Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony: In The End, Gretzky Lights The Torch

With nothing much else happening on a Friday night, NBC’s coverage of the Opening Ceremony was by far the most watched program on television on Friday. The ceremony garnered a 17.3 rating for the entire ceremony, meaning that it was watched by an average of 32.6 million people. From the press release:

As the Olympics are one of the few premiere events, it makes sense that practically everyone and their brother sat down and watched the ceremony. Unfortunately for most, it means watching it on tape rather than live.

Hear me out here. I’ve been trying to follow the plot of this musical (or whatever it is), and the only conclusion I can reach is that the story of this musical was written by an overly imaginative five-year-old. Look:

Olympic Stuff

By Brandon, age 5

You’re going to think this is amazing. You know the Opening Ceremony that you’re in? It’s being broadcast...on television! And photographers are everywhere! You don’t even have to record it yourself!

Oh, uh...okay, sure, if you want to.

Oh, nice try Bermuda...

...and hats off to the re-engineered Zubaz, Czech Republic...

UPDATE: Kevin McGran is a writer for the Toronto Star. The Twitter account, which appeared to be his, has since been removed. In a happy twist of fate, however, Gretzky did end up lighting the torch, and all is right with the world. The original post is below.

At the Winter Olympics’ opening ceremony in Vancouver, the identity of the person to light the torch was supposed to remain a secret. Minutes ago, though, the news broke. Kevin McGran tweets:

In, say, an NFL broadcast, the sophisticated mishmash of events on the field is explained to you by two or three commentators and perhaps a sideline reporter. If you’re lucky, one of them will have a loose grasp on what they’re talking about. For the most part, this is completely adequate.

The Winter Olympics’ opening ceremony starts Friday night at 9:00 Eastern. In essence, it’s a bunch of people marching with flags. How many commentators are required to convey this? NBC believes the answer to be somewhere around a billion.

The Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony will start on NBC tonight at 7:30 p.m. EST, and many of you will wait through two plus hours of people prancing around in lycra bodysuits to find out the answer to this question: who will light the torch?

Canadian officials are mum in keeping with the tradition of keeping the final torchbearer a secret, but the odds-on favorites are Wayne Gretzky (duh) and Betty Fox (the mother of Terry Fox, whose extremely inspiring/tragic/getting dusty in here story is here). Being the illustrious celebrity machine it is, the nation of Canada has any number of luminaries to draw from, but if they had their priorities in line they’d only have one name in mind for the honor.