Great Olympic Day and (i need to get in shape)

Day 12 of the Olympics and Canada has done well.  I am a big fan of the sports on the water....and living in Burlington, was happy to see today's results.

Adam van Koeverden won a silver medal in the Men's 1000 m Kayak singles. Adam is in his 3rd Olympics which in itself is a great accomplishment. I saw the race and Adam is known for his quick starts, and today did not disappoint, but his Norwegian competitor was tough, and won the race in the end. Great job Adam.

Adam van Koeverden

Mark Oldershaw came from behind in exciting fashion to win a bronze in the Men's Canoe Singles 1000m.
An amazing effort - True Grit!

                                                              Mark Oldershaw


On the mat, Carol Huyng won another bronze for Canada in wrestling. Although Carol won Gold in 2008...she still came into this Olympics as a bit of an underdog. Bronze is an awesome result.

                                                                      Carol Huyng

Congratulations to all of our athletes!! I am proud.

....and now for something completely different.

I knew after my recent trip to Lake Placid that I was not in the greatest condition of my life, but I saw an interesting website on sympatico today that upset me a little, and leads me to think...I better start trying harder.

What you do is, you enter your height and weight into the open fields and the computer shows you the Olympic Athletes that you have the same type of body as.

The computer picked 2 for me.

Daniel Brata is a Romanian Judo Athlete.

                                                                   does this look like me?

The second look alike (body wise) is Elisa Casanova.....a female Water polo player from Italy.

                                                        ....see any resemblance?


I am going running tonight.


If you want to try...here is the www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19050139

Lake Placid - It's all over.

Lacrosse can be a funny game. Up and down emotionally, physically, and the game can change one minute, and one game to the next.

We had high expectations for this tournament. We wanted to win....why not? - That is what we go for. There are 16 teams. If you are in the bottom half of the rankings, you have to play the top half (the best teams) early and it makes it really tough. Last year we lost our first game to one of the best teams by one goal. That loss guaranteed us a 9th place finish at best if we won our final 3 games which we did. So we went 3 and 1 and finished 9th.

This year if we did not win, we wanted at least to be seated in the top 8 going into the 2013 tourney. We won our first game this year, and that helped big time. Our next game we got beat badly, but since we won our 3rd game we were guaranteed top 8.

Yesterday we were humbled again. We scored 4 or 5....the Cloudsplitters scored a lot more than that.

I am not sure of the final, it has not been posted yet....but it was not close. I can make excuses but....no wait, I am going to make excuses. We were hurt and short of guys. Our leader Warren had a bad foot, one of our star Long Poles had to go home....Tippy, another star Stu Aird, was hurt very early and out. That left us with only 2 regular long poles, Bob Simpson and Jason Donville, who both did a phenomenal job, played the whole game. We had other guys that helped fill in, but we were short guys on the midfield and attack, a lot of whacks and bruises and a huge welt on Dave Johnston's chest/stomach (still debating that one).

We got behind early....and it was not until mid way through the game that Brad Wales scored a beautiful goal that made the score at that time about 6 - 1. We really never got much closer than that.


Good news......we are ranked 6th place out of 16 teams, so next year we will have a much better early draw. So as sports go, last year 3 and 1 (9th place) this year 2 wins and 2 losses (6th place). Go figure.

I would at this time like to thank our pal Warren Dimarco for organizing this for us. It was a success and a lot of fun.

                                                         Warren D warming up.

Great tournament by Goaltender Ted Sawicki - Long Pole Stu Aird is actually amazing to watch play lacrosse. Special mention to Brad Sanderson for being the all round Brad Sanderson guy that he is.

A great weekend for sure.

Lake Placid - Game 3

I am going to work backwards today. I will talk about the lacrosse part later in the blog.

After lacrosse today, we decided to check out some of beautiful Lake Placid.

We began with a look at the ski jumping venue. We took the chairlift to the top.

                                                         The Dimarcos ready to ski jump?

                                                          Lake Placid Ski Jump Venue

There was also a podium there, which was kind of cool, with the Olympics on right now, so Warren and I decided to see who should be on the Gold Medal platform.

                                                    Mike and Warren fighting for Gold.


We then decided to head up Whiteface Mountain, a really good decision, what an incredible view.

                                                Patti and I on top of the world.

                                                  Patrick with Dad Joe Masterson


We all had a great day.

....but earlier in the day.........we played some lacrosse.

Today was another day, we decided to put the difficult loss on Friday behind us. We needed to refocus on today's game against Tri-City, a New York based team.

We got off to another slow start though....and by part way through the third quarter, we were down
4 to 1. Not good.......but one thing about lacrosse is that things can change quickly. Ted Sawicki played amazing in net....and continually kept us in the game. Bob Wasson let a beautiful low screen shot go, and it was 4  2. We had some life.....and suddenly it was 4 - 4. We continued to battle, and I got the good fortune of picking up a loose ball that had been lying on the grass, it seemed like forever, and was left untouched to give the Canadian side a 6  5 lead late in the game, but they tied it with about a minute to go.

But this was our day. Wasson fired in his 4th goal of the game, to give us a big win.  Final 7  -  6.

We play now on Sunday for 5th place out of 16 teams, not too bad.

                                          Team Ontario 2012 - Lake Placid