Some Olympic faves to fill empty feeling
Aside from those picturesque blue fences and the three-hundred-thousand security points, my sense is we’re all missing the Olympics. To help ease the pain, here are the always numbing Monday morning musings and meditations on the world of sports.
Is anyone else having this problem? You see Duncan Keith and Jonathan Toews playing Friday and you don’t see them as members of the Chicago Blackhawks., You see them wearing Team Canada jerseys.
You see Marian Hossa and Pavol Demitra battling each other and you don’t think of rivals in a big Western Conference matchup. You think of the Slovakian teammates who almost upset Canada in that splendid semifinal game.
You see Ryan Kesler and you don’t think of the Canucks’ invaluable second-line centre. You think of the warrior who almost led his team to the gold medal in one of the most memorable games of hockey.
Mostly, when you see the actors from the drama of a couple of weeks ago, you don’t think of them in their day jobs. You just think about the musings men’s Olympic hockey tournament and you wish it could have gone on forever.
My five favourite Canadian Olympians:
1) Scott Moir — Half of the goldmedal ice dancing team. Who knew a figure skater could be this normal?
2) Jon Montgomery — The gold medallist in skeleton with the 50-kilowatt personality.
3) Clara Hughes — The toughest athlete I’ve ever encountered.
4) Ryan Getzlaf — After the goldmedal game, this is what he said about returning to reality. “I live in California. My real life’s pretty good, too.”
5) Alexandre Bilodeau — Central Casting couldn’t have picked a better star to crack Canada’s gold-medal drought.
My five favourite Olympic moments.
1) Hughes tearing up as Neil Young played ‘‘Long May You Run’‘ at the closing ceremonies.
2) The crowd at Cypress sitting in the wind and rain and cheering their hearts out for Jennifer Heil on the first day of competition. Didn’t know it then but it was a sign something special was happening in our city.
3) The gold-medal celebration of the women’s hockey team.
4) Montgomery chugging the pitcher of beer as he walked through the streets of Whistler.
5) The embrace between Charles Hamelin and his girlfriend Marianne St-Gelais after she’d won the silver in short-track; then the embrace between Hamelin and St-Gelais after he’d won the gold.
Here’s the thing about the Olympics. If you question any of it — spending billions on a sports festival, treating its administrators like they were heads of state, turning your city inside out — the whole thing falls apart.
But John Furlong never allowed himself to question any of it. To him, the Olympics represented something great, the higher angels in all of us, and that made it all worthwhile. It also gave him a vision and, in the end, he was able to pass on that vision to this country.
That was Furlong’s success and the success of the 2010 Winter Games. When you think about it, that’s quite an accomplishment.
Ron Wilson, the Team USA coach, surprised many with his less-than-gracious comments immediately after the gold-medal game. Given some distance and time to put things in perspective last week, Wilson wasn’t any better.
“That’s going to sting for a while,” he said. “We weren’t dominated by Canada by any stretch. You go into overtime and anything can happen. The puck [retrieved by Sidney Crosby] hit the referee’s skate. No one mentions that, and it caused the kerfuffle that happened in the corner and they took advantage.”
He didn’t stop there.
“The biggest surprise to me were all the [fans and writers] who threw Marty Brodeur, the greatest goalie in the history of the game, under the bus and ran over him, backward, forward, backward. They almost tarnished his career [based on] one night.”
“In our business, it’s about winning the whole thing, not putting it in perspective. In five years, no one will give a damn [which goalie] won.”
Maybe, but they’ll certainly remember which team won.
Watching Detroit and Chicago on Sunday, it’s clear those two teams play the game at a higher level than any other team in the NHL Western Conference.
The only question about both the Wings and Hawks, in fact, concerns their goaltending and that means, for the Vancouver Canucks to have a prayer of winning the West, Roberto Luongo has to make up the difference in the talent level.
Discuss among yourselves if Luongo is that good.
