Photograph by: Paul Chiasson/CP (left), Scott Olson/Getty Images (middle), Mark Blinch/Reuters (right)
Later that evening, a composed Joannie Rochette sealed the deal in the women’s long program. Skating to Camille Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah, she wobbled early, but finished strong. Her free-skate score of 131.28, and total of 202.64, secured third spot on the podium, and perhaps the greatest ovation ever accorded a bronze medallist. “I just went out there and did what my mother would have wanted me to do,” she said afterwards. “My mother always wanted me to be a strong person. She was my biggest fan but at the same time the most critical person you could ever meet.” Rochette laughed. “Tonight she was telling me, ‘What went wrong with that triple flip? It looked so good in practice.’ ”
Could this really be happening to Canada? Medals coming so fast and furious that it was hard to celebrate them all. On the final Friday night, the men reported for duty. Miraculously avoiding a pileup at the last turn of the short-track 500-m race, Charles Hamelin took the gold. The jingoistic cherry on top for the screaming fans at Pacific Coliseum came when U.S. superstar Apolo Anton Ohno was disqualified for bumping, and Canada’s François-Louis Tremblay was awarded the bronze. A half-hour later, another short-track gold, as Hamelin, his brother François, Tremblay and Olivier Jean outhustled the defending Olympic champions, Korea, by 0.222 seconds. The Americans took bronze.
Short-track supremacy, and the general climate of success, took some of the sting out of an epic choke on the curling sheet. Up 6-4 on her last shot in the tenth end of the Olympic final, Team Canada skip Cheryl Bernard missed an open hit and let Anette Norberg and the Swedes steal two to tie the game. In the extra end, the unthinkable happened again, as Bernard, this time holding last rock, missed a straightforward double takeout, losing the game and the gold. The silver didn’t hang easily around her neck. When she met the media the next day, the 43-year-old Calgarian said she had spent a restless night, replaying the match in her mind. “I threw those shots over and over again, and I made them every time.”
But nothing could put a damper on this party, including an all-too-close call against the Slovaks in the semifinals of men’s hockey. Up 3-0 with less than 10 minutes to play, Team Canada took its foot off the pedal. Lubomir Visnovsky scored to make it 3-1. Then, with five to go, Michal Handzus made it a one-goal game. With the Slovak goalie on the bench and an extra attacker on the ice, Canada barely survived the final seconds. A sprawling Roberto Luongo got just enough of his glove on a shot by his Vancouver Canucks teammate Pavol Demitra to deflect it wide. Canada would play for gold.
Canada was in uncharted territory. As the final Saturday of the Games dawned, the country already had 10 golds, tying the Norwegians in Lillehammer, and the U.S. in Salt Lake, for the most ever won by a winter host nation. And equalling Canada’s best-ever Olympic showing at the boycott-thinned 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games. The 11th came just before 2 p.m., at the Richmond Oval. The unheralded men’s pursuit team of Denny Morrison, Lucas Makowsky and Mathieu Giroux took an early lead on the Americans, and never looked back. Their victory lap wasn’t even completed when 34-year-old Jasey-Jay Anderson made it 12, winning the parallel giant slalom snowboard race at Cypress, finally grasping an Olympic medal in his fourth Games.
Kevin Martin and his rink nailed lucky 13, with an emphatic 6-3 victory over Norway’s Thomas Ulsrud, and his team’s unspeakably garish pants. At the Whistler Sliding Centre, Lyndon Rush, Lascelles Brown, David Bissett and Chris Le Bihan took a bronze in the four-man bob, Canada’s second-ever in the discipline, and first in 46 years. It probably should have been silver. Rush’s sled finished with a four-run total of 3:24.85, just 0.01 seconds behind Germany 1, piloted by three-time gold medallist André Lange. The Americans took the gold. “That shows how good he is,’’ Rush said of his German counterpart. “He struggles and wins a silver medal, and I have great runs and get a bronze.’’ Still, it was no time to be greedy. The medal, Canada’s 25th, eclipsed the Olympic high-water mark set in Turin four years ago. Vancouver 2010 was now officially our best-ever Games. Home-field advantage confirmed.
The victory celebrations, large and small, carried on into the wee hours. Just after 2 a.m., a happy, Twitter-organized mob descended on Vancouver’s Granville Street, carrying portable stereos. They tuned their radios to the same station and waited. When the opening chords of Bryan Adams’s Summer of ’69 spilled into the cool night air, they started dancing. Soon hundreds more pedestrians joined in. How could a self-conscious city and country ever have come to this? Could it ever get better?
Yes. Hockey gold.
