See you in Vancouver

While China was hugely impressive in gathering 100 medals, it's not the first time a country has cracked the century mark at the Olympics. In fact, it’s been done 16 times previous to this, which seems remarkable.

The most recent country to get 100 or more medals was the U.S. in 1996 , although they had to endure two weeks in Atlanta to do it. It’s probably going to be a while before anyone beats the record. The U.S. won 233 medals at the 1904 Games in St. Louis, which were really part of a World's Fair and only spottily attended by foreign athletes. Canadians may recall that one guy from out of town managed a medal, that being Toronto’s George Lyon in golf. The story goes that Lyon was pleased with himself that he walked through the clubhouse on his hands. Let’s see Phil Mickelson try that.

If you’re trying to guess the second highest mark ever for a single nation at the Olympics, you’d be smart to think about the boycotted games of 1980 and 1984. The Soviet Union won 195 medals in Moscow in 1980 when the Americans stayed home in a huff, while the U.S. returned the favour a bit in 1984 by picking up 174 medals in Los Angeles.

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FROM MOSCOW WITH LOVE

Maybe it’s just me. I don’t usually draw stares when I walk down the street. At least not that I never noticed. But I swapped a few Canada t-shirts on Sunday for a bright-red Russia Olympic shirt that is now my favourite article of clothing. Ever. It’s just brilliant.

I swear, however, that people look differently at me with this shirt. It’s bright, and pretty smart. But I kinda feel like anyone who looks American or Canadian is giving me the “what for” when they look me up and down. Could be rampant paranoia, which has been known to happen.

But a nice bloke sitting next to me at the closing ceremony on Sunday didn’t recognize me, even though we’d sat quite near each other in the Main Press Centre many times. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Toronto Star. I don’t know, maybe when I saw you sitting here tonight I just saw the shirt.”

See???

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BLOWIN IN THE WIND

Because you don’t get much of a breeze inside the Bird’s Nest stadium, and trust me and my soaked shirts on that one, the Chinese apparently inserted fans inside the flagpoles so that the flags in the stadium would fly and not simply droop. A nice touch.

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HALF A LOAF

It’s kinda like seeing McCartney without Lennon, but it was cool to see Jimmy Page blister his way through “Whole Lotta Love” on his guitar during the closing ceremony for the Beijing Games. He had Leona Lewis singing along with his strumming instead of his Led Zeppelin sidekick, Robert Plant. But half a Zep is better than none. Lewis, by the way, was told to change the lyrics of “Whole Lotta Love” so she wouldn’t mouth the words “gonna give you every inch of my love.” Notwithstanding that it doesn’t quite work when a woman sings it, the censorship seemed a little harsh. Then again, consider that in the 1960’s the Rolling Stones went on The Ed Sullivan Show and had to change their lyrics from “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together.”

Closing Time

Okay, Canada, who carries the flag in the closing ceremony?

Adam Van Koeverden, he of the single silver medal but who had hoped for double gold, carried it into the giant Bird’s Nest Stadium way back when. He’s likely out.

Canadian wrestler Carol Huynh might have been the most inspirational athlete we had, and she’s one of only three gold medals Canada picked up. But she apparently went home a few days ago, which would rule her out.

The men’s eights won a gold, but eight guys carrying a flag might be a little weird. Eric Lamaze? Probably not. Simon Whitfield? Certainly a great race for silver. But he’s a guy the last time we heard, and the Canadian Olympic Committee likes to move things around, sex-wise.

My choice?

Easy.

Emilie Heymans. Huynh was superb but we didn’t know much about her coming into the Games. Heymans we knew as the slightly fragile diver who never quite got where she wanted to go in individual events. She had a couple of synchronized diving medals to her credit, which is more than 38 million other Canadians can say. But she somehow seemed a bit of an underachiever, often coming up with less than her best when her best was required. Not this time. She was in second place in the late-going and tip-toed to the end of the 10 meter platform for her final dive. She collected her thoughts, gave a deep breath and then nailed one of the best Olympic dives any Canadian has ever tried.

The Quebec resident (yet another feather in her cap for PC Olympic types) was magic. For a moment, she was gold. But then a Chinese diver a decade younger and far tinier grabbed the moment for herself and drilled diving perfection, tumbling and rolling and swirling and somersaulting through the air and landing with a splash so small it was almost unnoticeable. You could’ve dropped a quarter from the platform and it would’ve made a bigger wave than the one Ruolin Chen created. She earned marks of 100 plus and grabbed top spot on the podium. Give credit to her. But give huge marks to Heymans, who came up with perhaps the best dive of her life exactly when she needed it and won as shiny a silver medal as the Olympics has ever seen.

Her final event was Thursday, and if she’s still in Beijing she deserves it.

Give her the flag, Canada.

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Before yours truly visited Beijing, Vancouver 2010 chief John Furlong was relating a story about one of his arrivals prior to the start of the Summer Olympics.

“I’m really ashamed of it,” he said. “I came with Cathy Priestner-Allinger from our office and there was nobody to greet us the way they usually do. We wandered all around the airport, and it’s like Heathrow 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 plus 30 per cent. We were exhausted and we were lost. We kept looking for the Olympics desk but nobody was speaking English. So this young guy, maybe 25, he’s kind of looking at us. And suddenly he’s talking to Cathy in excellent English.”

The chap offered the Canadians a ride. Priestner-Allinger was eager. Furlong was leery.

“He said he’d give us a ride. I said, ‘Cathy, we don’t know this guy.’ But she’s tired and I say ‘okay.’ It turns our he’s got a car and it’s parked outside. I’ve given in. So he says, ‘Oh, my car is down here,’ and we go down around some corner. I’m quite nervous but we get to the car and we start talking about the torch relay and the Olympics. This guy’s very humble, a very nice guy, and we tell him we’re involved in the 2010 Olympics and he turns around to us in the back seat and says, ‘It’s a very great privilege for me to take you in the city. When you come to the Olympic Games, if I can do anything for you or if my company can do anything, you must tell me. Anything at all.’

“We finally get to our hotel and I’m feeling ashamed and embarrassed. He hands me his card and says he’d consider it a great honour to help us the next time we come. So I check in and the next day I’m at a meeting and I come back and there’s a small gift in my room and a letter from this guy reconfirming our conversation.

“I said to myself, ‘John, how could you not have seen this.’ And then I said to myself, ‘Boy, we need two million of these guys.’ I mean, this guy saw this moment when we were lost and he made us feel like a million bucks. And I’m going to tell this story a million times. My God, I felt terrible. But it was a really good example of what we want people to do in Vancouver.

I was in Beijing for four days that trip, and it was my most profound memory of those four days. There was no close second.”

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They’ve got a small library in the Main Press Centre that’ available for journalists who need to do research. Some of the items make sense; Newsweek, the China Daily, the Book of the Olympics.

But how do they end up with “The Social History of Indian Football,” and “Complete Cheerleading,” “China’s Tibet,” and, most curiously, “The Philadelphia Phillies Encylopedia.”

Cuz you never know when an Olympics reporter is gonna have to look up Mitch Williams’ bio.

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Adam van Koeverden doesn’t owe Canada a thing. On the other hand, he owes The Star five yuan.

The Mississauga kayaker, who won a silver medal in the K1 Saturday, stood around talking to several members of the Canadian media about an hour after his race. When an official directed him toward doping control for the standard medalist test, van Koeverden said, “I need something other than water to drink’’ and headed through the closest door, which happened to lead into the media lounge, and to a cooler full of bottled pop.

He grabbed a drink, whereupon he was halted by Chinese officials who pointed to a sign that showed bottles cost five yuan (about 80 cents Cdn). Athletes seldom go into races carrying change and as they tried to make him put it back, a Star reporter handed over the coins.

They released their grip on him and off he went to testing.

Turvy Topsy

John Lennon almost certainly wasn’t thinking of Canada’s performance at the 2008 Summer Olympics when he sang that “nothing is real” in Strawberry Fields Forever. But you’d be hard-pressed to find many folks who would’ve mapped out what’s been a zany week for Canada at the Summer Olympic Games.

The first seven days result in precisely zero medals for Canada. Not one. The headlines screamed, “We Suck,” as potential medalists fell by the wayside. Most notable may have been swimmer Brent Hayden’s failure in the pool.

Then came a magical weekend, when virtual unknown Carol Huynh, whose parents were Vietnamese refugees and who hails from a small mill town in northern British Columbia, grabbed Canada’s first gold with a stunning wrestling win. By the time Sunday turned to Monday, a Canadian team that was shut out for seven days suddenly had seven baubles in two days.

Included was, admittedly, one strongly predicted win by the Canadian men’s eight rowing team. Emilie Heymans, who has often come up short in individual events and who has a reputation for emotional fragility, stood up to the mighty Chinese in the women’s 10 meter platform event and won a silver, getting nudged off the top of the podium only after a young Chinese diver nailed one of the best dives seen in a stunning competition.

Then comes a real switcheroo; potential gold medalist Adam Van Koeverden, the Canadian flag bearer and the representative of the new, “we got attitude” Canadian Olympian the COC keeps talking about, tanks in the men’s K1-1000 race. He was expected to battle for gold but came next to last. And it wasn’t close, as he ran out of steam by the 700 meter mark and fell back at an astonishing rate. A few minutes later, Thomas Hall of Montreal, who was expected to battle for a medal but hardly was a favourite, was behind with a couple hundred meters to go but put on a big push and won bronze in a race that was the exact opposite of Van Koeverden’s.

It’s weird, but a day like Friday is precisely why sports is so enjoyable. Anything can happen. You might even say Tomorrow Never Knows.

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BOLD TALK

It was pretty unusual. The folks who are organizing the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympics normally talk in code, as do a lot of folks in the hyper-political Olympic movement. But when they held a press conference here Friday, there was organizing chief John Furlong talking about how the Chinese left the door open for improvements. He went on to cite the empty seats, unused tickets, lack of atmosphere for athletes at some venues and too-big stadiums. In IOC speak, he was a 6.3 on the Richter scale. Not enough to kill, but enough to seriously shake up some folks.

Reporter Jeff Lee, who covers the Vancouver committee for the Vancouver Sun, noted this had to make an impact on the Chinese, who place such importance on saving face. Interesting.

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BOOB TUBE

The subway system here has large TV’s that show live action. A crowd the other day was standing in a packed subway car watching a Chinese team battle for a beach volleyball medal. Why can’t the TTC do this?

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WIN/LOSE

As painful as it was for the Americans to drop their softball gold medal game to Japan, it can do nothing but improve the sports’ image as a competitive one that deserves to be brought back to the Olympics in 2016. The IOC voted it out, as well as baseball, back in 2005 and neither sport will be on the agenda for London in 2012. But there’s a vote slated for October of 2009 and softball has been lobbying hard to get back onto the program. The Japanese win can only help that.

And, yes, that was International Softball chief Don Porter sporting a grin as big as all outdoors as he strolled through the Main Press Centre earlier today.

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SAY AGAIN?

Vancouver organizing chief John Furlong, who’s of Irish descent and occasionally slips into a very Irish lilt, was chatting with the Star on Friday about his ability to communicate in French. It’s rather limited, and he freely admits it.

Furlong tells the story of the time he appeared at a function in Halifax to talk about Vancouver’s 2010 Olympics. “I thought, ‘I know, I’ll do the first part of the speech in Gaelic.’ So I sweated over it and did the first three paragraphs of my speech in Gaelic, and then the last three.

"When I finished, a guy in the audience came up and said, ‘Nice speech. But your French is terrible.’”