You Just Never Know

So you woke up this morning and heard Canada won a medal in canoe/kayak events.
Hell of a guy, that Adam van Koeverden, you no doubt thought. Soon enough, though, you realized you'd thought wrong. Very, very wrong.
While van Koeverden — considered the surest of shots among the Canadian contingent at the Beijing Games — faded badly to a shocking eighth-place finish in the men's K-1 1,000-metre final, it was the much more unheralded Thomas Hall driving to a bronze medal in the C-1 1,000 at the Shunyi Olympic venue.
There, in a nutshell, is what you typically find at an Olympic Games, especially when it comes to Canadian results. For every van Koeverden or Brent Hayden who doesn't quite match high pre-games expectations, you'll also find a Carol Huynh or Ryan Cochrane or Priscilla Lopes-Schliep who produces an unexpected trip to the podium.
"Some people can handle (the Olympic pressure) and some can't," Hall would later tell CBC's Scott Russell on Olympic Prime. "Some people can bring their 'A' game when it counts. The Olympics only happens once every four years. It's a big deal and there's lots of stress."
Add it all up, and Canada generally winds up about where you'd expect at the end of the day. We sit on 17 medals with one full competition day left in Beijing, one shy of matching Barcelona 1992 as the second most successful Summer Olympics for a Canadian team at a non-boycotted Games (only Atlanta 1996, with 22, ranks higher).
Van Koeverden might yet contribute to that total. He's back on the water at Shunyi at 3:30 a.m. ET, gunning to defend his Olympic crown in the K-1 500 metres. He was as stunned as everyone watching about what happened in the 1,000, a race in which he won the silver medal four years ago in Athens.
"I just didn't have it," van Koeverden told CBC's Karin Larsen after the race. "It's a hell of a time not to have it. It's the worst 1,000 metres I have put together in years."
He's hardly alone. The sprint relays were littered with disaster, with both the U.S. men's and women's teams disqualified in the heats because of botched exchanges. The same fate awaited a heavily favoured Jamaican team in the women's final.
All of which goes to show that at the Olympics, you just never know. It's a whole different Games.
*****
It didn't take long for the so-called "Canadian flagbearer jinx" to be trumpeted by the media in the wake of van Koeverden's finish this morning. In the last five Summer Games, only kayaker Caroline Brunet (silver at Sydney 2000) was able to climb on to the Olympic podium.
Van Koeverden, of course, isn't done yet in Beijing. And it's worth noting that in 1984 and 1988, Alex Baumann (Los Angeles) and Carolyn Waldo (Seoul) both struck gold.
We're sure the latter two didn't believe there was any sort of hex attached to the red maple leaf. Confident guy that he is, van Koeverden likely doesn't subscribe to such thinking, either.