Live from Men's Downhill at Whistler Creekside
WHISTLER, B.C.
(UPDATED BELOW at 5 pm Pacific time.)
Live here at the men's downhill, one of the Winter Olympics' glamour events and on the alpine calendar, the most glittering.
Great day for it, too: 0C, overcast. Good-sized crowd arriving by chairlift up the finish area at the foot of Creekside's Dave Murray course.
Weather conditions are good - and a field of 64 starts flying down the hill here at 1:30 p.m. Eastern. Follow along with me on Twitter. I'll be back after with a post off the action here, where Manuel Osborne-Paradis is Canada's leading hopeful against the likes of favoured Didier Cuche of Switzerland and Michael Walchhofer of Austria.
Here's your first look up the mountain at Creekside, from the finish area halfway up the hill:
They weren't quite doing that, but the first man down Creekside's course named for the Crazy Canuck Dave Murray assesed the visibility thusly: "I had no frickin' visibility," said Sweden's Patrik Jaerbyn.
Manuel Osborne-Paradis's radio report up to the Canadians at the start area was along the same lines - "Dark and bumpy," he warned, and seemed glad to put the experience behind him.
But it wasn't just vision that was erratic (and the sun did come out for a bit, ). The Canadians said they felt different, the pressure of being their own backyard affecting them in different ways. Osborne-Paradis, the top hope going in - he was third on the odds board, anyway - said he didn't sleep well and was jittery all morning. Robbie Dixon, even more of a Whistler local than Osborne-Paradis, caught himself coming out of the gate and nearly fell then went down for good at a spot aptly called Double Trouble.
Even Erik Guay, who finished fifth, said he didn't start feeling comfortable until 30 seconds or so into his run. "It's just a shame (the finish) wasn't 200 metres longer."
Look for Osborne-Paradis to improve greatly in Friday's Super-G, after a 17th-place finish in this race. He won a World Cup event in that discipline earlier in the year, and "I feel better now," he said in the finish area, "I feel - angry."
Related: Final results. Switzerland's Dider Defago takes gold, Bode Miller of USA second and in between them...
Silver medalist Aksel Lund Svindal of Norway, during his post-race press conference, made sure everyone in the house would understand how sweet his silver medal was, and just who was behind denying him access to the Olympic course last spring: "The Canadian team, and Alpine Canada, are great to work with. Erik Guay gave me a great report on the hill here. I want to thank the Canadian ski team. It wasn't them who kept me off the hill. It was VANOC, Own the Podium, or something."
Dave Perkins has more.
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