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Their joy, ebullient and unbridled, is often expressed through tears. The emotion can be so raw and so genuine it’s contagious, causing eyes to well from coast to coast in chest-swelling moments of national pride.
Canadians don’t win many gold medals at the Summer Games, the winter’s ice and snow are much more suited to our athletic ethos. We’ve managed just three in each of the last four hot-weather Olympiads.
But the rarity makes those victories more memorable and it is often the reaction of the athletes, whether choking up on the podium or haltingly expressing their excitement and gratitude during media interviews that etches the moment of triumph into our collective consciousness.
“It’s joy beyond what joy could ever be imagined to feel like,” says Kyle Shewfelt, the gymnast who nailed a gold medal worthy floor routine at Athens in 2004.
It is one thing to witness the celebration but, according to a few recent Olympic champs, the feeling of winning on the Olympic stage ranges from the obvious elation to a sense of relief and disbelief. Those tears were just part of a roiling cauldron of emotions.
“The moment itself is just so big,” says Mark Tewksbury, who won gold in the 100-metre backstroke in 1992 at Barcelona and is in London as Canada’s chef de mission for the Games.
“It’s incredibly emotional. It just is. You’ve put everything into something for so long and your heart is just exposed. It’s just so completely overwhelming emotionally. Your defences are so down after you’ve done a performance like that — you’ve hopefully left it all on the field of play — you don’t have that wall that keeps those kind of emotions from spontaneously bursting out.”
Tewksbury recalls, when he was on the podium, he tried to sing along with the national anthem but, after just a few bars, his lips started to tremble and the tears flowed.
Shewfelt, too, was flooded with emotion while on the podium. As the Canadian flag raised and “O Canada” played, the image of himself as a youngster predicting this very success kept flashing through his mind.
“I had that vision, that picture of the little boy that had the dream,” he recalled of his thoughts while hearing the anthem. “The 6-year-old that started gymnastics, I kept getting that flashback. I kept seeing that little person version of myself that told a reporter when I was 9 that, ‘I want to go to the Olympics and win.’ It was a surreal feeling.”
“Those memories came flooding back. It was like a film strip of your life playing on a very, very fast repeat.”
Larry Cain, who won a gold medal in the 500-metre canoe race at the Los Angeles Games of 1984, tells of a very different feeling when he was on the podium. The anthem couldn’t end quick enough.
“There’s an irony to it,” he said. “You work for so long to get there and I remember standing on the podium and I couldn’t wait to get off. I was looking out (at the spectators) and seeing all these people that had meant something to me and had helped me along the way. It had been their dream as much as much as mine. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy standing there and hearing our national anthem but I couldn’t wait to get off, run over and share it with them.”
Among the, perhaps, unexpected feelings that surface in an athlete’s moment of joy is a mix of relief that it’s over and apprehension about what comes next. There can even be a sense of sadness with the finality of a championship, especially if an athlete knows retirement is around the corner.
In 1988, Carolyn Waldo clearly recalls the taxi ride to the broadcast centre in Seoul where she and partner Michelle Cameron were to be interviewed by Brian Williams after their victory in the synchronized swimming duet.
“You’d think we would have been laughing and talking, just euphoric. If anything, I think people would have been shocked by our demeanor in the back of the vehicle because we didn’t know what to say. It was like, ‘Now what do we do with our lives?’” Waldo recalls.
“You really come down. At least that was my experience. It was like being hit with a ton of bricks after that elation of being so high. Then you get really low. It was also bittersweet because we knew it was the end of our career.”
Even amidst his “overwhelming pride” at being Canadian, Shewfelt also recalls battling some of those same nagging apprehensions about the future.
“There’s such a buildup for years and years and years … then when it does actually happen, the way you envisioned, all of a sudden there’s a little voice on your shoulder that says, ‘Okay, you did it, now what?’” he recalls.
Cain remembers feeling an odd sense of detachment from his accomplishment as the tried to process it. Though, at only 21, he knew he had years of paddling ahead.
“You need time to put some context to it,” he said. “I remember thinking ‘Yeah, I did it,’ then sitting back and thinking, ‘What the hell did I just do? Did I really just do what I wanted to do for the last eight years?’ For eight years of my life, it’s what I’d dreamed about. You pinch yourself. You try to figure out whether it’s really happened or whether it’s just another dream.”
No matter what their feelings in the moment, there is commonality among gold medal winners from the past. They all feel a bond with anyone who wins now, sort of a golden connection across the years. They look at them and see themselves.
“I think that every Olympic athlete, Canadian especially, that’s had the pleasure and privilege to win a medal for our country, does have that flashback to the moment,” says Shewfelt.
“It’s part of the legacy. I know I was inspired by Mark Tewksbury, by Silken Laumann, by Marnie McBean, by Catriona Le May Doan. All of them helped me to shape into the athlete that I became. So, I guess you feel you played a small part in (current winners). It’s that succession.”
Lori-Ann Muenzer, who won a cycling gold in the sprint event in 2004, says she gets extremely emotional when she watches the Olympics and sees a Canadian standing at the top of the podium.
“There’s just so much pride, sometimes it’s extremely hard to speak. I usually hope there’s a box of Kleenex around,” she said. “You know the work that’s gone in. You know the time. You know the commitment. You can imagine the sacrifice. The average person just can’t fathom that load. You just feel proud.”
Canadians don’t win many gold medals at the Summer Games, the winter’s ice and snow are much more suited to our athletic ethos. We’ve managed just three in each of the last four hot-weather Olympiads.
But the rarity makes those victories more memorable and it is often the reaction of the athletes, whether choking up on the podium or haltingly expressing their excitement and gratitude during media interviews that etches the moment of triumph into our collective consciousness.
“It’s joy beyond what joy could ever be imagined to feel like,” says Kyle Shewfelt, the gymnast who nailed a gold medal worthy floor routine at Athens in 2004.
It is one thing to witness the celebration but, according to a few recent Olympic champs, the feeling of winning on the Olympic stage ranges from the obvious elation to a sense of relief and disbelief. Those tears were just part of a roiling cauldron of emotions.
“The moment itself is just so big,” says Mark Tewksbury, who won gold in the 100-metre backstroke in 1992 at Barcelona and is in London as Canada’s chef de mission for the Games.
“It’s incredibly emotional. It just is. You’ve put everything into something for so long and your heart is just exposed. It’s just so completely overwhelming emotionally. Your defences are so down after you’ve done a performance like that — you’ve hopefully left it all on the field of play — you don’t have that wall that keeps those kind of emotions from spontaneously bursting out.”
Tewksbury recalls, when he was on the podium, he tried to sing along with the national anthem but, after just a few bars, his lips started to tremble and the tears flowed.
Shewfelt, too, was flooded with emotion while on the podium. As the Canadian flag raised and “O Canada” played, the image of himself as a youngster predicting this very success kept flashing through his mind.
“I had that vision, that picture of the little boy that had the dream,” he recalled of his thoughts while hearing the anthem. “The 6-year-old that started gymnastics, I kept getting that flashback. I kept seeing that little person version of myself that told a reporter when I was 9 that, ‘I want to go to the Olympics and win.’ It was a surreal feeling.”
“Those memories came flooding back. It was like a film strip of your life playing on a very, very fast repeat.”
Larry Cain, who won a gold medal in the 500-metre canoe race at the Los Angeles Games of 1984, tells of a very different feeling when he was on the podium. The anthem couldn’t end quick enough.
“There’s an irony to it,” he said. “You work for so long to get there and I remember standing on the podium and I couldn’t wait to get off. I was looking out (at the spectators) and seeing all these people that had meant something to me and had helped me along the way. It had been their dream as much as much as mine. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy standing there and hearing our national anthem but I couldn’t wait to get off, run over and share it with them.”
Among the, perhaps, unexpected feelings that surface in an athlete’s moment of joy is a mix of relief that it’s over and apprehension about what comes next. There can even be a sense of sadness with the finality of a championship, especially if an athlete knows retirement is around the corner.
In 1988, Carolyn Waldo clearly recalls the taxi ride to the broadcast centre in Seoul where she and partner Michelle Cameron were to be interviewed by Brian Williams after their victory in the synchronized swimming duet.
“You’d think we would have been laughing and talking, just euphoric. If anything, I think people would have been shocked by our demeanor in the back of the vehicle because we didn’t know what to say. It was like, ‘Now what do we do with our lives?’” Waldo recalls.
“You really come down. At least that was my experience. It was like being hit with a ton of bricks after that elation of being so high. Then you get really low. It was also bittersweet because we knew it was the end of our career.”
Even amidst his “overwhelming pride” at being Canadian, Shewfelt also recalls battling some of those same nagging apprehensions about the future.
“There’s such a buildup for years and years and years … then when it does actually happen, the way you envisioned, all of a sudden there’s a little voice on your shoulder that says, ‘Okay, you did it, now what?’” he recalls.
Cain remembers feeling an odd sense of detachment from his accomplishment as the tried to process it. Though, at only 21, he knew he had years of paddling ahead.
“You need time to put some context to it,” he said. “I remember thinking ‘Yeah, I did it,’ then sitting back and thinking, ‘What the hell did I just do? Did I really just do what I wanted to do for the last eight years?’ For eight years of my life, it’s what I’d dreamed about. You pinch yourself. You try to figure out whether it’s really happened or whether it’s just another dream.”
No matter what their feelings in the moment, there is commonality among gold medal winners from the past. They all feel a bond with anyone who wins now, sort of a golden connection across the years. They look at them and see themselves.
“I think that every Olympic athlete, Canadian especially, that’s had the pleasure and privilege to win a medal for our country, does have that flashback to the moment,” says Shewfelt.
“It’s part of the legacy. I know I was inspired by Mark Tewksbury, by Silken Laumann, by Marnie McBean, by Catriona Le May Doan. All of them helped me to shape into the athlete that I became. So, I guess you feel you played a small part in (current winners). It’s that succession.”
Lori-Ann Muenzer, who won a cycling gold in the sprint event in 2004, says she gets extremely emotional when she watches the Olympics and sees a Canadian standing at the top of the podium.
“There’s just so much pride, sometimes it’s extremely hard to speak. I usually hope there’s a box of Kleenex around,” she said. “You know the work that’s gone in. You know the time. You know the commitment. You can imagine the sacrifice. The average person just can’t fathom that load. You just feel proud.”
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What happens if you wear a Pepsi T-shirt to the Coke-sponsored Olympics
The British Olympics minister has delivered the definitive ruling on whether you can wear a Pepsi T-shirt to the Coca-Cola-sponsored Games.
If it’s just you, fine, said Hugh Robertson. If it’s you and your friends, no.
If one person turns up in the wrong cola T-shirt, “he or she will be allowed in,” Robertson explained.
“They will only not be allowed into the park if they come in a group and an individual’s clothing turns into ambush marketing.”
Coke has paid $1.1 billion to be the official cola of the London 2012 Games, and there are rules to protect that.
“It might look draconian, but no one has ever been prosecuted,” the minister said.
Pepsi has won itself a weekend of intense and free advertising after Lord Sebastian Coe, chairman of the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, told an interviewer, “You probably wouldn't be walking in with a Pepsi T-shirt because Coca Cola are our sponsors.”
International Olympic Committee chairman Jacques Rogge was forced to try to clarify this week, saying, “If you come with a T-shirt and it is not exactly the T-shirt of the sponsor in the venue, they will not forbid you from entering the stadium. If it is a major attempt to do ambush marketing on a major scale then, yes, we will intervene.”
Robertson and Rogge did manage to spell out the Olympic dress code without actually saying the word “Pepsi.”
But a Google search on “Pepsi” and “Olympics” now returns 16 million hits. Priceless.
Top Stories:
The British Olympics minister has delivered the definitive ruling on whether you can wear a Pepsi T-shirt to the Coca-Cola-sponsored Games.
If it’s just you, fine, said Hugh Robertson. If it’s you and your friends, no.
If one person turns up in the wrong cola T-shirt, “he or she will be allowed in,” Robertson explained.
“They will only not be allowed into the park if they come in a group and an individual’s clothing turns into ambush marketing.”
Coke has paid $1.1 billion to be the official cola of the London 2012 Games, and there are rules to protect that.
“It might look draconian, but no one has ever been prosecuted,” the minister said.
Pepsi has won itself a weekend of intense and free advertising after Lord Sebastian Coe, chairman of the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, told an interviewer, “You probably wouldn't be walking in with a Pepsi T-shirt because Coca Cola are our sponsors.”
International Olympic Committee chairman Jacques Rogge was forced to try to clarify this week, saying, “If you come with a T-shirt and it is not exactly the T-shirt of the sponsor in the venue, they will not forbid you from entering the stadium. If it is a major attempt to do ambush marketing on a major scale then, yes, we will intervene.”
Robertson and Rogge did manage to spell out the Olympic dress code without actually saying the word “Pepsi.”
But a Google search on “Pepsi” and “Olympics” now returns 16 million hits. Priceless.
Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest man and face of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, vows to make a dramatic statement at the London Games and seal his legacy with the 100 metres event looming on Aug. 5.
“This will be the moment, and this will be the year, when I set myself apart from other athletes in the world,” Bolt told the Guardian newspaper in London.
“A lot of legends, a lot of people, have come before me. But this is my time.”
The 25-year-old Jamaican has struggled recently and he’s already lost this year to his compatriot, friend and rival Yohan Blake.
Two months ago, Bolt ran the worst 100-metre race of his professional career and recorded a time of 10.04, winning despite failing to break 10 seconds for the first time in three years.
Then he lost last month in the 100 to Blake, who won in 9.75, 0.11 faster than Bolt. Later, Blake defeated Bolt in the 200 metres, a distance over which the Olympic champion had been considered “unbeatable” for years.
“It gets annoying but, after a while, you get used to people making their own comments and just judging you,” Bolt said. “But I’m always positive. I know what I want. I know what I am capable of. But it makes you stronger when you have to work so hard to get better and you have to go through all these trials. So I don’t stress. I just focus on what is necessary.”
Bolt is eager to prove his doubters wrong.
“I’ve been saying this for years,” he told the Guardian. “This will be the moment . . . this will be the year . . . this is my time.”
RELATED:
Jamaican sprint factory producing some of the fastest runners on Earth
Sprinting giants U.S., Jamaica renew rivalry
Jamaica has high hopes for its athletes
“This will be the moment, and this will be the year, when I set myself apart from other athletes in the world,” Bolt told the Guardian newspaper in London.
“A lot of legends, a lot of people, have come before me. But this is my time.”
The 25-year-old Jamaican has struggled recently and he’s already lost this year to his compatriot, friend and rival Yohan Blake.
Two months ago, Bolt ran the worst 100-metre race of his professional career and recorded a time of 10.04, winning despite failing to break 10 seconds for the first time in three years.
Then he lost last month in the 100 to Blake, who won in 9.75, 0.11 faster than Bolt. Later, Blake defeated Bolt in the 200 metres, a distance over which the Olympic champion had been considered “unbeatable” for years.
“It gets annoying but, after a while, you get used to people making their own comments and just judging you,” Bolt said. “But I’m always positive. I know what I want. I know what I am capable of. But it makes you stronger when you have to work so hard to get better and you have to go through all these trials. So I don’t stress. I just focus on what is necessary.”
Bolt is eager to prove his doubters wrong.
“I’ve been saying this for years,” he told the Guardian. “This will be the moment . . . this will be the year . . . this is my time.”
RELATED:
Jamaican sprint factory producing some of the fastest runners on Earth
Sprinting giants U.S., Jamaica renew rivalry
Jamaica has high hopes for its athletes
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