Canadian Medal Winner Appreciation

[Hartamophone]

Nice goin', Jennifer Heil!

(Personally, I think it's all in her choice of ski brand, but that's just me).

Wicked good to start off with a gold on day one. Here's hoping there are at least 20 more medals to come.

[SmoothedShredder]

That was great to see. Nary a dry eye in the house say for the cat. Anyone hear the announcer say Jenn was from the US when they invited her up to the podium! That reaction was truly Canadian.

[Hartamophone]

That was great to see. Nary a dry eye in the house say for the cat. Anyone hear the announcer say Jenn was from the US when they invited her up to the podium! That reaction was truly Canadian.

I thought that was hilarious. The CBC announcers completely missed it, but her face was priceless. They did correct it immediately, though.

Edit to add: I also dug how she hopped the boards in true Canadian fashion to hug her coach. Great shift, Jen!

Edited February 11, 2006 by Guest

[fluffhead77]

nice one ms. Heil...go team canadia

[Whitey]

Great start to Day 1!!! She did an amazing job. It is great to get a gold early in the Olympics. I hope this is the start of good things to come in Torino.

[afro poppa]

Awsome to watch...good to see lots of support for our Candian comrades over in Italy

GO CANADA GO

[Prost]

Right On!!

GO CANADA!!

[mister slippery]

not a medal but on our way.

womens hockey, 16-0 over italy.

[StoneMtn]

Yep! We're pretty excited for her in this town.

Her success was posted on signs all over Whistler / Blackcomb Mountain today.

:thumbup:

[Hartamophone]

Cindy Klassen - Bronze. Niiiiiice.

Edit to add: And a silver, too!

Edited February 21, 2006 by Guest

[Hartamophone]

Beckie Scott (who I am pretty much full-on in love with) and Sara Renner - silver. Beauty.

[badams]

Beckie Scott (who I am pretty much full-on in love with) and Sara Renner - silver. Beauty.

Great sportsmanship from the Norwegian coach who gave Sara a new pole after hers broke. That was nice to see.

[Hartamophone]

Bronze for Anouk Leblanc-Boucher

Four medals and counting...

[StoneMtn]

[color:green]Canadian wins gold :thumbup: for Australia :thumbdown:

Vancouver native who competes for Australia wins gold in men's freestyle moguls

SAUZE d'OULX, Italy (CP) - Dale Begg-Smith, a Vancouver native who competes for Australia, won the Olympic men's freestyle moguls event Wednesday, while Marc-Andre Moreau of Chambly, Que., finished fourth.

Moreau was sitting third with a score of 25.62 points until Begg-Smith, skiing last, nailed his run and clinched the gold with a 26.77.

Finland's Mikko Ronkainen took the silver at 26.62 while American Toby Dawson earned the bronze at 26.30.

Alexandre Bilodeau of Montreal finished 11th at 23.42 and Chris Wong of Prince George, B.C., 14th at 22.88.

Moreau qualified third earlier in the day, while Wong qualified ninth and Bilodeau 11th.

http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Skiing/2006/02/15/1444336-cp.html

[StoneMtn]

Canadian men and women both won silver.

Melissa Hollingsworth-Richards won a bronze in the skeleton.

3 medals for Canada today.

Our hockey team is up 3-0 over Germany about 1/2 way through the second period.

http://p206.ezboard.com/fupstreamdiscussiongroupfrm2.showMessage?topicID=1607.topic

[Jaimoe]

I'm watching Emmanuel Sandu's skate right now. It's painful.

[Lazlo]

Male figure skating = Moose knuckle

[Hartamophone]

Damn, what a day!

Jeff Buttle - Bronze. Nice one, although too bad for Emmanuel Sandu - he waited a long time for this.

(Incidentally, it's pretty tough to find a shot of a male figure skater that doesn't leave itself wide open for ridicule, as evidenced above).

Men's Pursuit Team - Silver

Women's Pursuit Team - Silver

Mellisa Hollingsworth-Richards - Bronze. You gotta respect a lady who brings the heat in head-first luge.

[StoneMtn]

BARDONECCHIA, Italy (Reuters) - Switzerland's Tanja Frieden grabbed an unlikely victory in the women's snowboard cross on Friday after race leader Lindsey Jacobellis of the U.S. fell on the final straight.

World champion Jacobellis was well ahead but stumbled and skidded off the course after the penultimate jump, allowing Frieden to sneak through for gold. Jacobellis recovered to take silver while Canada's Dominique Maltais claimed bronze.

Maltais had smashed into the fence but managed to continue to the line. However, compatriot Maelle Ricker, who had looked imperious in her earlier races, fell awkwardly early in the final and received medical attention on the course.

Steady snowfall had slowed the qualifying times but the sun came out for the latter stages, where several riders bumped into each other and crashed in the four-woman races on the narrow, winding course littered with jumps.

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=winterOlympics&storyID=2006-02-17T141700Z_01_L17613818_RTRUKOC_0_US-OLYMPICS-SNOWBOARDING-CROSS.xml

In case anyone cares, both Dominique and Maelle are physiotherapy patients of my fiancee, "Lassie". [color:purple]Ya, that's right, you can thank Lassie for that bronze.

(It is really too bad about Maelle. She just returned from winning the X Games, and was expected to win last night.)

[PalacePrincess]

so what happened with emanuel sandhu? i missed his skate.

[Jaimoe]

so what happened with emanuel sandhu? i missed his skate.

For Sandu, it was the usual: A routine wrought with passivity and embarrassing mental breakdowns.

[StoneMtn]

Snowboard hot-dogging costs U.S. a gold

By Eddie Pells

The Associated Press

BARDONECCHIA, Italy – Alone in the clear, Lindsey Jacobellis could have practically crawled to the finish line and won.

After an Olympic-sized flub, she probably wishes she had.

Coasting to what should have been a runaway victory today, the 20-year-old American grabbed her board on the second-to-last jump before the finish line. Inexplicably — and some say inexcusably — she fell.

"I was caught up in the moment," Jacobellis said.

While she scrambled to her feet, Switzerland's Tanja Frieden caught up and sped past Jacobellis to become the first champion in the strange and wild sport of Olympic women's snowboardcross. Jacobellis settled for silver.

Then, the debate began.

"She definitely styled that a little too hard," U.S. snowboarding coach Peter Foley said, after looking at a frame-by-frame breakdown of the jump taken by Associated Press photographers.

Jacobellis was so far ahead as she approached the fateful jump that Frieden couldn't even be seen in the early frames of the AP photo breakdown.

So, the question is, should Jacobellis have gone for the so-called "backside method grab" she attempted at the end — a trick she rarely tries and one that included a flashy 60-degree twist right in front of the grandstands?

To many, it was blatant hot-dogging. In the moments after the race, Jacobellis insisted it was pretty much standard operating procedure and that she did it only to "create stability."

A few hours later, in a conference call, she held to that point, but also conceded there might have been some showboating going on.

"I was having fun," she said. "Snowboarding is fun. I was ahead. I wanted to share my enthusiasm with the crowd. I messed up. Oh well, it happens."

She went tumbling after the jump, which she had executed cleanly in her four previous runs through qualifying and the early rounds of finals.

Foley fell to the ground in shock. Jacobellis' family and friends, dressed in funky red-white-and-blue hats in the stands, stared at the finish line with their mouths agape.

"She just tweaked it too hard," Foley said after looking at the AP photos. "Definite styling on that jump. That's a good stable grab but she pulled it across too far, definitely, for it to be safe."

Of course, even the most rigid of riders would admit that snowboarding is about style. Jacobellis fits that mold. She was ubiquitous on Visa commercials back in the States, has done her fair share of photo shoots and doesn't shirk from the publicity that comes with being one of America's stars in the sport.

In the leadup to the Olympics, Jacobellis also had dreams of competing in the halfpipe, where the kind of grab that cost her on the snowboardcross course is much more common.

So, trying to finish with flair might not have seemed so out of line, especially given the lead she had.

Men's gold medalist Seth Wescott does it and so does his flashy teammate, Nate Holland.

"She's 20 years old," Foley said. "If she got caught up in the moment, she got caught up in the moment. It's not the end of the world for me. When I saw her go off the jump, I didn't see anything weird about it. I didn't go, like, 'Oh, no!' Especially because Nate and Seth grab method almost every run."

Wescott, who was on hand, said indeed he does go for style — just not in the most crucial of situations.

"Sometimes it's subconscious, but that was putting on a show," Wescott said. "You've got to choose your time and make sure you don't miss."

Wescott is Frieden's boyfriend and his opinion may not have been completely objective.

But he was hardly alone.

"You're not supposed to grab your board," Canadian bronze medalist Dominique Maltais said. "It's not a halfpipe race, it's just boardercross."

And American Jayson Hale: "It's kind of a little victory thing. And when you've got that much of a lead at the end, you throw in something for the crowd, for fun. It happens. Just not at the Olympics and not when you've got a medal in your hand."

Jacobellis got the medal, only a different color than it probably should have been.

She didn't feel her finish — the Lindsey Leap — reflected poorly on Americans.

"I don't think that at all," she said. "Just because we win a lot doesn't mean we're showboating."

Maybe the oddest part of the whole day was that the key sequence came with Jacobellis all alone, not bunched up in the crowd, which is when the memorable moments are supposed to come on a snowboardcross course.

In this sport, four riders take off from the starter's gate and go shoulder-to-shoulder through the 1,000-yard, high-banked, narrow track. Wild crashes are common.

At the beginning of the final run, there were some more traditional thrills and spills.

Canadian Maelle Ricker, the fastest woman in qualifying, came off a jump, rotated awkwardly, caught her backside edge on the landing and smacked her back and head onto the ground. She was taken off the course on a stretcher and flown to a hospital in Turin, and was later released with no major injuries.

A few moments after that wreck, Maltais lost her balance and careened into the netting after a jump.

Those wrecks made it a two-woman show, though really, it wasn't even that.

As she approached the fateful jump, Jacobellis had a bigger lead than anyone in any heat, men's or women's, in two days of racing in the newest, wildest sport on the Olympic program.

All over but the shouting, they say.

"But sometimes," Maltais said, "things like this happen in snowboardcross."

And because of it, Jacobellis had a lot of explaining to do.

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

[Hartamophone]

Been a few days:

Canadian Women's Hockey Team - Gold.

After the way this tournament started out, I was glad to see someone beat one of the superpowers, and have the final game relatively close, score-wise (even if it was because Canada eased up). Nicely done, ladies!

Pierre Lueders and Lascelles Brown - Silver.

[Hartamophone]

Dominique Maltais - Bronze

Damn, snowboard cross is an awesome sport to watch.

Duff Gibson and Jeff Pain - Gold and Silver, respectively, in skeleton.

Fourteen and counting....

Edited February 21, 2006 by Guest

[Rossolee]

For those on the board that know my buddy Pounder. His sister Cheryl

won a gold medal yesterday with the Womens Hockey Team! It was very

cool to see her on the cover of the Star today!! She's #11