So Much Olympics!

I have never in my life watched this much Olympics coverage. It's crazy. We're probably watching 7 hours a day on average, and that's if there isn't something important on that we've scheduled in to watch live (or 'live replay' the following morning). I've always loved the Olympics, and have always been happy to watch just about whatever sport is on, but now that my schedule is completely flexible (and Derek is home, too), and we have a PVR (one of those HD digital boxes that tapes tv shows automatically), there's just so much to watch and a fair number of hours in which to watch it!

I think some of my favourite moments have probably come from the Snowboard Cross and Ski Cross. It's so exciting to watch, and so wild, that I find it hard to believe that they haven't had it as part of the Games before. And to finish it off with a gold for Canada was the icing on the cake. We're watching a ton of sliding sports: luge, 'bob-skeleton' (where the Brits won their 9th gold ever at a Winter Games, so you can imagine how many times they've brought that up!), and 'bobsleigh'. There's been a good amount of short-track speed skating, although not as much long-track and thus we didn't see our Canadian skater win. There's been a lot of curling coverage too, even though the British teams aren't very good, and they've only shown our apparently excellent Canadian curling team when we're playing the Brits (or, really, the Scots). Curling's fun -- it's pretty much the only time that we hear the familiar Scottish accents from both the athletes and the commentators.

I should mention that I've learned that my use and understanding of the word 'athlete' is different from the BBC commentators' use of the term. I guess here it means a former track and field participant, rather than a generic term for someone who plays sports. I discovered this while watching the two-man bob-sleigh. The commentators regularly told us of the brakeman's former sports background, such as rugby, 'American football', weight lifting etc. And then a bunch of them were labelled as 'former athletes', which I still find a rather amusing title, as they are obviously still amazing athletes in my sense of the word.

We're still getting excellent coverage of important matches and sports thanks to BBC's red button coverage, which streams up to 6 sports at a time all day and night. One advantage to BBC's Olympic Coverage is that, since BBC does not have commercials (a privilege we all pay for annually through our £100+ tv licenses) their Olympics coverage doesn't have commercials either. This makes events such as the Opening Ceremonies wonderful, since you're not worrying about missing anything and you're not taken away from the atmosphere of the show, but it can be a bit boring during the skiing and hockey games as everything is put on hold for 2 minutes for the North American broadcasters to fit in their advertisements. We end up watching replays and funny shots of the crowd or the athletes (there's that word again!) for the break.

I'm so proud of how well Canada is doing. Our ice dancers were absolutely beautiful in the final performance, and I'm not a big ice dance fan at all. The Canada-US hockey game was a tough moment, but I'm very proud that they've pulled themselves back together and started working as a team to defeat Russia so spectacularly. We were told that 11 million Canadians tuned in for the game on Sunday night -- that's amazing! And it must have been absolutely devastating! I can't wait for the women's gold medal game, which we'll watch live tomorrow morning on the replay (I just can't stay up until 3pm!). And fingers crossed for our men to do as well. From the stats it looks really good for our curlers, too, so I hope that we'll continue to get coverage of that even though the British women are out and the men are on the border. So we may not be home to feel the Olympic fever, but we're still shouting and jumping off the couch in celebrations here, too. And boy, would another gold or two feel great!