Figure Skating

Today's News Headlines from

• Business: Alan Greenspan traces housing bubble to collapse of the Soviet Union
• Business: Suncor oil sands expansions approved
• Globe Life: Book excerpt: Damage Control by David Eddie
• Globe Life: Recall on Graco high chairs affects 35,000 sold in Canada
• Ottawa Notebook: Liberal attacks PM for ignoring contraception
• News: Suspect in Mumbai attacks pleads guilty in U.S. court
• Globe Drive: Sienna gets a makeover

I guess this could be an ode to the Aud.

I'm talking about the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium, which is as much a home rink to me as is possible.

Skate Canada has been here all week and will finish up tomorrow. It's the fourth time the old Aud has staged the Skate Canada Grand Prix, and it's done a Grand Prix Final, too, a memorable one in which, miraculously, there was no Russian judge on the dance panel, and against all odds, Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz won the gold medal over reigning world champions Barbara Fusar-Poli and Maurizio Margaglio of Italy. Things like that just didn't happen in ice dancing at the time. This was the final international event before the Salt Lake City Olympics and hugely important.

It was a stunning moment in sport, but in no way predictive of the fiasco at the Salt Lake City, as the ice dancing event proved to be the other half of a judging controversy that marked the 2002 Games and Bourne and Kraatz were left off the podium. The pairs event has always been talked about, but not the ice dancing, and yet the two went together.

But the Aud is much more to me than skating events. When I graduated from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., with an honours degree in English Language and Literature, the convocation ceremonies were held in the Aud. I can still remember walking across a platform to get my diploma, square hat on head, wearing the WLU colours of gold and purple, at one end of the arena. I crossed the stage at about the same spot where Patrick Chan lands a triple Axel in his long program and where Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir do their touchless lift.

The Aud is home, sweet home. No bad memories at this place. The smell of beer nuts, the gold and red seats, reminiscent of Maple Leaf Gardens, the hockey bags that roll in at the same time as the figure skaters, the pink-shirt fans from Toronto, (a skating event in Ontario wouldn't be the same without them), even a sighting of an old English classmate in the crowd. Sorry, I shouldn't say old.

Thank you, Aud.