With Glowing Hearts

Growing up I played a lot of sports, went to art camp, drama camp and played piano but I was most passionate about figure skating. I love the smell of an ice rink, the sound of a skate on fresh ice, the feeling of flying. I loved learning new jumps, falling over and over until you finally landed on one foot.

Being from southern Ontario there was a tiny dance team coming up the ranks behind me that had everyone talking. You couldn’t see them over the boards, their competitors were twice their size but they were beating everyone. People crowded arenas to watch as the little dynamo’s ascended the skating ranks at a shocking pace. When I was in university we skated out of the same arena for a while, I’d watch them skate while I warmed up to skate on the session after them.

The tiny dynamo’s were Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, Vancouver 2010 were their first Olympic Games and they came to win.

I’d watched watching them go from lower level competitions to junior national champions, junior world champions and on Day 4 of our Olympic trip we saw them skate on Olympic ice to finish in 1st place with one event left.

We were a little excited…

The 5th day of our trip, Feb 22nd 2010, was also the Free Dance event that would decide the Ice Dance medallists, but we didn’t have tickets. Before we camped out in front of TVs at a restaurant we decided to try our luck finding last minute tickets.

Lady luck was obviously one our side because we found a guy selling three tickets and he knew someone who had two more. Even better the tickets were in the same row, two seats apart. Oh, and they were 6th row center.

Tickets in hand we sprinted for security and lucky lane F.

We partied hard on our sprint to the rink that some of the volunteers started taking photos of our craziness.

I totally wiped out after this photo.

Happy (tired) girls!

At this moment I was in the exact place, with the exact people I wanted to be with.

As much as I wanted to see Tessa and Scott skate (and win) I didn’t want the competition to end, there were so many entertaining teams competing and I enjoyed every minute of the event.

Finally Tessa and Scott took the ice and we held our breath through every solid, perfect, step.

We held our breath again until the results were final, they were Golden, and then we jumped up and down screaming with the rest of the country.

I can’t imagine feeling any more excited than if I’d won myself.

Proud brothers looking on

Hells yeah!

Check out those golden rings.

It might be hard to tell but each time a Canadian won gold the rings changed in colour from white to gold.

As they started to tear down and prep the arena for speed skating we finally had to leave, obvi we really didn’t want to.

Not wanting the party to end we went downtown to celebrate with everyone else and see the golden rings/Olympic flame.

We absolutely spent the whole night walking around draped in flags.

A little Olympic sock modeling at the flame.

And then we ski jumped over to Starbucks for celebratory red and white (red velvet) cupcakes.

How cute are my friends arranging the cupcakes into the Olympic rings and taking a photo for me “for the blog”… that I finally posted a year later.

That night, as we made our way back to the ‘burbs, our hearts were definitely glowing.

O’Canada ♥ Best day ever.