions and large populations and areas.

Vancouver isn’t the first winter Olympic site to have venues that will be spread out across a large geographic area (Whistler, Vancouver, and Richmond) — Salt Lake and Torino encountered this as well, says Mey.

“In Salt Lake, you ended up with a huge 900 square mile Olympic theatre — it’s not just the venues where something can occur, it’s the whole Olympic theatre.”