I just watched the most beautiful and dramatic sports event — the women’s 5000m speed skating… Canada’s incredible Cindy Klassen won bronze, her fifth medal of these Turin games (out of five events entered!) and the sixth Olympic medal of her life. With that, she becomes a “legend” (as they keep telling us on the CBC coverage ;-) — no Canadian has ever won five medals in a single games or six medals overall (in winter or summer games).

The most tear-jerking part today, though, was Clara Hughes, who won the gold with an incredible come-from-behind performance. She is one of the few people in the world to have won medals in both summer (cycling) and winter (skating) Olympics. The amazing thing was to see her pour absolutely everything she had into the final two laps. It was almost superhuman. She was more than three seconds behind Klassen with less than a minute left (in the seven-minute race) — a huge margin to make up, but she somehow called on every muscle fibre in her body and tore through to victory by a second and a half. The look on her face when she found out she’d won, and her subsequent weeping collapse onto the ice, were wonderful to witness live. Moving and awe-inspiring.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 25th, 2006 at 12h46 and is filed under Just...life!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.