Olympic Rings in Whistler for Vancouver 2010

Where were you when the puck dropped?

On Sunday night at 11pm I was sitting on my couch, wine in hand- ready to chug the bottle if things turned blue and yellow.

Obviously hockey is huge for us Canadians and the Olympics are a time when all the enormous talent we rent out to every American NHL team (seriously, 53.3% of players are Canadian with Americans contributing only 23.9% of their own homegrown to the league) get to come home and show off. My Facebook feed advertised Canadians (and some honorary Canadians) in over ten different time zones, spanning from 4am in Vancouver to 11pm in Canberra, drinking… and watching the gold medal game. For those of you who don’t know, Canadian liquor laws were relaxed just for the event and establishments were allowed to sell alcohol before the watershed 11am time. Which meant that many of my friends were lining up to get into bars and having an obligatory Molson with their breakfast and hockey.

Of course, we needn’t have been on edge. The Canadians played an aggressive defense that was impenetrable by the Swedes, Price caught everything flicked his way, while the forwards shot across that ice scoring a goal in each period.

My favourite Olympic memory so far is watching the 2010 gold medal game in a cramped bar full of ex-pats in London, UK…. the story ends with the three of us conducting a crowd in a rendition of O Canada– outside Canada House in Trafalgar Square– from the top of a double-decker bus…. but I’ll save that for another day.

But alas, the Winter Olympics are over, and Canadian modesty returns in full for another four years.

Fun Fact: there are 55 songs on my iTunes that have “gold” in the title or artist name.

This one’s pretty self-explanatory:

“Number 1” by Goldfrapp