An otherwise impressive and extremely tasteful opening ceremony for the Summer Olympic Games is marred by the spectacle of 1000’s of athletes marching into the stadium waving and/or talking on their cell phones. Meanwhile, the Canadian contingent does us something less than proud as they marched in decked out with hats perched sideways, swinging our flag in a spastic, epileptic fashion and proudly displaying other Canadian flags that were disrespectfully scribbled over in a graffitiesque signature fashion. Canada sent 332 athletes which was the 7th largest contingent at Beijing. We finished 14th out of the 204 countries in attendance by walking away with a total of 18 (3 gold, 9 silver and 6 bronze) medals. Hard to say how many of the 18 medal winners were phoning it in with the adolescent opening day gangsta mob we saw, but I know for a fact that at least one of the gold medalists wasn’t – because he was a horse.
Suggestion for our 2012 Olympic Committee (from a reasonably successful albeit unpaid championship athlete and coach): It might be an interesting exercise for some university psychology major and/or whoever is responsible for selecting and funding our next army of Olympic hopefuls to review the films of the 2008 opening ceremonies to determine who was focused on the events to come and who was already celebrating (as in the “what are you trying to celebrate” sense of the word) the pinnacle of their 15 minutes of Olympic fame.