O, Canada!
Wherever you are in the world, you might think that the recent very ugly Stanley Cup Finals were representative of my hometown of Vancouver and of Canada in general.
Wipe that condescension and disdain off your face. Have you forgotten that just a year and a half ago, you were fawning over how absolutely glorious our Olympics where? They also took place in Vancouver, you know.
On this Canada Day, I have chosen to honour one of my favourite moments of the 2010 Olympics: the free dance of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the Canadian Olympic ice dance champions.
Because everyone loves a back story, especially for the Olympics, here it is. Tessa and Scott have been skating together since childhood. They were world junior champions in ice dance and debuted spectacularly at the senior level by finishing sixth at the worlds in 2007. They then made the leap to second in 2008, and complimented their silver medal with a bronze the following year. They were one of the contenders for the 2010 Olympics, having won numerous pre-Olympic meets in the 2009/2010 season. They faced stiff competition from their American training partners Meryl Davis & Charlie White, their teammates Tanith Belbin & Benjamin Agosto, and the Russian world champions Oksana Domnina & Maxim Shabalin. This does not include the French, British and Italian couples nipping at their heels.
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| In the preliminary compulsory dance |
By the time of the final free dance, the Canadian Olympic team had collectively taken a bit of a beating. The ambitious “Own the Podium” program was designed with the goal of putting Canada atop the medal rankings with the most medals. It was the midway point of an Olympics darkened by the death of a Georgian luger on the day of the opening ceremony, a lack of snow in what became a record warm winter for the city of Vancouver, and a respectable but unspectacular medal tally for the Canadian team at that point. A rather nasty British journalist sensationally wrote that these Olympics were about to become “the worst ever”, and we were just barely halfway. This was Monday, February 22, 2010.
Then Tessa and Scott took the ice.
Somewhat unexpectedly the leaders going into the free dance, Virtue & Moir were predicted to win a medal, but a lot of prognosticators had forecast silver or bronze for the team, behind the Americans and / or Russians. The country was hungry for a moment to really shine and gain momentum.
What happened next was sheer magic. The clip is below.
