The just-finished Vancouver Olympic Games started off as something of a catastrophe. There wasn’t enough snow, the Georgian Luger died, the ice resurfacing machines didn’t work, they couldn’t get the torch all the way lit at the Opening Ceremonies: you name it, it went wrong during the first week of the 21^st Winter Olympic Games, to the point where 8,000 snowboard cross tickets at $50 a pop had to be refunded in their entirety because the natural surroundings were such a mess.

Some time around the middle weekend, however, once the snow picked up and the machines got to working properly and skiing cross made its insane debut and ice hockey started and women’s figure skating took over and the aerials got moving, everything took a turn for the better. The worldwide audience could forget about logistical nightmares and instead focus on the joy, pageantry, beauty, and the rest of the bullshit that makes the Olympics something fantastic in which to immerse oneself every four years. As they always do, these Olympics proved great theatre.

There were many, many winners and losers throughout the sixteen days, 258 medals given away in 86 events and some sort of compelling story involved in nearly every competition. The rallying spirit of these Games seemed best epitomized by the final day’s events, the 50K cross-country ski and the Hockey Championship. In the skiing race, the gold medalist overtook the guy who came in second on the final straight away after two hours of skiing; in the Hockey final, Canada won in sudden death overtime on a goal by Canadian Golden Child Sidney Crosby, this after the Americans tied it up with twenty seconds left in regulation.

While many men and women best exemplified the Olympic Spirit during these Games, perhaps no single thing came out further ahead in the end than “O Canada,” the Canadian National Anthem. It is an elegant, stirring ode, simple yet rousing and available in three different languages to boot.

More than once during the Vancouver Olympics, I found myself involved in conversation about how beautiful Canada’s anthem is. It was as though people forgot about, or, more likely, never quite acknowledged the song to the degree these Olympics did. In the average American fan’s experience, it only pops up before hockey games, or Toronto baseball and basketball games. Off the top of my head, I can’t remember a game I’ve been to (maybe a Detroit-Chicago hockey game fifteen years ago?) where they played “O Canada,” or a situation wherein I’ve been forced to take it at face value and appreciate it as something other than what they sing before games in the Frozen North.

This renewed appreciation definitely had something to do with Canada winning so many gold medals this year. Whereas they didn’t win a gold in either of the two previous Olympics held in Canada, Canadians won the most gold medals of the Vancouver Olympics, meaning their anthem played more than anybody else’s.

O Canada

Our home and native land

True Patriot love

In all our son’s command

With glowing hearts we see thee rise

The True North strong and free

From far and wide, O Canada

We stand on guard for thee

God keep our land

Glorious and free

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee

It’s a frank, simple statement of national pride, twelve lines and no more about standing on guard for a glorious and free native homeland. None of that pitchy, meandering stuff from Frank Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.” I love my nation’s song, and deeply, but it’s a bitch to sing, and God forbid a self-involved diva should get ahold of it (American Idols in particular butcher it). America’s national anthem goes through something like three key changes and reaches it’s crescendo with an insanely-high note in the middle of the ending couplet. It’s almost more a form of journalism, if one inspects the lyrics, with those bombs bursting in air and proof through the night that the flag was still there.

That Russian song they sang during the Closing Ceremonies seemed a doozy. If there is one reason and one reason alone why I would ever want to be Russian, it would be for the chance to sing militaristic anthems with a fat Vodka buzz in a crowded bar in Moscow. The French anthem, “La Marseille,” is pretty in the way that so many French things are, alternately dramatic and fluffy, with lyrics about ferocious soldiers standing up to tyranny in the midst of a bright, lilting melody. “God Save the Queen” is British through and through, a celebration of a single woman as the embodiment of the entire nation.

National anthems in many ways reveal the notable traits about a society. And much the way Canadians were praised throughout this Olympics for, essentially, being some of the coolest, most laid back people on the planet, their national anthem won points with casual observers time and again for its simplicity, from the lyrics to the melody, and the way literally anybody can do a passable job singing it, whether they speak English, French, or Inuktitut (yes, there is a Native American translation).

Now that these Olympics are in the books and were, after those rough initial days, a complete success (what was the last disastrous Olympics? Athens 2004?), let’s acknowledge, finally and without reservation, the singular winner of the Games of the 21^st Winter Olympiad: “O Canada,” an uncomplicated yet proud anthem for a necessarily uncomplicated yet proud people.

As for the official loser of the Games (other than Evgeni Plushenko): the awful voice of the French P.A. announcer. I’ll have nightmares about that for years to come.