Olympic Ice Ice Baby

February 21, 2010 was the fourth day of our trip to the Olympic games and our first Figure Skating events. Our day started well before dawn to make it to the skating venue for 6:30am Ice Dance practice.

The sun was slowly rising as we wound our way towards the PNE.

Security was a breeze at 6am!

Gratuitous flag photo.

Finally, we made it inside and caught our first glimpse of Olympic ice!! This is what I call beautiful.

We’ve been to the PNE numerous times in the past, it’s an old arena so we were surprised that it was going to host short track and figure skating at the Olympics. However, once we were inside with all of the Olympic banners and the general Olympic magic in the air we were transported from the old run down PNE.

I feel like I should apologize for the sub-par photos here. I took a lot of “good” pictures of the arena and skating with my DSLR but they’re not edited on this computer so we’re going to stick with pics from my point and shoot camera.

Oh look, here’s my ~~I have to pee~~ I’m at the Olympics face, made even better with a dorky hat!

We were there for Ice Dance practice and very excited to see our first Canadian team take the ice, Vanessa Crone & Paul Poirier .

(V is in the photo below)

Front row at THE OLYMPICS!

The girls (L-R): Mel, Jen, Chele, Jules, me (with a bad coffee and massive lens/dslr in my arms)!

The view from the press/judges stands.

Shortly after we arrived at the arena we received a text message telling us Jo’s (Joannie Rochette, ladies competitor and eventual bronze medalist) mom had passed away hours earlier. Jo is one of the loveliest people I know and none of us could fathom that this was happening to her, let alone right before the biggest moment of her career, our hearts went out to her.

With Jo (left) circa 2003. I adore that girl.

In front of the rink after practice and before the Original Dance competition that afternoon.

Triplets.

Excited? Maybe.

The food options around the rink are a Subway with no seating, Pizza and McDonalds so we so we ended up at the golden arches for a meal of champions.

At least I got to pretend I was an Olympic mascot!

6 nuggets later we walked back for the Original Dance competition.

By the way, have you seen how pretty the Olympic flags were?

A smurf enjoying picture perfect Spring Olympics weather.

Past security, with official tickets, we were really going in… well, three of us were.

The Olympic lottery had only given us 3 tickets for the OD, luckily Mel and Chele scored great tickets from a re-seller and were not too far behind us.

We bumped into Marie-France pretty quickly, she was there doing broadcast commentary.

What does it look like when your teams rock out? We may or may not have been happy with the results.

After the competition we reunited with the rest of our crew and bumped into Megan and Aaron again. This time, instead of Korean fan-girls taking a group pic Aaron and I had a self-portrait taking competition.