It's not the Olympics in Canada without The Man.
The Man is no mere athlete, who comes and goes with each Olympics.
He is a constant.
He is The Voice.
He is Steve Armitage.
This is Armitage's 14th (!) Olympic Games as part of his 49-year-career (!) with the CBC. For multiple generations of Canadians, he has been the voice of swimming at the Summer Olympics and speed skating at the Winter Olympics.
The Man is literally ageless, since neither his biography on the CBC website nor his Wikipedia entry know how old Armitage is.
The Man is such a polished pro that he could make a race between three shoppers to the just-opened cash register at Walmart sound like the final minute of a tie game between Canada and Russia.
The Man is the William Shatner of sports broadcasting, infusing intense drama in every situation and especially each time every athlete "COMES...TO...THE LINE!"
The Man is the only person in the history of sports broadcasting whose voice gets lower, not higher, at the critical and exciting moments. He is the anti-Chris Cuthbert, who turns into Mariah Carey at key junctures. The more excited Armitage gets, the more his voice sounds like a powerful tank charging across a battlefield.
It hasn't been a perfect Games, however, for The Voice. Armitage dropped the ball horribly during Denny Morrison's race to silver in the men's 1,000-metre long-track speedskating.
Colour commentator Kristina Groves decided to do most of the talking, devoting the entire race to yapping about how great the Dutch skaters are and the camera obliged, focusing almost exclusively on the eventual bronze medallist Michel Mulder, who had earlier taken gold in the 500 m race.
As Morrison circled the rink, matching the Dutch skater stride for stride, Groves and Armitage took turns dismissing Fort St. John's finest as if he was some useless schmuck from Upper Slobova, who didn't qualify for the race at that distance at the Canadian trials and the only reason he was there was because of the head-scratching grace of teammate Gilmore Junio, who gave up his spot for Morrison.
Even in the back stretch on the final lap, Groves was harping about Morrison's "tight" and "robotic" skating technique, even though the bottom of the screen showed that Morrison was now skating two kilometres an hour faster than the Dutch skater. Morrison blew past him coming out of the final turn.
Only then did Armitage wake up, shouting over top of Groves as Morrison rocketed over the finish line, just four-one-hundredths of a second behind gold. He tried to cram the entire call into the few seconds after the race was over but then he patronizingly called it one of Morrison's best races of the year.
Umm, how about his life?
Groves still wasn't done, however, pointing out that it wasn't one of the best races she had seen Morrison skate, insinuating that he was lucky to beat Mulder.
Really?
At 28, he had just won his first individual medal at the Olympics and had become the first male skater who wasn't Dutch to win a medal of any kind in long-track speedskating in Sochi.
What Morrison should have got was classic Armitage, which is what we heard when The Man called Charles Hamelin winning the gold medal for Canada in the men's 1,500 m short track speedskating earlier in the week. Armitage started off quiet and then built tension at the starting line, his baritone dropping to a mere whisper before rising in volume again after the starting gun fired. A master of pace and control, Armitage called what he saw, pointing out the "sneaky" inside moves of Hamelin to take the lead.
Once the race picked up, The Man's voice descended into a thunderous growl, commanding any casual viewers to become transfixed by the action before them. Groves was relegated to the occasional cheerful chirp. When Hamelin crossed the line, arms raised in triumph, Armitage shout of "Gold!" was a proclamation from the heavens.
Morrison deserved the same treatment of sports drama at its highest, called by the Canadian master of the genre at the height of his powers.
The silver medal will just have to do for Morrison.
