Sam Sullivan

Ran into Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan in Beijing today. He’s here for some meet-and-greet, followed by some sightseeing and then his participation in the upcoming torch relay for the Paralympics. You might think it would be a challenge for Sullivan, a quadriplegic, to hoist the torch, but the gritty mayor has it figured out. He tells me he’s reusing the device he’d had attached to his motorized wheelchair to wave the Olympic flag during the closing ceremonies of the Winter Games in Turin. It was his role, of course, to wave the giant flag as the mayor of the host city for the 2010 Winter Games—now just 18 months away.

The Vancouver mayor’s own party takes him out. (Though it’s not the first time.) Why? Partly because, as Frances Bula wrote in a fantastic profile two years ago, and I discovered over coffee with the mayor a few months earlier — a brief meeting that was so weird I decided I had no idea what to write, so I wrote nothing — Sam Sullivan is not without eccentricity.