Canada has been on a roll in the Winter Games these past 16 days! We started out on a rather sombre note with the unexpected death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili during a training run, just hours before the Opening Ceremony. It did cast a tragic spell on the very first day, but with due honour and respect to the dead athlete, the Opening Ceremony was a spectacular event that captured the true spirit and essence of what Canada is all about, and held the world in thrall. When the Great One, Wayne Gretzky, travelled by motorcade to light the outdoor Olympic Cauldron on the Waterfront, our hearts brimmed with pride and patriotism. It was one of those moments when one felt really and truly proud to be Canadian, native-born and naturalized ones alike!
There have been many heroes who inspired me these past two weeks and indelible moments that I will cherish for the rest of my life. The foremost of those is Joannie Rochette, the figure skater from Quebec who lost her mother to a fatal heart attack two days before she was set to compete. A lesser person would've succumbed to the grief and withdrawn from the competition, but this was the Olympics, the ultimate competition in sports, and Joannie chose to go ahead and compete. What grit, what will, what determination, what nerves of steel! There were 11,000 lumps in 11,000 throats that Tuesday as Joannie stepped on to the ice for the Short Program, and the whole of Canada carried her through her spins and twirls. Well, she went on to win the bronze medal for Canada, but in our hearts, she won the gold!
And then there was Alexandre Bilodeau who won the first gold medal for Canada in the Men's Moguls, a feat no Canadian had ever accomplished before on home soil. With his brother Frederic, who suffers from cerebral palsy, on the sidelines to cheer him on, Alexandre became a Canadian icon under 30 seconds! What a race and what a golden moment! His telling the media that his brother had been his inspiration, that he had no reason to complain while his brother had every reason to do so, and THAT exactly had driven him to train and excel in his sport ... well, words of wisdom from such a young man! This is the stuff that Olympians are made of! And who can forget the iconic image of Jon Montgomery taking a victory stroll through the streets of Whistler, grabbing a pitcher of beer offered by a bystander, and seizing the moment of his gold medal win in the Skeletons! Then there were the golden boys, the brothers Hamelin, Charles and Francois, who nailed it in the 500 m. and 5000 m. skating competition, and wiped out all the criticism of their dismal performance in the earlier races!
I will be remiss if I keep talking just about the Canadian heroes! There was my favorite, US short track Olympian Apolo Anton Ohno, who went on to win the most number of medals in the Winter Olympics ever! I have been following his performances in the earlier Olympics as well, and think this might be his swan song, but what a glorious career he's had! And another athlete who held the world spellbound was the 19-year old figure skater, Yu Na Kim from South Korea, who won the gold. She was AMAZING, for want of a better word, and scored the highest ever in the competition in the Olympics. "Queen Yu Na", she was dubbed by the media, and rightly so! Also, hats off to Slovenian cross-country skier Petra Majdic, who was the favorite to take the gold, but had a gruesome crash in a training run prior to the race, suffered four fractured ribs and a collapsed lung, but still prevailed and skied with excruciating pain through three heats of cross-country sprints, and went on to the podium to win the bronze!
I can keep going on and on, but it's time for the cross- border showdown, the Gold Medal Hockey Game where Team Canada is pitted against its swaggering brothers from down South. The adrenaline is coursing through our bodies, the excitement is palpable, the frenzy is building up, so...
So long, folks! Gotta watch the game! Rest in my next post!
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