Yay for Olympics!
Eighteen years ago, when I was 13, I fell in love with the Olympic Winter Games. They were in Calgary that year, and our province embraced the Games with a zeal I had never seen before, or even since, really. It was cool. There were larger than life athletes, people like Alberto Tomba, Katerina Witt, Eddie the Eagle (a hapless ski jumper from Great Britain who qualified by virtue of being the only Brit ski jumper, the Jamaican bobsleddders, and our own Canadian heroes like Elizabeth Manley and Karen Percy (now married to Oilers GM Kevin Lowe) who won us two of our five medals that year.
Yay for Olympics! Michelle and I watched and cheered (Michelle cheered especially loud) as Spruce Grove native Jennifer Heil won Canada's first medal, gold in Women's moguls. We watched Cindy Klassen get a bronze in speed skating. Today I watched some figure skating- did you see that Chinese pair, Zhang and Zhang? She fell hard 38 seconds into the program attempting a quad throw, skated hurt off the ice, and then they came back and won the silver. That's what the Olympics are all about- inspiring stories of human accomplishment. Every four years it's good to get caught up in that again and cheer on the athletes, regardless of their national affiliation.
As an aside, I'm not really sure what the legal betting habits of Janet Gretzky, a non-athlete, has to do with anything. Hopefully the focus will shift off of that and on to what matters, the athletes.
Turin 2006
CBC's Olympic Coverage website
Canada's Olympic Team
New Zealand's Olympic Team (for no particular reason, other than I was wondering if my kiwi friends had much of a presence in the Winter Games)
Yay for Olympics!