Olympic Sport News

Archive for February, 2010

With the 2010 Games wrapping up, we leave behind our favorite guilty pleasure of the Consortium coverage: Jay Onrait on Olympic Morning.

If you’re a regular viewer of TSN you know Onrait isn’t a sports head. Looking for insightful commentary from the Stanley Cup playoffs or a deep emotional feature on Joannie Rochette? Jay is not your man.

He’s a goofball, and he’s made that his niche on TSN with partner Dan O’Toole, usually around 2 a.m. when few people are tuned in. He goes for cheap jokes and deadpan humor and usually nails it.

So it was sheer brilliance that the programmers moved him out of late night (and into early morning with the 3 a.m. PT start time) and onto the desk with Beverly Thomson and a cast of unsuspecting, half-awake correspondents on Olympic Morning.

Each day, while Seamus O’Regan and Melissa Grelo were chugging coffee on camera just to get moving, and the correspondents were wandering around Robson Square in the darkness wondering why anyone was even awake, Onrait was bringing the funny. Onrait’s act gave Thomson a spark, often cracking her up, and brightening a morning show that too often seemed like an infomercial for eTalk.

Here’s one of his best:

Onrait’s been lighting up Twitter, too. When a fan asked when he sleeps, he replied:

“Commercial breaks when I am not tweeting. Bev sings me to sleep. "Glass Tiger" songs usually.”

The formula came together perfect for Olympic Morning, with the four-hour time difference between coasts, there’s never anything Olympic or event related while Onrait and Thomson were on air. CTV tried to jam the show full of cross-brand personalities, but Onrait’s frat-boy act was the foil that kept the show from becoming “Canada AM goes to the Olympics.”

Even Leah Miller, who’s been hanging around Olympic celebrities for two weeks, said her most memorable part of the games was “being here on Olympic Morning with you, Jay!”

The country agrees, Leah.

Team Canada coach Mike Babcock has gone old-school for the gold-medal hockey game.

One's of Babcock's trademarks is honoring his alma mater, McGill University in Montreal, by wearing a school tie for big games. It's unmistakable, since the school color is a bright, brilliant red.

McGill staff weren't sure if Babcock had taken a lucky school tie with him at the Games. They sent him the traditionally solid navy blue one festooned with McGill crests last week just to make sure.

However, when Babcock appeared for a pregame interview with CTV's Ryan Rishaug, he was proudly sporting a red tie. Perhaps he thought navy blue was too close to Team USA's colors.

Tapping into the McGill connection couldn't hurt. Canada's gold medal-winning women's hockey team included three products of the McGill Martlets women's hockey program, defender Catherine Ward and goaltenders Kim St-Pierre and Charline Labonté, plus assistant coach Peter Smith. You might have noticed that when Dick Pound, a former McGill chancellor, performed the medal presentations last Thursday, he gave each of the three McGill players the two-cheek kiss common in Quebec.

By official count, Babcock's Detroit Red Wings are 5-2 when he wears a school tie. He did not wear one during the Wings' loss to Sidney Crosby's Pittsburgh Penguins in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final.

Final score: Canada 3, USA 2 (OT). Sidney Crosby scores the golden goal 7:40 into overtime. Gold medal to Canada, silver to the United States.

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Please join yours truly and the usual gang of knuckleheads from Yahoo! Sports' Puck Daddy hockey blog and Fourth-Place Medal Olympic blog for complete coverage of this remarkable moment for hockey. Who will be the next Eruzione for the USA? Who will make the difference and bring the gold back to where hockey is "their game?"

No Canadian athlete defined grace under fire during these Games better than Joannie Rochette, which makes her a perfect choice to be Canada's Closing Ceremony flag bearer. 

It was evident in the reverence shown by some of the other medalists present in the CTV studio Sunday afternoon, as they spoke of how the 24-year-old figure skater was able to win a bronze medal in the days after her mother, Thérèse Rochette, died of a heart attack.

One could get the sense they all were in awe, wondering if they would be able to bear up as well under the same straits. Olympic athletes lean on their families for an awful lot, perhaps more so than most young adults, so the impact was undeniable.

It was never about the medal; as you've heard a hundred times, it was about finishing the competition standing. And yet hers may well be the most celebrated bronze medal in the country's Olympic history, with all due respect to Silken Laumann (who overcame a devastating injury to win a sculling bronze in the 1992 Barcelona Games).

Some will say, well, there was a symbolic value to Alexandre Bilodeau being the first Canadian gold medalist of the Games. Charles Hamelin was the only double-gold winner. For sheer dominance, there was curling skip Kevin Martin.

But selecting Rochette sends a perfect message. The country has been unfairly maligned for having a win-at-all-costs approach, and at times we have veered close to being ugly Canadians (cheering misses in curling). Sunday night, through Joannie Rochette, Canada gets to show it is never just about the color of the medal. Rochette has become a national treasure.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Legacy is the buzzword for the Olympic movement.

To win a Games, host cities must not only lay out a plan for the venues they’ll put in place for the 17-day sport festival, they have to say what they’ll do with them afterward. What the IOC is trying to avoid is cities building billions of dollars worth of new facilities that have no practical use for a community after the Games.

Witness the Beijing Bird’s Nest. An architectural masterpiece and the site of some of sport’s greatest triumphs. Now, it struggles to attract even tourists.

The venues that Vancouver built for the 2010 Games are mostly being converted over into community centers. With world-class facilities already in Calgary for disciplines like speedskating, there didn’t seem to be much of a point to leave many of them up and running. 

There was some grousing about the curling venue, though. VANOC decided to only build a facility that could seat about 6,000 people – the curlers said they could sell tickets to twice that for the Games. But the city didn’t need another 12,000 seat arena. Instead the venue will now become an aquatic and community center, replacing an older facility.

But what most people are talking about in terms of post-Games legacy for the city isn’t the infrastructure – it’s the energy.

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson had already been musing before the Games about how to leverage the energy they were creating, and that was just in terms of using the volunteers.

It’s become far bigger than that. Thousands of people are packing downtown nightly. Ridership on public transit has skyrocketed. How do you, can you, keep that going?

As VANOC chief John Furlong said to Robertson the other night: “You can have your city back but I don't know what you're going to do with it because it's changed."