Two things have bothered me about our athletes' performances thus far:
1. I find it hard to believe all of our athletes are leaving it all out there and giving their best performance. I don't have any numbers whatsoever to back this up but I bet the number of athletes whose scores at these Olympics are anywhere near the neighborhood of their personal bests is pretty low. I know a few speed skaters who train at the Oval with many of our Olympic speed skaters. These people look up to our Olympic athletes and aspire to be in their position soon. They shake their head at the poor performances we've seen so far. It's not like the gold medalists are setting world records or anything yet our athletes are not only falling short of that mark but they aren't even approaching the level they've been competing at even in the recent past. Sure, you're allowed to have a bad day once in a while. The number of athletes who seem to have had a bad day on the biggest day of their careers is cause for concern.
2. Manuel Osborne-Paradis, Pierre Lueders and others whom I have come to know from the kind words of Donald Sutherland over the past couple months have been pretty disappointing. I doubt they personally had anything to do with becoming part of the CTV hype machine but it would have been great for at least one of those ads to be more than just an ironic reminder of unrealistic expectations in hindsight.
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