Ice hockey tie with US warms things up in Russia

In Sochi, as at every Olympics, there are volunteers everywhere you look. No job too small, no whim too slight. One poor girl in the main press centre got dragooned into helping out at the temporary laundrette the other day, while the paid staff were on their lunch break. You've got to be wondering if you've done something apocalyptic in a former life to come back as someone forced to handle the smalls of the world's sporting press.

The best job though has to be flower picker-upper at the figure skating. One of the quirks of what is, let’s face it, a thoroughly quirky sport is the tradition of chucking bouquets of flowers onto the ice to hail a particularly brilliant routine. As the skaters go to sit in the kiss and cry – once so named in irony, now the official title given to the seat where competitors wait for the judges’ marks – a battalion of teenage girls skates out on to the ice gathering them up.

The thought struck during the pairs competition on Monday night that this must be a fine way for a young girl to spend her fortnight at the games. Excellent skaters all, they presumably harbour notions of one day being the dancer in whose honour the flowers are thrown. A couple of weeks spent watching the pre-eminent skaters in the world from the best seat in the house and then skating around the rink as the crowd goes wild. Certainly beats laundry duty.

Finite reserve
The flower thing had me wondering, all the same. Like, how do you decide when to throw your bouquet? Surely each person in the crowd has a finite reserve – you've got to really want it to go through the rigmarole of bringing even one bunch through security, never mind a few of them – so choosing which performance to bless with your affection must be a fraught business.

Go early and you risk being empty-handed for the best routine; leave it late and you risk seeing nothing worthy of your praise. And what then? Throw them anyway just to get rid? Hold on to them and bring them home for that special someone? Nothing says eternal love like flowers you’re only getting because some skater didn’t stick a landing.

In the end, the answer was actually fairly obvious. The 12,000-strong crowd in the Iceberg Skating Palace knew when they were going to throw their flowers and weren't into complicating the thing even slightly. When the Russian pair Elena Ilinykh and Nikita Katsalapov finished their interpretation of Swan Lake that would win them the bronze medal, the rink was suddenly and comprehensively carpeted.

Flowers rained down from every corner. There must have been close to 100 bouquets tossed onto the ice as Ilinykh and Katsalapov drank in the applause. By contrast, nobody who came before or after – including the gold and silver medallists – saw more than a dozen. The wildest reception was for the home-town favourites. Well, duh.

Flags
Thing is, these haven't been a particularly nationalistic games, at least not in any overbearing way. The streets of Sochi aren't lined with Russian flags in anything like the manner of London two years ago, where you couldn't move for Union Jacks at every corner. Olympic Park is in Adler, about a 40-minute train ride out the coast. The mountain events are in Kransaya Polyana, a good 90 minutes up the mountain. It would be entirely feasible to walk around downtown Sochi and not know the games are on at all.

There’s no Jess Ennis or Mo Farah beaming down from every billboard. In fact, the closest anyone has come to face-of-the-games status is probably Vladimir Putin himself. He turns up in the news every day, whether it’s dropping in on the US team, as he did last Friday, or visiting the freestyle skier Maria Komissarova after she broke her back on Sunday and phoning her father to assure her she was being taken care of.

You are never in doubt that these are Putin’s games; they don’t necessarily always feel like Russia’s. One exception. Last Saturday, when Russia played the USA in ice hockey, everything stopped. Those televisions in Olympic Park that weren’t already on the hockey channel were switched over. Volunteers at all venues dropped what they were doing and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of screens for the 2½ hours it took to get a result.

Belter
The game was a belter. Russia went ahead, then went behind, then equalised to force overtime. It went to a shoot-out, which went to sudden death, which America won to the palpable dismay of the home nation. As an experience, for about the only time in the past fortnight, you got the feeling of genuine communal emotion.

It was reassuring actually. After all, what’s a mass sporting event for if it isn’t for that?