Breaking CTVs bubble

As Canadians were glued to their TV sets last night to watch the Gold medal final, our other hockey team lost to New Zealand 3 to 2, in a hard fought battle at the Hockey World Cup being held in India. A point my friends in New Zealand, rubbed in my face this afternoon.

Similar to all kiwi sports teams, their national field hockey team, the Black Sticks has the word black in their name. Seriously all teams in New Zealand have black in their name. The famous All Blacks rugby team, the Black Sticks Field Hockey team, and believe it or not the Tall Blacks, basketball team. Talk about words having a different connotation in different parts of the world, you could not get away with calling your basketball team the Tall Blacks in North America, even if if they were all black and obviously tall.

To some extent and leading to the point of this post, it sort of explains the bubble we all live in. Especially the 1,600 or so CTV employees that were in Vancouver and Whistler. I realize that seeing crowds of Canadians with painted faces, waving flags and screaming their heads off is not something you see everyday in Vancouver, but it is the just Olympics folks, not a rebirth of national pride.

There were lots of heart breaking stories about the sacrifices the athletes and their families made and many brought a tear to my aged and cynical eyes, but it is like that at every Olympics, even when we didn't win the gold and listen to our song being played a record breaking 14 times. 

Canadians, or at least the ones I have met have always been proud of our national sports teams, well maybe with the exception of our current field hockey team. The constant bullshit from the CTV broadcasters about how they have never seen this before, how this is uniting our country and the constant playing of that fucking I Believe song drove me crazy through the whole Olympics, 

The Winter Olympics is about athletes that ski, snowboard, slide, skate and more importantly to all of us play hockey, on ice and whether you agree with the funding of these athletes or not, it is great to see them try to excel at their chosen sport.

That's it. that all.

The Olympics is not, was not and will never be the greatest display of Canadian unity since the second world war, as so described by Beverly Thompson of CTV yesterday morning, because if that was true we would be a pathetic nation.

Sorry Beverly, like my friends in New Zealand sometimes do, you were just living in a bubble, the Vancouver bubble. Canada already was a proud nation and about as unified as we are going to get. 

We just tend to get more so when there is a big hockey game on. Unfortunately for the team in India though, only if the game is played on ice.