After much secrecy, the mascots for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver/Whistler have been unveiled. Prior to today’s announcement, there were speculations it could be a moose, the spirit bear, or a marmot. None of those, in fact, turned out to be the mascots (although the spirit bear was pretty close). Plural. For 2010, Vancouver will have 3 official mascots: Quatchi, a sasquatch; Miga, a sea bear (part killer whale, part Kermode bear, or “spirit bear”; and Sumi, part orca whale, part thunderbird, and part black bear. The official 2010 website now has an area up featuring the mascots. There’s also a sidekick mascot, Mukmuk, that exists only in the virtual world.

My first impressions of the mascots are as follows: they look cute, kids will love them, plushy sales of the mascots will go through the roof, I expect a big online marketing campaign for the mascots (their microsite already looks pretty good), and they are pretty representative of Canada, and B.C. specifically. I may be biase, but these mascots could be in the Top 5 of best mascots of all time. Certainly better than the fiasco that was the 1996 Atlanta mascot and more creative than Turin’s snowball and ice cube mascots.