Protectors of the Earth - Album 2 Steps from Hell Hymn of the Rising (No Choir) Audiomachine The Platinum Series III: Eterna Two Steps From Hell - Heart of Courage (Extended Version) invincible Title: Fatal Fantasy Composer: Lorne Balfe (Oswin Mackintosh) Oswin Macintosh (PRS); Track: 09. - Fatal Fantasy 4
The Vancouver Olympics were so fantastic because it built anticipation for a bunch of promises that, against all odds, were completely delivered! It's crazy to watch this intro because it aired before the games yet somehow, almost everything it predicts ended up happening! I don't remember every athlete and sport foreshadowed in this trailer, but I remember most of them. Lindsey Vonn at 2:19 did the gold. Shani Davis at 2:51 did too! Apolo Anton Ohno at 3:02 did get the most medals of any American! And by God, Shaun White at 3:15 did rocket snowboarding even further! They ask how he will follow up his 2006 win but everyone knows that his final ride in the Vancouver halfpipe was the stuff of legends!!! His best run was even an *encore* performance, a word which this intro coincidentally mentioned! NBC even represented Canada so excellently here! They did rewrite Olympic history at 5:15 because not only did they get Olympic gold for the first time at home, they got the *most* gold medals out of any other competing nation and even broke the record for most golds in any Winter Olympic games!!! The intro got it a bit wrong at 2:25 because their first gold wasn't Women's Moguls, but that first gold did end up coming from Men's Moguls, so it's close enough! And of course, we all know the legend that was unknowably foreshadowed at 5:50. So much pressure and hope was put into Canada's hockey performance. It was the gold Canada wanted more than any other and this intro knows it! Sidney Crosby, the man himself, is shown as the face of Canadian Hockey, so it's storybook perfection that he was the one to score the winning gold medal goal on that fateful day in Vancouver! You can't write an ending that perfect!!! This intro and these Olympics in general were beyond satisfying. Nearly everything hope, dream, and prayer was delivered to produce one of the most legendary Olympics of all time and it was surely one that Canada itself never forgot! The manner in which this intro somehow foreshadowed all those memorable moments even before they happened is nothing short of psychic! I don't know what oracle at NBC wrote this commercial but whoever he/she is, they essentially predicted the future! It's just so much fun to go back to this intro and relive the hype I had going into these games, hype that was met and for that reason have embedded these glorious games in my mind. But I feel a bit sorrowful looking back. Almost all those wonderful and inspiration athletes have or retired by now. I can only recall Shaun White and Lindsey Jacobellis competing in 2022, the former confining his retirement and the later likely retiring soon as well. It's sad that I have to say goodbye to these last 2 legends of my younger self, it feels like the end of an era. But alas, time marches on. I'm glad to have been able to see these athletes in all their glory during those wonderful Vancouver games. The chapter of my life that directly connected to those games sadly is ending, but I will always have the memories and joy of the 2010 Winter Games, one of those few moments in my life where all my dreams managed to come through. I along with Canada will forever remember Vancouver 2010 because along with being a perfect chapter in our lives, it was also a perfect chapter etched in history. 6:55 And those dear reader, were the enduring images forever mapped in out minds during the 21st Winter Olympic Games. :'-)
"It is unbelievably lovely. The city itself is a city like all cities, but from the window of my room at the Shore Inn, I looked out across water as blue as a sacred scarab from a Pharaoh’s tomb. Fishing boats moored like old men taking the sun. Great swooping gulls that dove to fold in atop masts and rode the wind currents to my balcony where they observed me with detached bemusement. Great stands of virgin timber rising straight up to snowy mountaintops where the sun catches the ice crystals in Omar Khayyám’s “noose of light” and sends it back shattering against the eyes. Clear. So clear you can see all the way up Queen Charlotte Strait to the Pacific, or so it seems. One can turn just so and see the world the way it was before concrete and neon and Styrofoam; and a gladness jumps up in the heart. Perhaps for this reason, Vancouver seems a happy city. Random people on street comers smile for no discernible reason. A movie marquee proclaims LITTLE BIG MAN starring CHIEF DAN GEORGE with DUSTIN HOFFMAN, and one understands small prides. The candy bars are nastier than American brands, but the wrappers are more polite. Dining is more leisurely than in Los Angeles. It might be possible to go to Vancouver for a long while and write good books there. The air, dear God, the sharp minty bright air!" Harlan Ellison, 1969
It was the NBC sports intro to the Olympics. They have the broadcasting contract for the Olympics in the US. About the only thing they do well is the intro, the rest is riddled with commercial breaks or taped delayed (with multiple commercial breaks).
Perhaps it's because they were so famous that everyone already knew their names. Even 12 years later I still recognize a lot of these athletes and I'll bet they were even more well known going into the games.
