Vancouver 2010 - My Top 10 Favourite Olympic Moments

Well, it's over...two weeks of turning the TV on at 9am for Olympic Morning with Jay and Bev, Jeff, Seamus and Melissa and leaving it on all day, through James and Lisa and Michael Landsberg on Olympic Daytime and Brian Williams on Olympic Primetime. It was quite a couple of weeks, full of emotional moments. Here is my own top 10 list of best Olympic moments (taking for granted that watching the coverage with my brand new son tops the list). Some of these involve the news people; but I figure that's okay, since they were the lens through which many people saw the Games:

10. Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir singing the anthem, with real feeling, after winning their gold in Ice Dance.

9. Clara Hughes reacting before Kristina Groves when Kristina won the bronze medal. She's a true team player.

8. Jay Onrait. Dude is funny!! Oh, and seeing Bev Thompson, serious news lady, break down into giggles more than once during the show:)

7. Sven Kramer apologizing to the volunteer he assaulted after his crushing disqualification from the 10,000m race. He was understandably upset and reacted with anger; but when he calmed down, he manned up and apologized, both privately and publicly. Well done.

6. Sid the Kid, with a pass from Iginla, scoring Canada's winning goal. How many records did we break with that game/medal? I'm sure that one of the records will be "most records broken in a single game".

5. The Bilodeau family.

4. Most honest reactions to winning gold: Jon Montgomery and Jasey-Jay Anderson (who asked Lisa LaFlamme if we could all vote to extend the Games...I guess that's what happens when your event is on the second-last day!)

3. How emotional Lindsey Vonn got when she won gold - I was expecting aloof and superior so it was nice to get soft and cuddly from her.

2. That one of our gold medal winners was Mike from Canmore. If CBC'd been doing the coverage, I believe in my heart that this would have been mentioned.

1. Charles Hamelin and Marianne St-Gelais. They're just cute.

Honourable mention: the curling fans breaking out into the anthem, and Kevin and his team waiting for them to finish, during the gold medal match, before throwing the next rock.

Oh, and I love that we all know so much now about speed skating and skeleton, cross-country skiing and snowboard cross. I guess that means that the commentators were doing a good job!

Here's a list of unfortunate things about the Games (and the coverage), just so I don't seem like I'm ignoring the crappy stuff:

1. Michael Landsberg's unfortunate puffy suit jacket thing that he kept wearing on air. I liked his segments, especially when Kelly Vanderbeek and John Kucera were on; but that jacket was not fit for TV.

2. Apolo Ohno blaming his disqualification in the 500m on a Canadian judge. Not cool man. You pushed Tremblay away from you and you got caught. How many medals have you won because of other skaters breaking the rules? Don't be a bad sport - you're such a gifted athlete.

3. The rivalry between Julia Mancuso and Lindsey Vonn. You're on the same team - act like it. And if this trash talk and rivalry was something created for the media, that's even worse.

4. Brian Williams, who is a respected and experienced sportscaster, mispronouncing all kinds of names during his broadcasts. Doesn't he have an earpiece in with a producer on the other end telling him this stuff? And this was not just a French/English thing...he was butchering all kinds of names!

I'm sure that I'll post this and then think of all kinds of other moments that made me laugh or cry. These Olympic Games were spectacular and galvanizing for Canada. I wonder what observers from around the world thought?