Olympics: Hosts smiling - at last

Canada has rarely been quite so exultantly at peace with itself.

For the host nation that committed itself so passionately, and expensively, to success in these 21st Winter Olympics there have been good and bad days this past week.

However, nothing compares with the one that brought a crushing ice hockey victory over the Russian team who have seemed to own the game in the past.

The Canadian men produced awesome commitment - and forechecking - in a 7-3 annihilation of the threat presented by the brilliant stick-handling of such Russian stars as Alex Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin.

The win gives the Canadians a semi-final place against Slovakia on a day when four more medals were gathered in by the hosts, gold and silver by the two-women bobsled teams and silver and bronze in speed skating.

On the hockey ice and the bobsled track it was hard to know who had put in quite the most withering performance. While the nation hung on every moment of the hockey collision, the gold medallist bobsledders Kaillie Humphries and Heather Moyse won by almost a second.

That's an eternity on a track which saw British contenders Nicole Minichiello and Gillian Cooke survive a spectacular crash as they pushed beyond their limits on a third run that ended their fading challenge.

Inevitably, though, it was the hockey men who most deeply satisfied the Canadian yearning to be the best in the world.

Hockey is where so much of Canada lives.

You see it in the ice rinks across the land where tot-sized schoolboys show up at 6am for their designated practice time. You see it on frozen prairie ponds. You see in the ferociously competitive junior leagues as youngsters hoping to make it to the ultimate level of the National Hockey League set off on long journeys through the back country in the team bus, which has been described as the "iron lung". And you saw it, almost like a force of nature, in the assault on the Russians.

Shell-shocked Russian goaltender Evgeni Nabokov was surprisingly not yanked off the ice in favour of his No 2 until the Canadians had scored their sixth goal in the second period.

Nabokov shook his head and said: "They just kept coming and coming and we couldn't stop the bleeding. I wish them luck, that is all. That was Canadian hockey right there. I don't like predictions, but it looks like the Canadians have got it going. They will not be easy to stop."

On this latest evidence it will be for the impressive Slovaks, and probably the Americans, who meet Finland in the other semi, in what could be a supremely climactic final on Sunday, a chore roughly akin to stepping into a landslide.

Though Canada's hero, 22-year-old Sidney Crosby, had a relatively unspectacular game - at least beside the scoring edge of his team-mate Corey Perry and the huge defensive contribution of Chicago Black Hawk Jonathan Toews - the fate of his bitter rival, Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals, was to suffer an outright eclipse.

Ovechkin is a hero for many young North Americans with his exquisite stickwork and fiercely combative nature, but here he was battered into oblivion by the massive Canadian effort.

In all this Canadian euphoria there is also the prospect of redemption, at least to some degree, in the controversial "Own the Podium" policy. The bobsled triumph brought Canada level with the United States and Germany on the mark of seven gold medals - and with a considerable power to add more.

Whether this ultimately justifies the pressure brought to bear on so many individual athletes, and the expectations created across the country, is a philosophical argument that in the current atmosphere can plainly wait.

Meanwhile, Canadians finally have increasing reason to be jubilant about the strength and the cohesion of their team, which is beginning to shine.

- INDEPENDENT