The most striking images were the faces belonging to the vanquished. One by one, Canadian hockey players lowered their necks to receive silver medals, and a few minutes later, they were handed stuffed toys honoring Tina and Milo, the mascots of these Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.
And one by one, they grimly accepted these tokens of achievement as if they were being handed cigarettes in the moments before facing a firing squad.
Remember the old slogan from “Wide World of Sports,” “the agony of defeat?” These were the faces of defeat. They looked stricken.
The consistent element of every Olympics, summer or winter, going back to Athens in 1896, is the joy that almost always accompanies the tradition of the medal ceremony. The winners of the gold in any event you can name — decathlon, biathlon, badminton, bobsledding, fencing, mountaineering, all of them — are always beside themselves with glee and flushed with self-achievement, sure.
