Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics

Well time for another blog post, finding any spare time these days has been difficult however things seemed to have gotten back to normal, for now anyways.
Vancouver 2010, I think these games have surpassed the rush of excitement that the Calgary 1988 winter games had, the media is reporting that the excitement world wide is similar if not better then the Sidney summer games of 2000. The Vancouver games definitely started off a little rough with the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili the luger from Georgia, I’m glad they had a moment of silence during the opening ceremonies for him. Then there was the issue of the warm winter we’ve had here in B.C., caused by a stronger then normal El Nino, they had to truck in snow from Manning park a few hours away. Regardless of the difficulties Vancouver has done a fabulous job of hosting these games and in the eyes of the rest of the world they have been spectacular winter games. Canada has pulled off a record for the most gold winning performances for a hosting country, which is great considering that prior to these games Canada had not achieved a gold metal while hosting the games. Other things that made these games so good was the way Canada included the native community, in almost every aspect of the games the level of native involvement is impressive. In the opening ceremonies the way they mixed in the traditional dancing and banging of the drums and all the various native symbolisms was great. One thing I was totally impressed with is the way the metals were designed each metal is a piece of a larger picture and each athlete who wins a metal gets a scarf with that picture so they can see where there metal fits in to that picture. Some of the metals are from a picture of a four-sided box symbolizing treasure and the native art on the box is of the Orca whale symbolizing power. Other metals were of a picture of the Raven symbolizing strength and the native artwork contained handles throughout representing sharing and helping, all in all very cool. Well of to watch the gold metal game between Canada and the United States (expected to be the most watched television program watched by the entire world in history) and then the closing ceremonies.