0—Odds that Canadian legend Kevin Martin, aka "The Old Bear," aka "K-Mart," was not going to bowl a bulls eye at the buzzer against an upstart Norwegian team in the first-round of the men's curling tournament. C'mon. They don't call you "The Old Bear" if you can't curl.
9—Number of goals by which the Canadian women's ice hockey team beat the Swiss women's team the day after we saw the Swiss women's team lose to Sweden 3-0.
I think what happened there was, those girls were probably just good athletes who were recruited by the Swiss Olympic Association to train for the women's ice hockey tournament. I don't actually believe the Swiss players grew up on skates, hockey sticks in hand, playing pick up on ponds in their little Swiss mountain hamlets, and I seriously doubt there's much of a girls' youth hockey culture in Switzerland, whereas the Canadian players obviously grew up with the game. Isn't ice hockey basically a Canadian sport? Nobody even cares about hockey in the US—so why would the Swiss?
I mean, I'm happy those girls found a way to participate in the Olympics and experience the Games (even if it meant taking a humiliating drubbing at the hands of the Canadians), which, lets be honest, probably would have been much worse had the Canadian women not been so heavily criticized for their merciless, unsporting 19-0 blow out of the Slovakian team one day previously. On the other hand, we paid more than one hundred dollars to watch what, to me, looked like a college intramural game in terms of the skill level and athleticism on display.
Maybe the Swiss could have invited a few of their friends and relatives to watch their games, but to charge the public $100 for a ticket to see two teams which were basically in Vancouver for no other reason than to play Washington Generals to the Canadian women's team's Harlem Globetrotters, is a rip off. Honestly, I wouldn't pay a hundred bucks to see Carmelo Anthony, who's not only a world class athlete but was basically born with the rock in his hands, play basketball. I might pay around $40 for a Nuggets game, maybe.
Lets put it this way—when IOC President Jacques Rogge claimed in the Opening Ceremony that the Winter Olympians were the "best athletes in the world," for accuracy's sake he should have added, "Well, except for Swiss women's ice hockey."
5—Number of crown and cokes I drank on Monday in downtown Vancouver. (Around five. It might have been more, I can't remember.)
5 or 6—Number of people I saw inside the fence taking pictures of themselves with the Olympic cauldron in the plaza next to the Convention Centre that was supposedly closed for security reasons, when I went back to check if the cops had manned up and opened the thing on Sunday. Who were those guys? Like politicians or the relatives of some television anchor or high level policeman? I'd like to know just how is it that the Canadians were sure those people weren't just as much of a threat to vandalize the Olympic flame as I was?
Oh, now they open it! I guess they were waiting until I left.
6—Number of times I was questioned, patted down, had my bags searched, and had to walk through a metal detector (counting at the border). If it's a totalitarian police state you're after, why go all the way to North Korea? Just go to the Olympics! I'm guessing London will be even more fun, cuz England actually has real, dangerous enemies (and probably deserves them), unlike the wholly imaginary threats to Canada behind the smothering security overkill in Vancouver.
Too much—The amount of credit Canadians give themselves for being such nice and polite people. They made a big deal out of this in the Opening Ceremony, when the fat open mic night quality poet was claiming the words "please and thank you" could define Canadians. Not in my experience.
For myself, I heard a lot of sullen anti-Americanism expressed in Vancouver. On the subway and in restaurants and stuff where they knew Americans would be around to hear it, I heard lots of people openly dissing the US—claiming that we'd rigged the bidding for some construction project or that we'd rented them a bunch of broken down buses or whatever. Wah wah wah. What a bunch of crybabies.
It's funny how Canadians feel so intensely about us. I hardly ever think about Canada at all. Canada is about as big a preoccupation of mine as like, North Dakota or Siberia.
It's just not very high on the list of things I worry about.
Updated—
2/3—Number of medals out of the total possible won by the United States in the Women's downhill, one of the prestige, glamor events of the Winter Olympics, yesterday. Who Pwns the Podium now, huh?
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