For Canada:
HERO: Easy one for us: Cindy Klassen, who won five medals, the first Canadian to ever do that. Actually, she was the first to win four.
RUNNER UP: The men’s curling team, which got Newfoundland kids off school for half a day.
GOAT: The men’s hockey team. A pack of bums.
If she’s not the official goat for the US, she should be: Lindsey Jacobellis, who had an insurmountable lead in the women’s snowboard cross finals, showboated on her last jump, fell down as a result, and got up in time to finish second to the Swiss boarder who whizzed past her as she struggled to regain her feet. I reckon she’ll be kicking herself about that for a while.
GOAT: B0-0-0-0de Miller
HERO: Apollo Ohno (sp?) He’s a class act.
GOAT: Bode Miller
Speed skater Ohno is the hero.
Bode Miller is the goat. His mouth says he is true to his self and has no regrets. If he says that another 5 times he may even start to believe it.
I wouldn’t be so hard on her. She’s young and, in a sport where a little showboating is part of the fun, she just picked the wrong time to do it. I don’t know if I exactly feel sorry for her, but there’s no schadenfreude as I had with Bode Miller.
So, for my hero, as much as I don’t really like snowboarding, I loved Shaun “The Flying Tomato” White. Just a nice personality, great spirit, can’t ask for anything more. For my goat, it’s Bode.
For Norway:
HERO: Alpine skier Kjetil André Aamodt. He went down that Super G course with an attitude that said: Okay, maybe I’ll go out, but I’m going out with both barrels blazing. And won. Fourteen years after getting his first Olympic gold, he added number four to his collection. Did I mention he’d screwed up his knee on a bad landing during the downhill competition earlier in the week? This guy rocks.
GOAT: Many possibilities, but I’ll take my favorite whipping boy, biathlete Frode Andresen. In spite of his claims to have started a program of “eye exercises” to improve his shooting, the guy still has more problems with the vision thing than George Herbert Walker Bush. He was supposed to hand the relay over to Ole Einar Bjørndalen, the Greatest Biathlete In The Whole World[sup]tm[/sup], and all he had to do was give him a fighting chance… and HE BLEW IT. You have eight bullets to hit five targets. How is it possible for an athlete at this level to end up doing three penalty laps??? To make matters worse, he blathered on about how he “really shot very well” and “would do the same thing again if I had the chance”, blaming it on bad wind conditions that didn’t seem to bother those around him… Ole Einar skied and shot like a madman, like he does when he’s at the top of his game, but it was hopeless.
Hero: Joey Cheek
Goat: Bode (at least Jacobellis got a silver)
I’m going with The Flying Tomato as the Hero. Not only for how much fun he was to watch and how likable he was in his interviews, especially when he was close to not qualifying, but for the Sacha Cohen pimping. One of my life’s regrets is never being able to enjoy the, um, socializing in the althelets villiage at the Olympics.