Olympic Cooldown

That's what my tv will be doing; cooling down now that it's not on and tuned to Olympic coverage all day, everyday.

I saw this interesting recap of the Olympics by the numbers on the Vancouver 2010 website:

26: Number of Canadian medals.

14.5: Medals won by Canadian women at 2010 Games (pairs figure skating makes up the half medal)

14: Gold medals won by Canada at 2010 games.

119: Winter Olympic medals won by Canada prior to Vancouver (7th overall in Winter Games history).

5: Storeys that aerialists soar in Olympic competition.

19.1: Weight, in kilograms, of the curling rocks used in Olympic competition.

7: Number of nations that made their Winter Games debut in Vancouver: Cayman Islands, Columbia, Ghana, Montenegro, Pakistan, Peru and Serbia.

17: Countries that sent one athlete to the Games.

50: Years since Canada beat Russia in the Olympic Games. That ended with Wednesday's 7-3 Canadian victory that bounced Russia from the finals and sent Canada to the semifinal against Slovakia.

972: Kilometres an ice surfacing machine had to be hauled on a flatbed truck from the Olympic Oval in Calgary to replace broken machines at the Richmond Olympic Oval in British Columbia.

3 million: Pairs of Olympic red mittens sold.

10 million: Amount of Own the Podium dollars allotted to Alpine Canada over the last five years.

5th: Highest finish for a Canadian alpine skier in 2010 Games.

11 million: The number of television viewers who tuned in during the last minute of the gold-medal curling match between Canada and Norway.

10.5 million: Number of Canadian viewers for Canada-Russia game.

9,143: Total number of metres American Bode Miller had to ski to win gold in the Super Combined (3,838 metres), silver in the super-G (2,200 metres) and bronze in the downhill (3,105 metres) on the Dave Murray Olympic course in Whistler, B.C.

36: Kilometres Norway's Marit Bjoergen had to ski to win a bronze and three gold medals at the 2010 Winter Games. Bjoergen won bronze in the 10 km freestyle, gold in the 15 km pursuit, the Individual Sprint Classic, and was a member of Norway's Olympic champion 4 x 5 km relay team.

And this quote, from the closing ceremonies sums things up perfectly:

“Athletes of the world, at your hands and through your determination and tenacity we have felt every imaginable emotion,” said John Furlong, CEO of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC). “We have lived the agony and the ecstasy with you as if we ourselves were competing. Boys and girls you will never meet now know that it is possible to achieve greatness through the power of a dream.

“I believe we Canadians tonight are stronger, more united, more in love with our country, and more connected with each other than ever before. These Olympic Games have lifted us up. That quiet, humble national pride we were sometimes reluctant to acknowledge seemed to take to the streets as the most beautiful kind of patriotism broke out all across our country.

Wow! Fantastic competitions, fantastic venues, fantastic fans, fantastic job, Canada!