Cindy Klassen has been chosen as Canada's flagbearer for the closing ceremonies. She will carry the maple leaf as the first female speed skater to win five medals in an Olympics. And as the only Canadian ever to win six medals in total, Cindy Klassen is Canada's greatest Olympian.

The closing ceremonies will include a special Canadian section during which Vancouver 2010 will be introduced. Avril Lavigne is performing.

Barring any compelling news or photographs in the upcoming days, this should be my last posting on the Cindy Klassen Games, I mean, the Torino Winter Olympics. I hope you haven't found them boring. I have discovered myself being glued at some point to all but one Olympic Games since Sarajevo and Los Angeles in 1984. In Sarajevo, Canada won four medals, three of them by speed skater Gaetan Boucher; in Torino we won twenty-four. I rarely go in planning to watch any of the Games, but then something always happens and I get hooked. The only exception was Athens in 2004, when I was living in Italy and didn't have access to decent television or prominent Canadian press. For me, Athens never happened.

Torino began for me back on Day 5 when I noticed the medals. Then the men's hockey team seemed to be all strangers to me--but the Games really got my attention when they took a swan dive against Switzerland.

Of course, close proximity to Switzerland is enough to make anyone lose their mind.

Well, not really, but we should. Did you know that Canadians have thirteen (13!) fourth-place finishes at this year's Olympic Winter Games?

Read the CBC story here. Pierre Lueders's fourth in the 4-man bobsled today was number twelve, and Eric Bedard's in the 500m short track was thirteen.

Eight Canadians placed fifth.

The Canadian women set records again today, Cindy Klassen with her fifth medal, a bronze, and Clara Hughes with a gold in women's 5000 metre long-track speed skating!

Cindy Klassen is the story of this Olympics, as I have mentioned before. And Clara Hughes is the first person in history to win medals in both the Summer and Winter Olympics. If you remember, she first won two bronze medals in cycling in Atlanta in 1996, a bronze in skating in Salt Lake, and now a silver in Team Pursuit and today's gold in Torino.

After winning two silvers in men's long track today, Canada has 24 medals in total, which shatters the previous record of 17. Twelve of them are courtesy of the speed skaters. We are just one medal behind the Americans for third place overall in this Olympics. Let's see, ten times the population, ten times the money, four percent more medals. Something sounds a little bit wrong there, doesn't it? If there were five or six more events in this Olympics we could have beaten them easily. And if the men's hockey team hadn't sucked so badly, we would have tied.

No wonder ABC News thinks "Canada is emerging as an Olympic powerhouse".
See a related CBC story here with its far less certain, characteristically Canadian title: Canada: Olympic powerhouse?

This reminds me of a joke that is all too true. What is the difference between New York and Toronto? In New York the cabbies say, "Hey! Get off the car!" In Toronto they say, "Get off the car, eh?"

Have a look at Charlie Teljeur's cartoons of the Canadian Olympic experience, subtitled "Il Giro di gemito" (the whine tour).

Here are some more of my favourites:

Day Thirteen: Janet Consoles Wayne
Day Twelve: Canadian Olympic Logo (revised)
Day Eight (If you know me you'll get it. The policeman is no doubt from Lugano.)

You can find the rest here, courtesy of the CBC.

To win a gold medal! Brad Gushue and his rink from St. John's, Newfoundland, just smashed Finland 10-4 in the gold medal game in men's curling. They scored six points in the sixth end, and you could almost ask what happens when a Newfie botches a wide open last rock draw, which Gushue missed for seven.

Cindy Klassen is the hero of our Games, now with a gold medal in 1,500 metre long-track speed skating. She has won a Canadian-record four medals in Torino – gold in the 1,500, silvers in the 1,000 and team pursuit, and bronze in the 3,000. And she still has one more race to go, the 5,000 on Saturday.

It's a toss-up between Cindy, who has earned just under a quarter of Canada's total medals so far, and the women's hockey team for flag-bearer at the closing ceremonies.

Would you trade Cindy Klassen's superhuman feat for a men's hockey medal? I don't think so. Just call her Shannon, or Mark, or Larissa, or Takashi, or Matt, or Carl, or Jesse, or Nikolai. (You figure it out.)

It's over. Thirty seconds ago Canada lost 2-0 to Russia in a quarter-final game in which they couldn't even score.

"They just weren't as good a team as their opponents," said Kelly Hrudey, once a goalie now a commentator. And that's the truth. In fact they played lousy, went 3-3, losing all three games 2-0 in the same arena. I knew I was right to be worried.

So, what went wrong? Oh, just about everything. Who was checking Ovechkin on that goal? Is everybody blind? What were those stupid penalties about? Interference, please! On the powerplay nobody drove to the net, they kept tip-toeing around the boards. How could NHL all-stars keep losing the puck on routine passes in the neutral zone? How could you miss all those scoring chances?!

The picture at left shows Simon Gagné giving the most accurate impersonation to date of the entire Canadian men's hockey team during this Olympics. See him a few seconds earlier, getting absolutely decked by Darius Kasparaitis.

If you ask me, I think Wayne should arrange for Cassie Campbell to give them a lecture series on what it takes to win. They have a thing or two to learn from the women. And what, just what, was Mario Lemieux thinking by retiring before the Olympics?

If you have ever wondered why Great Britain never fields an ice hockey team in the Winter Olympics, just read this Olympic event guide on ice hockey by the BBC.

Here are some of the highlights:

"When 12 players come together on the ice and attempt to hit a small rubber object into a small metal cage, the results can be pretty spectacular."

"The object of the game is simple - score more goals than the opposition."

". . . referees are tough on illegal body contact, which is punishable by a penalty and time in the sin-bin."

According to the article, penalties are sometimes given for "Roughness and fisticuffs."

Here's a PDF file of the article, for when the Olympics are over or whenever you find yourself in the sin-bin.

Italian Olympic skier Giuseppe Michielli competing today in the Nordic Combined Large Hill event. Courtesy of Gary Susman over at Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch.

In fact, I have been pleasantly surprised by a number of really excellent photgraphs from the Olympics this year. Here are a few of them that I hope you enjoy.

Pierre Lueders's Canada 1 bobsleigh hurtling down the track (Michael Sohn/AP)

Team Canada captain Cassie Campbell with her gold medal (Julie Jacobson/AP)

The first day of snow at the Olympics (Bernard Weil/Toronto Star)

Italian Armin Zoeggler before his luge run (Herbert Knosowski/AP)

And then there's this one, which isn't a particularly great photo but certainly illustrates one of the big issues with this games. In case you get confused, the Canadian gentleman is the one wearing white.

One night in 2002, I was one of the hundred thousand or more Torontonians dancing up and down Yonge Street after the Canadian Men's Hockey Team beat the U.S.A. and took the gold medal at the Salt Lake City Olympics. Such cheering and collective triumph was the defining moment of my five years on Bay Street.

Shortly thereafter, I moved to Europe and became isolated from hockey. When I came back it was the strike, and I haven't been able to catch up yet. But now I need your help because it is four years later, another shot for gold is upon us, I find I am anxious about the Canadian Men's Hockey Team, and I don't know anything. My worry is simply this: the people who aren't playing.

It could be said about our team that won in Salt Lake City that it was the best Olympic hockey team ever assembled. It was made out of legends of the game including Mario Lemieux, Paul Kariya, Theoren Fleury, Steve Yzerman, Brendan Shanahan, Eric Lindros, Joe Nieuwendyk, Al MacInnis and Curtis Joseph.

The problem is that none of those players are returning to this Olympics. Some have returned: Iginla, Sakic, Foote, Blake, Ryan Smyth, Chris Pronger, Simon Gagné. Jovanowski and Niedermeyer are on the roster but are injured. They're great: no problems here. But who is replacing the part of the pantheon that retired to Olympus after Salt Lake City?

Have a look at the CBC's coverage of the roster announcement from a few weeks back and compare the two rosters from 2002 and 2006 below:
cbc.ca - Canada's Olympic men's hockey team unveiled
Canada 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Men's Hockey Team
Canada 2006 Torino Olympic Men's Hockey Team

My question is, are these guys good enough? Can Todd Bertuzzi skate like Theo? Can Shane Doan measure up to Kariya, Nieuwendyk, or Lindros? Is Wade Redden capable of stepping into MacInnis's shoes? When you say it like that, doesn't it worry you too?

In other words, please explain to me what makes this team as good as the last, and why they are going to win. Thank you.

Please leave comments.

Is it just me, or do you notice anything strange about the Torino 2006 Olympic medals?

Winning at the Olympics entitles you to 500 FREE HOURS on AOL. They're keeping the Timbits for the winners of the Special Winter Olympics. They are trying to get ready for Beijing in 2008 but they haven't figured out how to cut a square hole. Until a few days ago, the centre of each medal depicted unique illustrations from prominent Danish artists. Goodyear couldn't get official Olympic sponsorship, but that wasn't a problem since this is Italy, so they bribed a few Milanese jewellers instead. It is a contemporary European postmodern commentary on what the Olympics have become...and all that we have lost. Iran has entered a last-minute Olympic hockey team, because if each player brings home one medal, they will be able to complete their uranium centrifuge by the end of next month. After so many centuries of wishing Euclid hadn't been Greek, the Italians got tired of waiting for Archimedes to come up with a workable, pronounceable shape. Since wax rings must be so expensive in Norway, just like milk and bread and everything else, medal-winning athletes will not only improve national pride but household sanitation. The new Winter Olympic demonstration sport must be snow-golf. Since the IOC is an international humanitarian organization they decided to set an example for the world by preparing for peak gold, peak silver and peak bronze. Each new medal has to earn its place as a biathlon target, but used as a viewfinder it can also help half-blind hunters who are in over their heads to distinguish between a quail and a man. Winning athletes over the age of 30 with the right analog home stereo equipment can listen to a single song on the B-side of each one of these things in order to raise money for African famine relief. If you run the song backwards it says, "Carl Lewis is dead."