A Recap of the 2010 Olympics

Well, the Olympics have been over for a couple of weeks and should give my views of what happened.

I'm going to start off with the positives of what happened at the Olympics and then get to the negatives.

There were lots of positive things coming out of these Olympics, whether it be Canadians actually stepping up and not choking on a big stage taking home the most gold, athletes redeeming themselves after a bad race and coming back to win in another event, the patriotism Canadians showed that even took American speed skater Shani Davis by surprise. But I am just going to list them here:
1. The hockey: The only major team sport at the Winter Olympics did not disappoint, big hits, big goals, and unbelievable saves.
2. Jon Montgomery: Canadian athlete who won gold in the skeleton was very charismatic and even ended up on Oprah.
3. Stephen Colbert: Enough said
4. The closing ceremonies: Everyone remembers the gaffe of the fourth arm not working and they were able to make fun of that and let Catorina Lemay-Doan light the cauldron

There were lots more that are there but I am not going to try and write a novel.

The Negative:
1. The exploitation of the death of Joannie Rochette's mother: I am not bashing her performance, or that she skated. All I am saying is that the media just put too much into this and didn't allow her a moments rest, especially after she won the bronze medal. Watching her do interviews it looked like she just wanted to go and be alone or at least not have cameras shoved in her face.
2. The announcing: I called this before the games began, at least they let Chris Cuthbert call the gold medal game but they stuck him with Pierre Maguire (Oh well, I guess I can't have everything), there is a lot more here that I could talk about but that is an entire novel.
3. The death of the Georgian luger: Not much more needs to be said here
4. The between period analysis on TSN and CTV of Men's Hockey: Nick Kypreos continually made his points very easily and expertly and made Darren Pang and Bob McKenzie look like complete fools for talking as hockey experts.
5. The singing at the opening ceremonies: Whether it be the obvious link sync of Bryan Adams who didn't have the microphone up to his mouth at the start of the song, K.D. Lang destroying a Leonard Cohen masterpiece, or Nikki Yafonsky singing of O Canada making a four year old's attempt Nessun Dorma sound like Pavarotti, the singing sucked, period. And here is another question, why was there no Ben Hepner (native British Columbian opera singer), Shania Twain, Avril Lavigne, hell, I would have taken Celine Dion over K.D. Lang.
6. The hosts that were in the International Broadcast Building: I was able to watch Olympic events on CTV and NBC and the hosts were awful, the exceptions to this were James Duthie and the morning hosts on CTV and Al Micheals on NBC. Lisa Laflamme was awful at best, Brian Williams (Canadian) was reminding me of the Canada-Soviet brawl in the '80s at the world juniors, Bob Costas was plain boring, and I can't remember the name of the person who did the Olympics on NBC after Costas but she could have used some lessons and she might have been decent.
7. The Canadian song for the Olympics: If you haven't heard it, don't. Every time I heard this song I thought a castration would be less painful. These guys even have the best song for hockey at there use and don't use it before any of the games (Yes, the original Hockey Night In Canada theme). Instead we get stuck listening to an Ontario girl who probably has connections to CTV singing on of the worst songs to ever be recorded.

There are more but I don't want to torture you people any further than this, you don't want to read all day, so take care and Happy St. Patty's day