GOLDEN BOY: Moguls skier Alexandre Bilodeau in fine form.
CANADA IS basking in the afterglow of Alexandre Bilodeau’s triumphant winning of the country’s first-ever Olympic gold medal on home turf.
TV networks have been playing the victorious performance on repeat and have pumped up their patriotism; Twitter’s all abuzz (a Canadian is a trending topic!); and there’s even word the Royal Canadian Mint will be creating a 22-karat gold coin in honour of Bilodeau and this national sporting milestone.
Canadians don’t do hero-worship, but we’re making an exception for this guy.
The first-ever at-home gold medal is obviously a big deal for the host country. It’s also helped a bit to lift the shadow cast by the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili on Friday (well, maybe not for the Georgians).
The media was quick to jump on reports that there had been concerns voiced in the past about the luge track being too dangerous. Sorry, but it’s not like luge is a safe sport to begin with; these guys rocket down an icy course at speeds of over 100 km/h with nothing to protect them but a helmet – and skeleton racers do it face first!
Kumaritashvili’s death was tragic, of course, but as U.S. slider Tony Benshoof pointed out: “Luge is a tough sport. It takes a long time to master … at the end of the day, we’re going 95-98 miles an hour and we’re six inches off the ice. We get down a mile of track in 45 seconds. There’s an inherent risk.”
Bilodeau’s gold medal performance has also helped us forget about the embarrassing botched cauldron lighting at the opening ceremonies Friday night. This, combined with the warmer, rainy weather playing havoc on proceedings, made me think that events were conspiring to trip up the Winter Games before they had a chance to begin.
Even the entourage of U.S. vice-president Joe Biden – who was in town for a weekend of Games-watching (doesn’t he have somewhere to be?) – managed to get into a car accident on the way to watch women’s hockey.
Ah, but see we can forget all that now. Bilodeau has won Canada its first home-soil gold and in doing so has vanquished a sad stigma: that this country had never won gold at the two previous Olympics we’ve hosted.
It’s particularly sweet that Bilodeau won the gold by knocking off douchebag Dale Begg-Smith – a Canadian who moved to Australia because of some business interests and then opted to compete for the Aussies at the 2010 Games. Ha – the turncoat will have to settle for silver.
Winning gold is great. The big question, though: will Canada continue in its success and ‘own the podium’ as promised? Could we even handle that? After all, as Charles McGrath observed in an excellent piece on Canada and its Olympic medal quest, we’re not used to being or celebrating winners:
Theirs is a vast country that in many ways is run like a small town, with small-town values, and it has a highly developed culture of modesty, if not a collective inferiority complex. The athletic record in general is a little underwhelming, and some Canadians think that is because their countrymen prefer that, considering a good effort just as valuable as a trunkload of trophies, maybe better.
True, but it’d be nice to have a trunkload of trophies.
