Vancouver wasn't completely rebuilt for the games and the facilities weren't spectacles, but that's fine...the emotion of our athletes and the crowds was the real spectacle (and it'd be interesting to hear about the crowds and energy from more non-Canadian sources, especially since some recent games, like Salt Lake City and Beijing, felt somewhat 'bottled'). Architectural prowess is not a tenet of Olympism, it's just a symptom of the one-upmanship infecting the host city arms race (the IOC tends to benefit from it, though). Toronto has a good shot at 2020 but it depends entirely on what other cities bid and what happens during voting, where even a single IOC vote tends to decide who gets dropped off each ballot. London may be a 'safe' city but it was up against a bunch of big fat alpha cities that were no less safe. The IOC can only be a host city puppetmaster if enough and the right cities bid.
Did CTV go to a commercial while the medals for the cross country marathon were being handed out during the closing ceremony? I swear they didn't show it. Jacques Rogge also never called upon the youth of the world...Furlong mentioned youth and may have called upon them in French so butchered that I missed it (and if Rogge was capable of basic human emotion he might have smiled at Furlong's French).
The mime mocking the cauldron fiasco was brilliant, and Neil Young and the Russian anthem were both good. Everything else was a bit cringeworthy. They should have had Nikki Yanofsky sing
I Believe...Canadians have been hearing it every 5 minutes but no one else in the world has heard it (unless they've been watching CTV). I do wish they'd stop getting opera singers to sing anthems.
All this talk here about Own The Podium. No, it did not make its stated goal. Yes, despite that, we had a wonderful showing on the podium. Scarberiankhatru is right: more funding towards athletics needs to continue to flow, but how the money is targeted needs to be re-examined. I suspect that a number of those commenting on his posts here, did not read, or at least understand, more than his opening line.
No suspicion is necessary...every time they post, they've been proving it.
When a program is focused on specific podium targets and already successful athletes, relies on the whims of government funding injections (will the money be cut off if next time we win fewer medals?), is needlessly vulnerable to media attacks because of its name, goals, and – fairly rare for Canada – chest-thumping patriotic ambition, and whose effects cannot be separated from the impact of home turf, home crowds, and the drive of veterans seeking redemption (Martin, the men's hockey team, Hamelin, Morrison, Anderson...you can't buy their hunger for gold that bumped up the gold medal haul in the closing days), then that program has some serious flaws.
Athletes and officials are defending the program and no wonder: they know that their livelihood is at stake and that the program could be slashed just as easily as it could be improved. CTV commentators questioned on air where all the money went that was spent on our alpine skiers and CTV news was even working out how many million dollars were spent per medal. There's often a fine line between constructive criticism and implying that money was wasted, and this is a problem when, in fact, much more money needs to flow. It should be spent in other ways, though, not just on efforts to buy our way higher up into the medal standings, because that's politically risky and it doesn't work with any kind of predictable success. The feds have coughed up a bit more money, which is great and hopefully a step towards recognizing that sports on a national/international scale can have a larger and more continuous role to play in health and culture than just trying to win a few medals every four years (if possible while beating the Americans), and that serious funding is needed in the 3 years between Olympics, too. Maybe we should use the money to clone Clara Hughes and get these clones on skis...you can't buy guts like hers.
