Why hosting the Olympics would be the worst thing to ever happen to Toronto Pardon the hyperbole. The Great Fire of 1904 was certainly worse, and the decision to build the Gardiner expressway would at least be on the short list. Did you know that not only does it completely ruin the lakeshore, but they also tore down a popular amusement park to build it? If you didn’t have the pleasure of living...
This is the second of two parts of an Olympic post-mortem (read the first part here), in which I arbitrarily assign ranks to the participating countries. Following the 2012 Summer Games in London, I published a story in the Obiter declaring Grenada to be the Winner of the Olympics. I realize that this was an arbitrary designation, but it was not entirely unfounded. I developed a method of...
In this, the first of a two-part Olympic post-mortem, I take a historic opportunity to bloviate at length about Canada’s forgotten talent. I’m not going to explain the game. If you want to know how to curl, take the 90 seconds to look it up on Wikipedia. To an outsider, cricket and American football are difficult to understand, but there’s no use pretending that the roaring game is hard to learn...
The winter Olympics in Sochi have produced some memorable moments thus far, including the release of photos revealing the construction of side-by-side toilets, complaints of poorly designed courses, Russian cronyism inflating the cost of the games, back room dealings amongst figure skating judges, and reports of the comically small beds being slept on by the respective men’s hockey teams. But...
Like many Canadians, I can remember exactly where I was when Sidney Crosby scored the “golden goal,” propelling the Canadian men’s Olympic hockey team victory over the United States at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics (it was at a hotel in the Dominican Republic, in case anyone is curious). The 2010 Olympic hockey tournament was by far the most invested I have ever been in a sporting event in which I...
TRAVIS WEAGANT <Editor-in-Chief> Once upon a time, in France, my roommates and I got drunk and watched the Olympics. The end. Or, at least, that could have been the end. That should have been the end. But it wasn’t. It’s common sense that just because the United States wins the most medals at the Olympic Games doesn’t mean they’re the most gifted athletic nation on Earth. It’s also clear...