Quotulatiousness

February 23, 2010

Canadian women beat Finns 5-0, will face Team USA for gold on Thursday

Filed under: Cancon, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:48


Photo by Julie Jacobson

Finland provided much more challenge for Canada, with excellent goaltending turning back many shots, but eventually they broke through. Cherie Piper scored the opening goal on a pass from Meghan Agosta, while Agosta broke the single Olympics scoring record with her ninth of the games. Haley Irwin scored twice, and Caroline Ouellette got the other goal for Canada.

They will face Team USA on Thursday for the gold medal. This matchup was expected, as both Canada and the US have been dominant in their respective games through the preliminary and semi-final rounds, tallying 86 goals between the two teams, and allowing only 4.

Update: Colby Cosh is pessimistic about the men’s team making it all the way to the top podium:

Even on the explicit, historically derived premise that Canada has the strongest team in the tournament, it would be hard to peg our chances of winning gold at much higher than 25%. On Desjardins’ pretty reasonable estimates of underlying national team strength, the figure is not close to 25%. I crunched the numbers, leaving room for the possibility of being helped somewhere along the way by an upset of a strong rival, and I get about 19%. That’s assuming we have a 100% chance of beating Germany tonight, when the real figure is probably more like 93-95%.

February 22, 2010

Tweet of the day

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:07

damianpenny
I don’t want to say Canadians are angry, but I just saw a billboard demanding that Martin Brodeur produce his birth certificate.

Aftermath

Filed under: Cancon, Sports, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:21

To Americans, it was a hockey game. To Canadians, however, it was a disaster beyond belief or comprehension:

With a hard-earned, thrilling victory Sunday, the United States surprised Canada, both the hockey team and the nation.

The Americans did it exactly as General Manager Brian Burke and Coach Ron Wilson built them to do it — through speed, relentless diligence and unflappable goalkeeping. They withstood a furious Canadian attack, hitting as hard as they got hit, and prevailed despite the deafening roars of the red-clad crowd at Canada Hockey Place.

“For these young guys I think it was great to win in an atmosphere like this,” Wilson said. “Everything was stacked against us, but we came out on top.”

The entire nation is in mourning, black armbands, sackcloth, and ashes all round. The shock was so unexpected that Vancouver police had to close down the bars — where stunned hockey fans were desperately trying to find oblivion in alcoholic excess. The Prime Minister may be forced to call for a national day of penitence and prayer to assuage the angry Hockey gods.

Or so I’m told . . . ours was one of the few television sets in the country not tuned to the Olympics. We will, however, be watching Canada take on Finland in the women’s semi-finals tonight.

February 21, 2010

Sports bulletin: Canada defeats US 16-2 in hockey

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Sports, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:36

But that’s not the Olympic match-up, that’s in Kandahar:

“Half of our team is in Iraq” was one of the good-natured excuses offered by U.S. troops to explain Canada’s 16-2 victory over the United States in a ball-hockey game on Sunday that had all the passion, but none of the drama, expected of the Olympic ice hockey tilt between the two countries later in the day in Vancouver.

The lopsided score was a fair indication of the play before a crowd of nearly 1,000 often deliriously happy soldiers at the smartly laid out ball-hockey rink that Canada built at Kandahar Airfield in 2006.

Honestly taken aback by a Canadian offer to balance the game by swapping a few players when the score stood 10-1 in Canada’s favour, U.S. army Col. Mark Murray, invoked the immortal words of Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, commander of the 101st Airborne, who responded to a Nazi ultimatum to surrender during the Battle of the Bulge, by replying: “Nuts! It will be a cold day in hell before we do that.”

February 19, 2010

Canadian dominance of hockey at the Olympics

Filed under: Cancon, Sports — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:37

The men may be struggling (just scraping through against the Swiss yesterday), but the women are doing their best juggernaut imitation. It’s getting lots of attention, but not always the kind the organizers were hoping for. After their 18-0 demolition of the Slovak team to open the tournament, they’ve handily beaten the Swiss (10-1) and the Swedes (13-1).

I don’t follow hockey at all, but I’ve been trying to catch these games, as Elizabeth’s god-daughter is Cherie Piper:

One sign of just how dominating Canada has been in the preliminary round of the Winter Olympic women’s ice hockey tournament is that Scarborough native Cherie Piper has nine points in three games — and she’s only in fifth place in scoring. And that’s just on her own team.

Canada rolled through their opposition, like a hair dryer through snow, outscoring their opposition 41-2, defeating, in order, Slovakia 18-0, Switzerland 10-1 and Sweden 13-1.

And through that the Scarborough native contributed a ‘modest’ four goals and five assists.

Piper already has two Olympic gold medals to her credit, including the last time around in Turin where she was co-leader in goals-scored and second in total points for the tournament.

Their preliminary round is over, and they’ll be facing the 2nd place team from the other pool (either the US or Finland). Sweden, the other team to advance will face the 1st place team.

Update: It’ll be Canada vs Finland, US vs Sweden. Winner of each game goes to the gold medal match, losers go to the bronze medal match.

February 16, 2010

It’s not surprising that more Canucks are lefties than Yanks

Filed under: Cancon, Sports, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:38

Although this is about hockey, not politics:

What is the difference between a Canadian and an American? The old question is coming up again here at the Olympics, with answers involving eagerness for war, ketchup, the pronunciation of toque or the ability to identify poutine and the Tragically Hip.

But none may be so simple as how one holds a hockey stick. According to sales figures from stick manufacturers, a majority of Canadian hockey players shoot left-handed, and a majority of American players shoot right-handed. No reason is known for this disparity, which cuts across all age groups and has persisted for decades.

Most Canadians, like most Americans, are naturally right-handed, so the discrepancy has nothing to do with national brain-wiring. And how you hold a pencil, say, has little or no bearing on how you hold a stick. A left-handed shooter puts his right hand on top; a right-hander puts the left hand there.

January 27, 2010

Welcome to Canada . . . this is our variant of English

Filed under: Cancon, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:28

SherryGrammarian would like to extend a welcome to all the soon-to-be-arriving Winter Olympics visitors and offers some explanations about the variant of English spoken in (parts of) Canada:

Like the country itself, Canadian English suffers from a bit of an identity crisis: Do we speak the tongue of our British heritage? Or do we employ the vernacular of our closest geographical and cultural neighbour, the United States?

And in quintessentially Canadian fashion, we’ve come up with an offend-no-one resolution: a little deference, a little defiance. Canadian English is the bastard child of a queen and a cowboy.

We honour the monarchy by minding our p’s and q’s, and in using u’s in words like “labour” and “flavour.” In Canada, you enter the “centre” and catch a feature at the “theatre.”

The last letter of the alphabet retains its British pronunciation yet appears American in words like “organize” and “realize” — but we draw the line at calling the bearded Texas rock band “ZedZed Top,” and for that we will not apologize.

[. . .]

And (Americans, take note), “rout” is what my hockey team does to your hockey team. “Route” — pronounced root — is the path to the nearest donut shop.

January 11, 2010

Coming to your area soon: the XHL!

Filed under: Europe, Sports — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:18

Remember that old joke about “I went to the fights and a hockey game broke out”? Apparently the Kontinental Hockey League thought that was a formula for success:

The Kontinental Hockey League may be taking the NHL’s bottom-tier and overage players for the most part, but one thing they’ve provided to the hockey world in their two seasons of existence is plenty of YouTube-worthy brawls. Just over a week ago Barys Astana and SKA St. Petersburg had a brawl that featured former NHL’ers Sergei Zubov, Oleg Saprykin, friend of Puck Daddy Kevin Dallman, commercial superstar Robert Esche, and even a goalie-on-defenseman scrap.

Sovetsky Sport writer Genadi Boguslavski tweeted out details of today’s punch-up that featured Vityaz Chekhov and Avangard Omsk. It didn’t take long for things to go from a line-brawl to the bench-clearing variety.

This first video features Jaromir Jagr in a bit of a tussle and apparently trying out some new Greco-Roman wrestling moves:

The game lasted four minutes, with 637 minutes of penalties handed out.

September 23, 2009

QotD: King’s Ransom

Filed under: Cancon, Quotations, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:58

I didn’t want to go into detailed technical criticisms of a VERY rough cut of the documentary, but the footage of Gretzky playing is somewhat disappointing. Which is fine; it’s always a little disappointing. I feel like filmmakers should just let us follow him for a whole shift instead of depicting him scoring nifty goals. C’mon, like Gretzky scoring on a breakaway is an appropriate symbol of his gifts? Gretzky sucked on breakaways! That’s right, I put it on the record! We all knew it! Attica! Attica!

Colby Cosh, “Footnotes to today’s Gretzky/ESPN column”, ColbyCosh.com, 2009-09-18

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