The risk of aiming high

By Ken MacQueen with Nancy Macdonald, John Geddes and Jason Kirby - Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment

Throughout this premature Vancouver spring, The Question has preoccupied Canada’s sporting press: can this country still “own” the Olympic podium by topping the medal count? The medal performance anxiety issue is raised daily, in all its variations, to the increasingly tense executive of the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC), and to the frustration of some athletes.

On Sunday, an exasperated COC president Michael Chambers said this, in steering the question into more favourable winds: “We’re going to win more medals. Canadians aren’t all mathematicians or accountants, they’re not just counting up medals. They’ve embraced the wave of the Games.”

By Monday, after a disappointing weekend—a men’s hockey loss to the U.S., and unexpected medal shutouts in men’s ski cross, men’s speed skating, and men’s short track—reality set in: top spot was impossible. Canada entered competition Monday tied for fourth—four gold, four silver and one bronze—15 behind the leading U.S. Our ice dancers Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir added a gold that night, and Ashleigh McIvor won another on Tuesday in ski cross, but Canada was still far back of the U.S. “We are going to be short of our goal, I readily admit that,” said Chris Rudge, the former Quebecor executive who serves as CEO of the Olympic committee.

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Top 10 best moments of the Vancouver Olympic Games

By macleans.ca - Sunday, February 28, 2010 at 9:05 PM - 4 Comments

This best-of list does not specifically include Canada’s medallists. They deserve celebration, but are a bit too obvious, and too numerous to address, here.

Top 10 worst moments at the Vancouver Olympic Games

By macleans.ca - Sunday, February 28, 2010 at 9:00 PM - 13 Comments

The death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili is notably absent from this list. We at Maclean’s felt that such a tragic event had no place in such a lighthearted recap. Please see our magazine article, Who’s to blame, for our report on Kumaritashvili.

Does drinking six beers make the skeleton interesting to watch in person?

By Scott Feschuk - Saturday, February 20, 2010 at 8:33 PM - 18 Comments

Let’s be honest: a lot of the Olympic sports being contested up at Whistler are not exactly spectator friendly. People in Vancouver get big-time hockey and a close-up view of skiers performing approximately 28 body rotations off the freestyle ramp. We get to watch various international specks fly off distant ski jumps, and glimpse cross-country skiers for whole seconds at a time before they disappear into the woods.

And then there are the sliding sports, which are all high-speed flash on TV but in person are like buying a ticket to watch a sneeze.

Which got the scientist in me to wondering: Would drinking six beers make the skeleton more interesting to watch in person? (FYI, the scientist in me is an alcoholic.)

In the name of advancing human knowledge, I conducted my selfless experiment.

Purpose: To see if drinking six beers would make the skeleton interesting.

Method: Drink six beers. Watch the Olympic men’s skeleton live at the Whistler Sliding Centre.

Materials: Media pass to enter Sliding Centre. Six 355 ml beers purchased over 109 minutes at the official Olympic concession stand (Brand: Molson Canadian. Total cost: $39). One Continue…

Jon Montgomery rides the slipstream into gold

By Nicholas Köhler - Saturday, February 20, 2010 at 1:22 AM - 4 Comments

For sheer breakneck drama, not much could beat it.

The man we’ll now forever know as Monty charged down the corridor of ice at the top of the Whistler Sliding Centre track and hopped on that speeding bullet with all the economy and aplomb of a gunslinger drawing his pistol.

Jon Montgomery, the second-to-last to race in the men’s fourth heat—to be followed by front-runner, Latvian Martins Dukurs—got off to a half-second lead over his nearest competitor, Russian racer Alexander Tretyakov.

Then, flying down the ice, Monty started spinning his magic, stretching the yeast of that .5 lead into .6, then .7 until, slipping into home, he stood to wait for the final time.

When the 1.06 he now held over Tretyakov popped up on the screen, the Canadians in the crowd went mad. Montgomery had secured the silver, that was for sure, but what would Dukurs do?

The Latvian, 25 and the skeleton man to beat, started off strong, maintaining a lead of a quarter of a second or so.

Then he hit a wall—what he would later call his “black corner”—oozing ever so sluggishly out of the seventh turn. As the crowd watched Dukurs lead bleed away, the Latvian sped late into the ninth corner.

Standing by a huddle of Canadian reporters as Dukurs slipped through a massive band of white on the jumbotron above, Jeff Pain, the 39-year-old vet who’d finished his final Olympics in ninth place, gasped: “He’s got the gold!” he said of his teammate.

For Pain, who lost the top spot on the podium in Turino to fellow Canadian Duff Gibson, picking up silver, and who will now retire, this was a bittersweet occasion. Teammate Michael Douglas had earlier that night been disqualified, over the trifle of failing to remove the sheaths from his runners. And Mellisa Hollingsworth, favoured to medal in the women’s, had clunked in at fifth.

Now, with Dukurs race over, the final pronouncement: on screens around the sliding centre, a +.o7 slipped into view.

Watching 30-year-old Montgomery—a prairie kid from southwest Manitoba going against the grain of geography by throwing himself into the steep dives and wicked turns of skeleton—recognize his golden moment, Pain had come to the end of the line.

What next? “Who knows? Ballroom dancing? Curling? Something,” said Pain.

And what next for Montgomery, a used car salesman and auctioneer with a maple leaf tattooed over his heart?

“I’ve got doping, then I hope a beer, then tomorrow’s a blank slate. It’s a good unknown. I’ll take it any day.”

So will we.

Jon Montgomery

By Shanda Deziel - Saturday, February 20, 2010 at 12:58 AM - 0 Comments

Mellisa Hollingsworth deals with a pertinent question

By Nicholas Köhler - Friday, February 19, 2010 at 11:10 PM - 10 Comments

Mellisa Hollingsworth was doing a poor job of fighting back tears, finishing up her media-imposed analysis of what must be one of the worst days of her life—coming a dismal fifth in the women’s skeleton tonight after arriving as a very strong medal favourite—when she was surprised by a most unexpected query.

“Mellisa,” came a voice from the fringes of the scrum. “I have a different type of question for you. Do you still identify with your Estonian roots?” The question came from an older woman surrounded by a group of imposing men. “We are Estonian media,” she explained.

Who knew that Hollingsworth, the 29-year-old who grew up in a rodeo family from Eckville, Alta., was really an Estonian. For a second, Hollingsworth, standing in the cold of the media corral at the Whistler Sliding Centre, didn’t seem to know either.

She had started the evening off behind a couple of imposing Germans and the U.K.’s Amy Williams, after the first two heats last night. But on her sled—built by her cousin Ryan Davenport, a Canadian skeleton legend himself, and called, like a long-shot horse that delivers big on the betting track, White Lightening—Hollingsworth still seemed to have much left in reserve.

She’d had a strong season, destroying any contender on the World Cup circuit and taking seven podium finishes in eight races, along with two gold medals, wearing a helmet emblazoned with the image of a horse’s skull. And here she stood in tears, a bronze winner in Turino with such high hopes for more now left with nothing, those two Germans, a lightning-fast elfin Brit and an American ahead of her.

“Do you still identify with with your Estonian roots?” The Canadian media had dealt with Hollingsworth like fragile crystal, but nothing had prepared her for this. “I’m Canadian,” she said, holding aloft a small Canadian flag.

Then, just as quickly and with no further discussions, Chris Dornan, who handles media for the sliding sports, amongst other things, grabbed her arm and she was gone, striding past a query asked at precisely the wrong time. Down at the end of the press box, where the athletes go alone, Dornan gave her a long hug.

Great moments in placards

By Nicholas Köhler - Friday, February 19, 2010 at 8:05 PM - 0 Comments

Leave it to the Brits to boil a word down to its diminutive essence and then take their shirts off. “Shelly on her belly winning gold in the skelly,” read one sign, held aloft by a no-doubt hard-nippled group of cold English youngsters, a tribute to the sledding excellence of the UK’s Shelley Rudman. Rudman is seventh in the race after her third heat. “Skelly” and “belly,” meanwhile, will soon become part of the lexicon at Masters and Johnson.

Winning form: The game plan

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Can the opening ceremonies beat Beijing’s?
Céline Dion, Bryan Adams, or (God forbid) both? The Internet is abuzz with rumours about what may be in store for the 60,000 lucky souls who will attend the Vancouver 2010 opening ceremonies at B.C. Place, and billions more around the world who will tune in on TV. But verifiable details about the Feb. 12 spectacular are few and far between, despite the participation of close to 4,000 volunteers and months of rehearsals.

David Atkins, the executive producer of the show, will only allow that Canada’s two official languages and many First Nations will be reflected in the content. And that it won’t be as clichéd as the ice floes, Ski-Doos and hockey players that were Canada’s contribution to the closing ceremonies in Turin in 2006. “What we’ve aimed to do here is try and create something which is more reflective of Canada and hopefully a little more perhaps emotionally engaging,” he told the media last month.

Organizers have been actively dampening expectations since Beijing’s never-to-be-duplicated 20,000-person extravaganza in 2008. But surprises are surely in store. Atkins used horses to make the Olympic rings in the show he produced for his native Australia at the 2000 Games. At the Asian Games in Doha in 2006, he used elephants. B.C. Place underwent $8.3 million in renovations for the Games, including, it has been reported, the installation of a cauldron in the floor. The budget for the opening and closing ceremonies in Vancouver is $40 million. That could buy a lot of dancing bears.
—Jonathon Gatehouse

No more playing Mr. Nice guy
If it’s true that nice guys finish last, Canada, in the run-up to Vancouver, is looking golden. In fall, when speed skaters from several countries were denied access to the Richmond Oval, comedian Stephen Colbert called on “Saskatchewhiners” to “unclench their frosty sphincters and let Americans onto their oval.” Colbert isn’t the only one claiming we’re being total iceholes. We’ve been taken to task the world over for abusing our status as Olympic host by “playing nasty,” and “zealously” restricting access to Games venues by foreign athletes.

Shelley Rudman, who won Britain’s lone medal in Turin (a silver) in the skeleton, told the BBC that while Canadian athletes have logged a “phenomenal” number of runs on the sliding track at Whistler (widely considered the world’s most treacherous and technical course), she’s barely had a crack at it.

Brit curlers have made similar noises. And at the unfamiliar Whistler downhill track, which was built at a cost of more than $100,000, several foreign medal contenders were recently left huddling along the safety fencing, watching a rote training session by the Canucks—who have used it for two seasons. Indeed, Ron Rossi, the executive director of U.S.A Luge, told the New York Times that Canada’s “lack of sportsmanship” has even undone a decades-old, open-access agreement between the Canadian and U.S. luge teams; most Canadian sliders, the U.S. noted, took 60 to 100 practice runs ahead of Salt Lake.

But will Canada’s podium-at-any-cost approach make it rain gold? It just might. The hundreds of runs Canuck sliders have logged at Whistler will attune them to every inch of the difficult track. Same goes for skiers, who’ve deployed GPS to track the optimal route to the bottom at the Whistler downhill. Speed skaters have had 16 months to acclimatize to the new oval in Richmond, where they live and train: they’ve learned, for example, that the Olympic surface is neither as hard nor as fast as in Calgary, favouring strong, technical skaters—but shh: don’t tell the foreigners!

Canada has never won a gold at home, never heard O Canada sung at a medals ceremony, and taxpayers have dumped more than $100 million to see the Maple Leaf tower above the flags of other countries in Vancouver. The race for the Lady Byng this is not. The Canadian team has set a target of 35 medals for Vancouver, 11 more than in Turin, its best finish ever. If what the Wall Street Journal calls our “aggressive, new attitude” seems un-Canadian, perhaps it’s just not one we’ve so brashly displayed before.
—Nancy Macdonald

Retailers are all geared up
Despite the fact that the Hudson’s Bay Co. paid $100 million to be the official merchandiser of the Vancouver Games (and the next three Olympics), many other Canadian businesses are capitalizing on the event by issuing their own products. So far the retailers have gotten away with it by avoiding the O-word. Lululemon is selling “Cheer Gear!”—its line includes hockey-helmet-like toques and “Cheer Me On” mitts and scarves—under the coy banner: “Cool Sporting Event That Takes Place in British Columbia Between 2009 and 2011.” And Roots, previously an official Olympic outfitter, has its “International Collection” of hoodies, T-shirts, scarves, toques and leather items, featuring the flags of many countries vying for gold this month.

Angered by the brazen merchandising campaigns, Olympic organizers have reportedly sent letters to retailers, calling for “better sportsmanship.” But even with all the added competition, the official Olympic merchandise has hardly been overlooked: as of mid-January, 1.5 million pairs of red mittens had been sold; organizers boasted that they were more than halfway toward their $500-million goal in revenue.
—Cathy Gulli

Even Volunteers are hitting the gym
The process of picking volunteers for the Games has been quintessentially Canadian in the level of diplomatic decorum used: the 25,000 volunteers selected for the Olympics and Paralympics represent more then 60 ethnicities and languages. There are roughly equal numbers of senior citizens and young and middle-aged people. And volunteers come from every part of Canada, as well as many of the countries competing for medals. Thirty-one per cent of volunteers speak French, demonstrating a “commitment to both official languages,” says Erin Sills, spokesperson for the Games.

Volunteers share an earnest reverence for the Olympics. Diane from Toronto—she won’t share her last name or age for fear of jeopardizing her position on the alpine ski crew—has spent months preparing. “I’ve been training hard, and going to the gym several times a week,” she says. “You have to be pretty athletic to withstand these conditions.” She’s right: volunteers must commit to 13 shifts, which last up to 10 hours each. They also have homework: Diane has to read a 60-page manual that details “the venues, safety, jobs, what to do and what not to do,” she says. But she doesn’t mind.

“Even though I’ll never be an Olympic athlete,” she says, “I get to experience the Olympics in a different way.”
—Cathy Gulli

Good business for First Nations
The Olympics are an appetizing target for groups seeking international attention, and few causes in Canada draw the global gaze like unresolved Aboriginal land claims. Why, then, aren’t native groups making the most of their opportunity? Because organizers in Vancouver and Whistler wisely brought them into the fold, declaring the Lil’wat, Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people to be the “Four Host First Nations” of the 17-day celebration, and sharing in the promotional and financial spoils. About $54 million in construction contracts has gone to Aboriginal-owned businesses, while visitors will find a $3.5-million First Nations pavilion at the centre of Vancouver, spotlighting Aboriginal artworks, businesses and culture. Native leaders and artists have played a part in everything from the design of the medals to the torch relay.

The deal has its critics—even within the four participating nations. One organization calling itself the Olympic Resistance Network has criticized the Games as a waste of money better spent on housing and health care for Aboriginals, attracting limited attention in the international media. But on the whole, natives in British Columbia seem upbeat about the Games, hoping their prominent role in the event will help break the stereotype that one leader describes as “the dime-store Indian, just beads and feathers.”
—Charlie Gillis

Canada's Olympians: Jeff Pain, Skeleton

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment

Aly Pain loves her husband in his uniform. For years she has asked him to wear it—a spandex one-piece that leaves nothing to the imagination—on Valentine’s Day. Alas, Jeff Pain, skeleton racer and Torino silver medallist, has barely spent a Valentine’s at home since he started competing in 1995. His success on the international circuit has meant penury and conjugal strain. And despite her husband’s impressive physique, Aly has wanted out of the marriage three times since their 1997 wedding, at which Jeff—with impressive prescience—chose AC/DC’s Highway to Hell for their first dance.

She first asked him to leave not long after the cost of underwriting his exploits on European skeleton runs forced her to a Calgary pawnshop. “I had already pawned some watches and, ironically, my 1988 Winter Olympic special edition Walkman,” she writes in a self-published book she has co-authored with Jeff, The Business of Marriage & Medals, set for release after the Olympics. “It had to be something that cash converters would see as value and take. That meant electronics, tools, cookware.” For a time they lived on just $20,000 a year, from which Jeff financed his forays to skeleton hotspots in Germany, France and Austria. Meanwhile, Aly remained home and alone, her job repairing medical equipment barely making a dent in the couple’s debt load and expenses. One worried friend pushed a wad of twenties into her hand: “It was enough to buy food for me for two weeks.”

Yet she maintains the couple’s marital woes were less about money than her husband’s overweening devotion to his sport. As early as the couple’s honeymoon in Australia, she writes, Jeff’s monomania rankled. Counting what money remained them on their final night in Sydney—would it be enough for one last romantic meal?—Aly turned on him: “I told Jeff we wouldn’t always have to plan so carefully if he didn’t always take what he wanted first.” Later, during a 22-hour flight home during which they did not speak, Aly experienced an ugly epiphany: “His thing came first,” she writes. “I sat there thinking, ‘I hate you so much.’ ”

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The tally

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, January 24, 2010 at 1:55 PM - 208 Comments

With 51 precincts reporting specific estimates—restricting the count to media-reported figures and, where available, police counts—it’s possible to account for approximately 21,000 anti-prorogation protestors at yesterday’s rallies. Continue…

Olympic secrets: Athletes bank on a lotus leaf

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, January 11, 2010 at 5:43 PM - 6 Comments

The lotus leaf has a curious property, it doesn’t get wet. Water drops bead into perfect spheres, suspended by the air trapped in billions of nano-sized hairs. What’s that have to do with Olympic athletes? Well, water equals friction and friction is the enemy of speed, and speed is the stuff of Olympic glory. And so it was that a team of University of British Columbia engineers signed on to the Top Secret Program with a mandate both simple and complicated: make Canada’s athletes go faster.

If the “hydrophobia” (water repellency) of the lotus could be applied to sled runners, skates and ski bottoms, athletes could achieve higher speeds with less energy. “The idea was to mimic Mother Nature,” says engineering professor Savvas Hatzikiriakos. Researcher Anne Kietzig, who specializes in metals, began treating alloys with a laser from the university’s physics department. “You get different structures depending on the speed and the energy used by the laser,” she says. The result, viewed under an electron microscope, was a series of micro-level bumps covered in even smaller ripples measuring 500 billionths of a metre—a metallic lotus leaf.

The plan was to send this metal out to be coated with a water repellant surface, but a strange thing happened: the metal blades coated themselves. “What I initially did was just leave my samples lying around in the lab, not really paying attention to them for three weeks and all of a sudden they were hydrophobic, which we didn’t expect” says Kietzig. The treated blades bonded with carbon from the air, creating an ultra-water repellant surface, one that can reduce drag on ice by as much as 30-60 per cent.

So far, the governing bodies for bobsled, luge and skeleton won’t allow the treated runners to be used in competition. The break-through also came too late to be incorporated by Canada’s speed skaters at the 2010 Winter Games. But insiders say treated blades are likely to be used by Canadian skaters in the future. Meantime, Kietzig is happily slipping out of the lab in February to volunteer at the Olympic speed skating oval in Richmond.