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Salt Lake City, Utah
You got to keep them separated
In the preliminary round (before all the good teams started playing and when most of the NHL stars were as far away from Salt Lake as their schedules would allow) it was in fact Deutschland uber alles. In the very first game I saw Germany shock early round favorite Slovakia (featuring one time Islander Sigmund Palffy) in a 3-0 shutout. In this, the very last game I saw, Germany shocked no one by getting eliminated 5-0 in the quarterfinals by the hometown favorite US team.
This is star US goalie and eventual silver medalist Mike Richter leaving the ice after the game, surrounded by enough depressed, angry Germans to make the average person at least a little nervous.
Of the ten hockey games I was fortunate enough to see (eight men's, two women's), the Quarterfinal game of Sweden versus Belarus was far and away the best, possibly even the best hockey game I have ever seen. The powerful and undefeated Swedes fell in a hard fought, close game as a puck bounced off the head of star Swedish Goalie (and one time Islander) Tommy Salo and right into the net with just over two minutes remaining. After the game, depressed Swedes were as shocked as anyone else who followed hockey- it is still almost unthinkable that they actually lost to Belarus.
The flip side to last picture, Belarus' "Miracle on Ice," quite possibly the second greatest upset ever in the history of Olympic hockey.
I enjoyed Olympic hockey. It moved fast, was terribly competitive, often as brutal as it should be. There were some anomalies. SLOC felt it necessary to have cheerleaders at hockey games- something which, by its very nature, remains nothing short of sacrilegious. Also, early rounds (and most events) were populated by locals from an area with no legitimate NHL team. Spectators were often confused as to what team was what, how many "quarters" games had, as well as the basic tenets of the game. I attended most games wearing my Patrik Elias Devils home jersey, something which often clued confused locals to turn to me to answer questions.
This game I brought my other jersey, my Team Canada jersey bought back in 1999 on Younge Street in Toronto (when I bought it, the salesperson told me that putting the Team Canada jersey on for the first time was one of the greatest feelings I would ever have- that's how much hockey is valued there). My jersey proved lucky as Team Canada came back from a 3-1 deficit to beat Team Finland and earn a place in the gold medal round. In both the Women's and Men's tournaments, Team Canada received gold medals to the US silver medals. As a hockey fan, I find it terribly hard to root against Canada- it just seems right that they win.
This was the better of the two women's games I saw. The other game, Russia versus China, had its moments (including a ten minute game misconduct by a Chinese player) but felt not nearly as competitive as what I had become accustomed to in Salt Lake. Team Canada's women played at a much higher level, and at least Finland made a game out of it for two periods.
Salt Lake City's E-Center, where the E stood for, well, actually just E come to think of it, was really quite intimate for a tournament with as much international interest as one expects at the Olympics.
Inside the E-Center (courtesy of four hastily pasted together photographs) where I saw 7 of the 10 games (the other three were in Provo at a venue just about the size of Morristown's Mennen Arena). For added realism, gather approximately 10,000 friends, dress them exactly like the audience in this picture, recruit the top American born hockey players living today and, considering how they played, the very first Germans you see, and travel to Salt Lake's sprawling West Valley's E-Center, reassemble all of the Olympic banners and just sit back and enjoy. Or if that seems like too much trouble, you can just stare at the picture, zone out a little, and start chanting U-S-A!, U-S-A!, whatever works for you.
The really cool thing isn't the shattered glass (broken on an early practice shot by an apparently motivated German) but the fact that a piece of the broken glass is actually falling (the big, horizontal piece on the lower right), a victim of gravity as it begins its predictable descent to the ice surface. Also they didn't stop practice which made it unacceptably dangerous for some lucky ticket holders.
I also saw other games. I really did. The Slovakia v. Latvia game was especially good, a 6-6 tie which effectively eliminated early round favorite Slovakia. The Russian women humiliated the Chinese women (which some people would pay good money to see in private), Switzerland v. Ukraine and Switzerland v. France proved that the neutral Swiss were unlikely bad asses on the ice, Russia v. Finland was a great second round game, Sweden v. Germany and Germany v. Slovakia showed the Germans could rock or suck, and the Canadian women made me proud to want to be a Canadian. I also saw this game, where giant, oversized Americans led by legendary Olympic Hockey coach Herb Brooks proved that they probably did deserve that medal after all.
Wait, where's Team USA? Who are these people? Where's Mike Richter damn it? Actually I'm quite happy that you can actually see the puck in this picture, proving once again that it doesn't take that much to make me happy.
