Olympic red mittens are flying off the shelves as fast as retailers can stock them and a six-metre tall downtown clock is counting down the final days and hours to the 2010 Winter Games.

With four weeks to go, excitement is building in Vancouver as more than 60,000 will be on hand to witness the Olympic cauldron being lit in BC Place stadium during the opening ceremony.

Vancouver has sometimes been referred to as the "No Fun" city but organizers and residents are doing their best to make sure everyone takes home a positive image of Canada's third-largest city.

"(We're) moving very fast," said John Furlong, chief executive of the Vancouver Games organizing committee.

"There's a lot of positive anxiety inside the organization right now. We're very focused on what we have to do."

Security will be tight during the games with city police, military and Royal Canadian Mounted Police on alert for possible protests and terror attacks.
Recently police have battled to rein in violent ethnic youths who have been waging a bloody gang war in the city suburbs.

That makes security one of the biggest costs as an estimated 250,000 visitors, 10,000 media and 5,500 athletes from 80-plus countries will converge on Vancouver for the February 12-28 Games.

The budget for security has climbed from an original estimate of 175 million dollars to 900 million dollars.

The 45,000 kilometre (27,968 mile) torch relay is in full swing as it heads west en route to BC Place stadium.

On Thursday, the Olympic torch made its way to the Alberta provincial capital of Edmonton before travelling to the 1988 Winter Games host city of Calgary on Monday.

Organizers are hoping there won't be a repeat of several incidents already where Canada's native Indians have managed to disrupt the relay.

Outdoor events will be at the mercy of the weather and forecasters are predicting a severe El Nino in February.

There is a good chance of fog becoming a problem in places like Whistler, which was dropped from the Alpine World Cup circuit several years ago because of poor weather, and in the lower-elevation ski resort of Cypress Mountain.

Organizers have already moved the freestyle and snowboarding competitions at Cypress to the evening under the lights to help beat the fog.

Weather is already a concern at Cypress.

On Wednesday, it was decided to close the ski areas to the public two weeks earlier than planned because of unseasonably warm weather.

So far the most popular souvenir has been the more than a million pairs of red mittens, with the Canadian maple leaf, that have been sold at 10 dollars each.

While many Vancouverites say they are heading out of town during the Games to escape the crowds those that hope to take in the action are being asked to leave their cars at home.

Organizers say they have added extra public buses, but it remains to be seen how Vancouver's undersized transit trains (SkyTrain) and its often chaotic public bus system will handle Olympic-size crowds.

The city has set a goal of reducing vehicle traffic in the downtown core by 30 percent, but a trial run on Friday flopped as just 2.5 percent of drivers chose to heed calls to leave their cars at home.

With a worldwide television audience of three billion expected to watch the Games, American broadcaster NBC said last week it would lose money on the Olympics for the first time in recent memory because of higher license fees the network agreed to pay to show the Games.

NBC also said advertising revenue would not be enough to offset the high cost of broadcasting the 2010 Winter Olympics and the 2012 Summer Games.

The two billion dollar figure the network paid is one third more than they paid for the most recent round of Olympics.