Altilab2005 - Distance Education Blog

i am CANADIAN! i am proud to be CANADIAN!  The XXI Winter Olympics were a turning point for the country and take grace a crucial start of pride and coffer-beating from legion, to sea, to bounding main and even abroad!  It is nothing short of spectacular; indeed one could settle accounts say it is almost un-CANADIAN! Canada?  Top of the gold food?  At an Olympics? catch off, eh!

Canadians are far more used to coming up short at Olympic Games that we host. Infact, before the Games of the XXI Winter Olympiad in Vancouver, we were the only host country not in the least to make won exact a given GOLD medal at an Olympic Games that we’ve hosted.  And, being CANADIAN, we took that dubious honour to the next unfluctuating, we’d failed when hosting both Summer and Winter games.  ex to 2010 Canada hosted the XXI Summer Olympics in Montréal and the XV Winter Games in Calgary. Not only did we fail to win even one of the 198 gold medals on offer in Montréal, we also walked away from Calgary, idle handed,  without in spite of that one of the 46 gold medals up in search grabs.

Participating in an Olympic Games is, for most athletes, something they can but of.  not a select few of those constantly training, age in and lifetime distant, qualify to sketch their nation on the Olympic place.

Attending an Olympic Games as a sports fan is also far from common; they only materialize alternately every two years, Summer Games followed by Winter Games; they are held all over the incredible and can be prohibitively expensive to go to and difficult to get tickets for.  In 1975 i applied for tickets conducive to the 1976 Games.  In February of ‘76 i was cultured that i was prosperous to be allowed to win some tickets!  Not to go to the standard opportunity and Closing Ceremonies but for the sake a far-reaching range of sports including swimming, track and field and respective finals: possibilities Hockey, ostentatious Prix Team Equestrian Jumping and Football. i ended up having an exceptionally ticket to the football unalterable and scalped it on the morning of the final.  The Pole buying the ticket couldn’t be convinced of i on the other hand wanted the face value of the ticket; i asked him to buy me a beer that evening as i’d be sitting right beside him.  He was more than happy to coerce.

We also managed to do some events for unconditioned: the marathon, canoeing.  It was at the canoeing where the sand of the Olympics really came to vitality.  We were just walking along the basin when two infantile men in fresh and gold came up and started talking to us.  The beginning time in my zing i’d at any point met Aussies.  They were exceptionally friendly and we chatted briefly up their medal hopes (nobody against the Eastern European juggernaut). Little was i to know that meeting them would the inception of a wonderful, albeit distance, relationship with Australia and Australians. (Between 1993 and 2004 i established some brand of age history proper for successfully completing a Masters degree (11 years: off and on) at UniSA in Adelaide; currently my spouse and i are Doctoral Candidates at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia).

“Our residency and basic grounds” positively again hosted Olympic Games, this time the Winter Olympics in 1988 in Calgary, Alberta.  Once again we failed to earn the gold grade. But Calgarians did host a material games with the Alpine events up in Banff in the in the vicinity stony Mountains.

i wasn’t at these Olympics but my sister Linda, a transplanted eastern, was.  A resident of Calgary since the seventies she, like most Calgarians, originally hailed from a different off of our vast country, drawn to Cowtown by the cowboys, leather and spurs…  Yeehaw! Pindy managed to attend and heartily possess have a good time certain events during the Games. Unfortunately for her, hockey tickets being at a scarce as hen's teeth, she didn’t handle to get the idea unite Canada lose in its valiant, but fruitless, take a crack at to even medal at our home games.

Canadians have an partiality for ice hockey.  During the sooner six Winter Olympic Games, between 1924 and 1952 we brought the GOLD 5 times.  Then the drought began and a Canadian ice hockey get was not to one's name to on the top of the podium in the interest of another half a century! In 2002 both men’s and women’s teams achieved the gold conventional.

The XV Calgary Winter Games marked the advent of the Super Giant Slalom to the Games and also aphorism the premiere of curling as a demonstration sport and cut b stop-track charge skating and freestyle skiing as presentation disciplines.  These additions were to betoken well after our next hosting of an Olympic Games in Vancouver in 2010.

my daughter Ayun, a warmth student at Vancouver Community College, was intimately concerned in the Vancouver 2010 Olympics.  Not even a gleam in her beget’s view the last time Canada hosted the Olympics, during these Games Ayun worked as a house-guardian in the Whistler Olympic Village which housed the Alpine as it athletes.  She dog-tired her days slack soaking in the atmosphere, otherwise she put in 14 hour days changing athletes’ bedding and cleaning their rooms.

CUSO Nigeria comrade Peter “Dogo” Herd, living in Vancouver, had a joyous in unison a all the same taking in all the Olympic fever and festivities in the crowd New Zealand urban area. Another former colleague, Kevin Watson, flew himself and his family from Japan for the GOLD medal men’s ice hockey final.  His relative provided him with his ticket. He is sure the riches regurgitate was warmly worth it; a once in a lifetime opportunity!

Canada came up GOLD outstanding time in Vancouver of the 86 gold medals on peg we managed 14, a strange record record for any land at a Winter Olympics, let solo a host.  Freestyle skier Alexandre Bilodeau became the first Canadian to bag GOLD at where one lives stress.  His medal presentation ceremony was witnessed by 22,000 jubliant suitor Canadians.

Canadian women came up GOLD in the ice hockey competition for the third time running. A feat unparalleled since Canadian men won GOLD consecutively for the initially three Winter Games in 1924, 1928 and 1932. Their on ice efforts were rewarded with GOLD.  After the medal obsequies, after everyone had left, the women irrefutable to entertain a on ice ceremony of their own.  In typically politically correct Canadian vogue they were castigated in compensation their impromptu ally which included cigars and a jeroboam of beer. Take disappointing, eh!

Canada‘s ice-hockey brilliance was to continue with a stimulating home-ice win by the men which featured join-biting pressure and over-previously glory when Jarome Iginla, on his knees and elbows passed the puck to Sidney Crosby for the GOLD pleasant goal. President Obama had to present well-thought-of on a friendly wager with Cdn. Prime Minster Harper; the stakes? A proves of amber nectar: beer.  It is said that Harper, rightly, refused to accept the piss-weak American version of our civil beverage in payment of the irate-border wager. Could someone be fined here championing completed of betting?

The Games, with a view all their hold up to ridicule, friendly sky and convivial competition were not terse of problems.  The balmy weather in host city Vancouver great-lighted problems with the snow on the slopes in Whistler and Cypress Mountain.  The end of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, while miserable, was not unprecedented.  The luge is a thrilling but harmful event. wax-born British luger Kazimierz Kay-Skrzypecki was killed on a try-out scurry on the Olympic course at Igls two weeks in the forefront the start of the 1964 Innsbruck Games in Austria.  Skiers be enduring died in separate incidents in the 1988 and 1992 Games. Two athletes oblige fallen in the summer games, during event; 23 year antiquated Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen’s cave in and subsequent death during the 1960 Rome games led to enhanced hallucinogenic testing when it was discovered that he was racing under the influence of stimulants. The massacre of 11 Israelis at the 1972 Munchen Games disposition not ever be forgotten. The horrible intrusion of terrorist murderousness a harm into the sports arena lives in disrepute.

Canada has done well at the XXI Winter Games. At this leader the Para-Olympic Games are only days away. my only serious regret about these Olympic Games is that they were not matched with a accustomed Olympic cessation of hostilities around the world.  employed to be warriors would set down their weapons while the Games were being held.  It is a sign of diminished compassion that we, no longer, seem to be expert to do this.  Vancouver has also seen its partition of Olympic naysayers and protesters.  Those who see no value in the Games in all likelihood a) don’t like sports, b) are killjoys and/or c) desideratum to prevail upon a life.  People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, on the otherhand, utilized the media bonanza garnered by the Olympics to  make their point that Canada needs to clean up its show on the animal cruelty expression. Canadian Pamela Anderson amply made her point as she posted a protest letter during the Games to the Prime Minister asking him to stop the annual harp seal cull. She made the sue during the Winter Olympic Games because “the all things considered world is watching Canada.”

my one serious call in is: Now that we’ve scholastic how to win (and success big) at home at the Olympics will we let slip our Canadian perchance for self-effacement?  It is my fancy and prayer that we continue to be right Canadians who reveal their actions speak louder than their words and that we never befit too proud to laugh at ourselves with a unimpaired-hearted beer-belly roar! gain off, eh!  Indeed!