Let the Games End

Tonight is the closing ceremony at the Vancouver Winter Olympics. And, in case you didn't hear about the gold medal men's hockey game . . . Canada won.

In overtime.

I'd like to thank the following people who inspired me in covering these Winter Games: Calixa Lavallée, Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier, and Robert Stanley Weir, for writing the stirring words and music for the Canadian national anthem, which I got to hear a lot; ice dancer Tanith Belbin, for being hot; halfpipe snowboarder Shaun White, for simply being on fire; the U.S. ski team, for winning all those medals, particularly in Nordic combined, and sticking it to the Austrians, but especially: Julia Mancuso, for also being hot, and Lindsey Vonn, for being hot and blonde.

Special gratitude goes to the Canadian hydraulics engineers who screwed up that fourth arm of the indoor cauldron at the opening ceremony, if only to prove that Americans aren't the only ones who screw up with things like this; the Vancouver organizing committee, for not thinking to invite Chilliwack to play at either the opening or closing ceremony, and; the United States Olympic Committee, for being too busy being dysfunctional and arrogant to interfere with their own athletes. Special thanks go also to the former Soviet republics of Estonia and Kazakhstan, the only countries to rank lower in the medal count than the United Kingdom, so my four British friends don't have to be completely humiliated by the British presence in, ironically, British Columbia.

My friend Mackenzie Reide, who is from Vancouver but did not go home to watch the Games in person so she could continue pursuing her writing career in New York, hopefully read some of this blog and felt like she was home as a result. I dedicate this Winter Olympics commentary to you, Mackenzie.

Finally, a heartfelt and completely irrelevant and irreverent tip of the hat to Janis Kipurs . . .

. . . the aforementioned Latvian bobsledder who competed for the Soviet Union in 1984 and 1988, who in 1988 won the gold medal in two-man bobsledding and bronze in the four-man competition and provided me with such a wonderful name to whimsically riff off, and who, in 1846, invented the sewing machine. :-D ;-)

By the way, who won curling? :-D

On to Sochi in 2014.