[Great68]

This CNN reporter is awesome, he doesn't have a stick up his ass like the reporter that tattled on the women:

Ain’t No Party Like a Gold Medal Party

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — If asked which athlete you’d most like to party with at the Olympics, whom would you pick? Before Thursday I might have said the 2006 version of Bode Miller, who raged against the hype machine in Turin. Or U.S. snowboarder Scotty Lago, who clearly knew how to capitalize on bronze-medal notoriety in the streets of Vancouver. But now, an hour after the women’s hockey gold medal game, I’d say the entire Team Canada — because I’m sitting in press row at Canada Hockey Place, watching these women pound Molsons and smoke cigars on the ice.

A few of the victorious Canadians trickled back out of the locker room after all the fans had cleared the building, and only ushers and a handful of media members remained. A press conference was going on elsewhere in the building. The Olympic champs were still wearing their gold medals — but they were also holding beers, champagne bottles and stogies, and taking tons of pictures. I cut off my live blog of the game at the medal ceremony, and started a new post on the Molson Party, which is the most authentically cool celebration I’ve seen at these Games.

Forward Haley Irwin was kind enough to share one of her beers with a friend behind the penalty box:



Irwin (left) and tournament MVP Meghan Agosta laid on the ice and did bicycles while sharing puffs on a victory cigar:



First-line forward Caroline Ouellette (13) took swigs off of a giant Molson:



And Rebecca Johnston (No. 6) feigned a Zamboni cruise, which would have been cooler had her teammates let her take the giant Molson into the driver’s seat:



Finally, Irwin and Agosta worked on a champagne-and-beer combo (if this had been the U.S. team, High Life could have sufficed):



I won’t be shocked if I see them driving that Zamboni down Robson Street at 3 a.m. When you win a hockey gold medal for Canada on home soil, I think you’re pretty much given carte blanche.

(Late-night update: In the latest moronic piece of news to come out of the IOC, executive director Gilbert Felli says they will investigate the celebration. “It is not what we want to see,” he told the Associated Press. “I don’t think it’s a good promotion of sport values. If they celebrate in the changing room, that’s one thing, but not in public. We will investigate what happened.”

And the reason Felli had to react to it? Because an equally lame reporter from the AP called to inform him about it and ask for a comment. Is it possible to just see something like this, laugh at it, and be happy for these girls? At least Steve Keough, the Canadian Olympic Committee spokesman whom the AP called, had a reasonable answer: “In terms of the actual celebration,” he said, “it’s not exactly something uncommon in Canada.”

A word for the IOC, and reporters casting this as a negative incident: Please, just let Team Canada have their fun. What they did was refreshingly authentic. Don’t punish them for it.)