Olympian success like a fresh breath of welcome spring

Published: March 10, 2010

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By the time Sidney Crosby scored the winning goal for Canada, in one of the best Olympic hockey games ever played, the Winter Olympics already had turned a corner in terms of public awareness.

Despite spring-like weather in and around Vancouver, these games were a global success, for a variety of reasons.

A group of relatively new exciting events brought a new generation of fans to the games - snowboard half-pipe, ski-cross, snowboard-cross and ski moguls, for example. Technology captured the speed, technical difficulty and danger of the events as never before. (Curling, of course, offered even couch potatoes dreams of Olympic glory.)

In the United States the games also were viewed with particular interest because of American athletes' emergence in sports, such as bobsled and Nordic combined, where they most often have been also-rans.

As the Olympics sometimes do, these games also reflected global politics. No nation boycotted this year's Olympics, perhaps because global politics are focused on common economic and security problems. That could be tested in 2014, when the Olympics will be at the Russian city of Sochi, very near the tense border between Russia and Georgia.

For most of their existence the winter games have been the forgotten sibling of the summer games. Vancouver 2010 might be remembered as the winter games that raised anticipation for the next winter games.

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