WE ARE FAMILY
Olympics bring Canada together for memorable moments
Halfway there, a lifetime to go. At the Olympics time is elastic because the experience is so vast, and when you’re here a week feels like a generation. If feels like we have all lived lifetimes here, raised families, endured changes in circumstance, won and lost and stuck together. This is the Olympics. That’s how it works.
But the Olympics are split into 88 separate ones, too, with each country on its own voyage. And Canada’s Games, four years after the Canadian Olympics, have already felt like a lifetime.
Remember the Dufour- Lapointe sisters? They must be all grown up now, their wonderful parents pensioners. Remember Spencer O’Brien’s tears? A distant memory, an old scar. Mark McMorris’s broken rib must be healed by now; his bronze medal must be in a case. Dara Howell’s bubbling fearlessness must have matured; she can’t still be 19, and the author of the greatest women’s slopestyle run in history, can she? Charles Hamelin, our figure skating team, the brilliant Alex Bilodeau — he must be an accountant, now. He must have settled down.
That’s what the Olympics does to you when you’re here: there is so much richness that it overwhelms you every day.
But we should try to remember. At one point we led the medal table for almost 24 hours, something this country has never done at any Olympics; by Wednesday, Canadian exceptionalism reached the point that my friend Dan Wetzel, the peerless columnist for Yahoo Sports, wrote about the American malaise and suggested the solution would be to annex Quebec, which at that point had accounted for six of Canada’s medals.
It was a fun idea, if only to see how Quebec and, say, the American South would get along. But as we all know, any attempt by the Americans to invade Canada would turn us into their woodsy Vietnam.
But we’ve had an Olympics full of moments, four years after the ones that lit a national fire. O’Brien, the snowboarder, weeping as she apologized for not doing better. Justin Wadsworth, the American husband of Beckie Scott and a Canadian coach, giving a ski to Russian Anton Gafarov so he could finish his race at home with dignity. McMorris’s bronze with aching ribs, and Hamelin’s electric daring for gold. And, of course, long- track speedskater Gilmore Junio, giving up his spot in the men’s 1,000- metre long- track, so Denny Morrison could win a silver. There has been ugliness, of course, because it’s not a children’s play. The heartening success of Quebec- born athletes has caused some minor squabbling over that fundamental schism, again. Parti Quebecois Minister of Higher Education Pierre Duchesne tweeted out a picture of Justine and Chloé Dufour- Lapointe wearing Quebec- themed blue- and- white gloves, which were Photoshopped from the redandwhite Canada gloves they were actually wearing; when it was pointed out to him Duchesne chuckled, called himself the victim of a hoax, but he didn’t delete the tweet.
And that, in its way, was the theme of the first week of Canada’s Olympics for me: Family. Quebec gets antsy when their athletes make them proud; it raises their nationalist blood, as it does for the rest of Canada. It can cause the old frictions to resurface, here and there. But we’re Canada, and we hold together. We are a family: sometimes fractious, rarely a single tribe, but never more a tribe than during the Olympics.
No athlete gets here without family, and you see them here everywhere you look. There was Junio’s family at the speedskating, cheering for Morrison like he was their brother, or their son; Gil’s sister Marjorie cried when Denny won silver. There was Hamelin, after his brother Frank fell in the 5,000- metre short- track relay, tweeting about how proud he was of his brother, and how he was a true champion. There was Howell’s father Doug, just hoping his daughter would make it down the mountain safe. Afterwards, his daughter said she’d never seen him happier.
Family. The Dufour- Lapointe sisters and their parents were a wonder. Justine won gold in moguls, and Chloe won silver, and the eldest, Maxime, finished 12th. And their mother Johanne talked about how she had to take care of all her children, even when the success of one or two meant sadness for a third; Maxime was as important and worthy of pride as her sisters, because they are a family. For Johanne, the important thing was that all three of her daughters got here, because she couldn’t imagine leaving one at home.
“We told them you’re going to ski for a few years, but after skiing, you’ll still be sisters, so you have to hold together,” she said.
And then there was Bilodeau. He was sitting in sixth place when looked down at the last run of his Olympic life and nailed, absolutely nailed, a fast and thrilling and aerially wondrous gold medal performance.
And he shared it with his brother Frederic, again.
At the 2010 Games, the brilliant Ian Brown of the Globe and Mail asked Bilodeau if he skied for Frederic, a wonder who paints and skis despite having cerebral palsy, in the same way John Ralston Saul became a writer because his brother could not speak. And Bilodeau told Brown: “I think it’s probably true. I mean, I look at my brother, and look at what he can’t have and would like to have. And he would for sure succeed at this, if he could ... he would train every day. He would just explode everything in front of him. But I actually have that chance.”