From the Games:

 Editor’s note: Michael Villani is a Newport Beach resident who is a venue announcer at the Winter Olympics. He will provide stories from his perspective on an occasional basis.

Well, things are winding down here in Vancouver, but you couldn’t tell it by these rabid countrymen.

Wednesday night when the Canadian men’s hockey team beat Russia, you’d have thought it was the gold-medal game. The streets again barely passable (many shut down altogether) as the parade of jubilant revelers continued. It all spilled over to Thursday when the Canadian women’s team beat our ladies 2-0 to win the top spot on the podium. The Canadian women’s bobsled team had its athletes on the podium in the top two spots. Then there was a silver in the women’s short track 3000-meter relay. There will be more as Canada fights tenaciously to increase its medals total here at the end. The nation’s other pastime, curling (Really? I don’t get it), will surely add to the count.

My venue, figure skating, didn’t disappoint the fans either. Thursday night, if you watched, you saw the women’s free program crown a victor with a capital “V!”

In an unbelievable performance, Korea’s Yu Na Kim, who is 19, skated to a new world record of 150.60 points, for a total of 228.56. That shattered her previous world record by more than a whopping 18 points, catapulting her far out of reach of her competitors to claim the gold. Already a huge star in her homeland, Kim wowed all, including thousands of her countrymen, packed in the Pacific Coliseum to see her stunning performance. As I watched this Korean beauty skate, descriptive words like flawless, fluid, languid, effortless came to mind, and I could go on. While other skaters seem to hesitate, pause, contemplate before entering into a jump or complicated move, Yu Na seems to float in a dreamlike trance as she glides down the ice to, not just stick, a triple axel or lutz, but to own it. She’s simply breathtaking to watch.

An obviously shaken and dejected Mao Asada of Japan, who missed her triple axel, which she almost never does, had to settle for the silver.

Then there’s Joannie Rochette. How this grief stricken woman mustered up the courage to skate the performance of her life, was almost beyond comprehension to the thousands of her fans that filled the arena. Her mother died suddenly of a heart attack as she and her husband arrived in Vancouver last weekend to watch their daughter skate.

The painted smile on her pretty face belied the obvious pain in her heart. But Rochette did it, in true champion fashion; she hung on, in a bittersweet performance, to win the bronze.

As she struck her final pose, after her near-perfect, four-minute free skate, the venue erupted in euphoric cheering.

The camera panned the crowd to find her father, Normand, his eyes filling with tears, hands clasped over his heart in total admiration and love for his grown-up, little girl.

I’m sure I speak for all of us in wishing her peace and comfort in this time of great sorrow.