Comment; blame Canada.(The Talk of the Town)

The Canadians may not have broken many records at the Salt Lake City Olympics, but they did do something more difficult: they smashed their national image. As everybody knows by now, the Canadian pairs ice-skating team of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier outskated the Russian team but were awarded the silver medal because a French judge threw her vote. Those of us with a weakness for French women -- and certainly the most unforgettable figure of these Games was that skater in the Coke commercial who murmured, ravishingly, "mon coeur" -- recall that in France a judge can also be an investigator, and is supposed to have arbitrary opinions. Nevertheless, the Canadians screamed bloody murder and demanded an inquiry and, mirabile dictu, Sale and Pelletier got the gold medal, although the Russians were allowed to keep theirs, too.

It is difficult for non-Canadians to grasp just how vast a change this is. The skaters didn't like what happened to them, they kicked and yelled, and then something better happened to them. Many American stories could be summed up in that sentence, but for Canada, a country with a whole arsenal of shrugs and apologies and "What's wrong with a silver, son?" explanations, that discovery was like the physicist Richard Feynman's discovery about sex: you mean, you just ask for it? Just to ask requires an accumulation of unembarrassed insolence that is known in America as cool. Canadians have often been cold, but not, Pierre Trudeau aside, cool.

Most national institutions in Canada were designed for the reduction of conflict. The Mounties are there in their bright-red uniforms to say, "Shoot if you want, we'd rather talk." Canada has a house of Parliament, the Senate, whose primary purpose is to amiably accomplish nothing, and to be seen accomplishing it. Canadian sports was, for many years, marked by having two football teams with the same name. Often enough, the Grey Cup, which is like the Super Bowl minus the money and the Britney Spears commercials, featured the Roughriders vs. the Rough Riders, so no one could be disappointed. It was instructive to watch the Canadian pair as they skated the line between the traditional oh-well-ism and the new haveit-your-way-ism. It was clear, for instance, that Sale, the Alberta girl of the bright smile and the shimmying rear, was the American of the pair. She ...