A look back at 2014 in Canadian sports needs go no further than Sochi, Russia. The Winter Olympics were terrific.
The rest of the year, not so much.
To wit: a Canadian team did not win the Stanley Cup for the 21st year running; the Toronto Blue Jays took a powder in the American League East, finishing third, four games over .500; the Raptors, hometown team to the growing basketball hot bed of Toronto, Ontario (of all places) bombed out in the playoffs, and even the Grey Cup–that most Canadian of all events–failed to muster a capacity crowd in Vancouver.
Still. The Olympics were a joy to behold. (Be reminded. We speak of the competition, not graft and downright ugliness of the host nation’s government and oligarchs who spent so much fleecing everyone in sight.)
Canada placed fourth in most medals (25) and third in golds (10).
Two of the golds came in hockey as both the men and the women rolled through the tournament undefeated, both repeat winners from Vancouver 2010.
Ditto: Alexandre Bilodeau in the free-style skiing moguls and Kaillie Humphries and Heather Moyse in the two-women bobsled.
Bilodeau was a revelation. In 2010 in Vancouver, he made history, becoming the first Canadian ever to win gold on home soil, landing on the cover of MACLEAN’S magazine.
But repeating is said to be the hardest thing to do in sports. Sure enough, there was Bilodeau in Sochi on the final day of his Olympic career trailing his training partner, Mikael Kingsbury, in the standings.
One run remained. To win, Bilodeau needed to be perfect.
He delivered a stunning run to defeat Kingsbury by almost half a second, an enormous gap.
In early December, Bilodeau won 2014 Air Canada Athlete of the Year Award after a fan vote that also included Humphries and curler Jennifer Jones.
Humphries’s bobsled driving performance won her the Lou Marsh Award as the top Canadian athlete–man or woman–of the year, voted by a group of sports editors and broadcasters.
A different set of editors and broadcasters essentially ignored Humphries (she got two out of 80 votes) and named tennis players Eugenie Bouchard and Milos Raonic as the Canadian Press athletes of the year. Both Bouchard and Raonic also won in 2013.
Still, this being Canada, what matters–what REALLY matters–for most is hockey.
On the men’s side, coach Mike Babcock turned a team of NHL all-stars into a team of Olympic muckers. The result: Team Canada allowed a total of three goals in six games.
That was the fewest allowed by a gold medallist since 1928 when Canada completely shut out the opposition in a three-game tournament.
With the gold medal, Canada became the first men’s team to successfully defend an Olympic title since the Soviet Union in 1988. Team Canada is now undefeated over the past two Olympics.
If the men’s team was methodical, their women counterparts were out-of-this world brilliant and gritty.
Case and point: the gold medal game against the USA.
As the clock was winding down, the women appeared surely headed for their first defeat since losing the 1998 final to the Americans in Nagano.
Then the strangest thing happened.
Down 2-1 and goalie Shannon Szabados pulled for an extra attacker, Canadians collectively held their breath as the puck began a journey the length of the ice, heading straight to the open net.
Call it what you want (fate? bad ice? old-fashioned luck?)’ The puck–somehow–rebounded off the right goal post and came to rest in front of the crease.
There was no clinching goal and there would be no stopping the Canadians after that.
Seconds later, with 55 seconds left in regulation, Marie-Philip Poulin tied the game. At 8.10 of overtime, Poulin scored again.
Final score: Canada 3 USA 2. Canada’s 20th straight victory on Olympic ice.
Three days later, the men’s team, voted Canadian Press’s Team of the Year, completed the sweep, shutting out (natch) Sweden 3-0 to put an exclamation point on an Olympic Games a lot of Canadians will not soon forget.
Bruce Dowbiggin is a renowned sportswriter, author and broadcaster, who has won two Gemini Awards for excellence in broadcasting. His latest book is “Grant Fuhr: The Story of a Hockey Legend,” which he co-wrote with the former Edmonton Hall-of-Fame goalie.
Dowbiggin joined RCI by phone from his home in Calgary with some of his thoughts on 2014.
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