REVscene Automotive Forum - The Top 40 quotes of the Olympic Games

1. "I'm wearing gold around my neck, I don't really care what they think,"
-Canadian Goaltender Roberto Luongo when he was told that the Americans said he looked uncomfortable in the Gold Medal Game.

2. "It just made more sense to hang out with a cute girl than with 19 other guys." -- Figure skater Scott Moir, on choosing ice dancing over hockey when he was nine years old.

3. "My name is Odd-Bjoern Hjelmeset. I skied the second lap and I f----d up today. I think I have seen too much porn in the last 14 days. I have the room next to Petter Northug and every day there is noise in there. So I think that is the reason I f----d up. By the way Tiger Woods is a really good man."
-Norwegian cross-country skier Odd-Bjoern Hjelmeset, when asked about his silver-medal performance in the men's cross-country relay.

4. "It's amazing, all players until you actually win, you're all questioned. I went through it for a brief period, Wayne (Gretzky) went through it very briefly, Mario (Lemieux) went through it very briefly — all these guys until you win you have to deal with that. I think this will answer some of that question for him, he was in net for a gold-medal winning team and played admirably."
-Team Canada General Manager Steve Yzerman who captained the Detroit Red Wings for more than a decade before he won his first Stanley Cup, on Luongo's critics.

5. "Yep, no medal again, maybe I will pop down to the shops and see if I can buy one" - downhill skier Marco Buechel of Liechtenstein after ending his fifth Olympic without a medal.

6. "I would never have dreamed of just hanging out with the king and wearing the same pants, and, you know, say, 'Hey, you look cool, king'" - Norwegian curling captain Thomas Ulsrud on the prospect of meeting the King of Norway at the curling venue and offering him a pair of the squad's pants.

7. "I love my mother very much, but I wouldn't want her around me all the time when I'm working." -- Frank Snoeks, a Dutch television commentator, on the ever-present mother of American speed-skating star Shani Davis, in The New York Times.

8. "I want to puke." -- Canadian ski-cross racer Stan Hayer, when asked what his first thought was when he woke up yesterday, race day.

9. "Grandmas love him, When we do an autograph signing, every grandma within 65 miles wants a picture." -- Jules Owchar, longtime coach of Canadian curling skip Kevin Martin, tells The New York Times.

10. "Your position in the house [the curling rings] is not always very ladylike and I can imagine something flipping up. That's a wardrobe malfunction that wouldn't be very good at all." -- Canadian curler Cheryl Bernard on why she won't wear a kilt in competition.

11. "Once you reach the finish line you are being treated worse than sheep going to slaughter. They are running around, shouting and you cannot enjoy your victory." -- Germany's biathlon double gold medallist Magdalena Neuner, on the finish-line harassment being imposed by doping officials.

12. "Luge looked like you are trying to stuff your Christmas tree through the door tip first and have your limbs peeled backwards. So skeleton made sense to me - going down head first, if you fall off, you go the way gravity wants to send you" - Canadian skeleton gold medallist Jon Montgomery

13. "Today I won not only a bronze medal for myself, this is a gold with little diamonds on it. I won a medal just getting to the start line" - Slovenia's Petra Majdic after finishing third in the women's 1.4km sprint despite breaking five ribs in a training accident earlier in the day.

14. "He's legitimately the Michael Jordan of curling, and has been for 20 years" - US curling captain John Shuster after losing to Canadian rival Kevin Martin.

15. "It's a total farce. It wasn't worth getting up this morning. We'd have done better to stay in bed and buy a lottery ticket" - French team head Nicolas Michaud on the decision by judges to let the Nordic Combined individual hill ski jumping competition go ahead despite high winds.

16. "A few laps from the end I knew it was all wrong. I saw my girlfriend in the stands, her hands over her face and I thought 'sh*t, this is big sh*t'" - Kramer after he was disqualified for a lane infringement in the 10,000 metres.

17. "I'll take it. It's not offensive or anything. It's nice, I guess. It's really a tabloid magazine, right. So, like ... yeah." -- Canadian speed skater Shannon Rempel, on making the cut in a British tabloid's "Top 10 Winter Sports Babes."

18. "Any gift that I give her will not be able to beat the medal that she has won. The only thing that could outshine that is a ring." -- Canadian short-track speed skater Charles Hamelin, whose girlfriend Marianne St-Gelais celebrated her birthday with a silver medal in the women's 500-metre short-track.

19. "As far as I'm concerned, until you're on the track, nobody has the right of way. I was already at a disadvantage being on the outside. We both crashed, but she fell. It's not my fault she's clumsier than I am." -- British short-track speed skater Sarah Lindsay blasts Canadian rival Jessica Gregg following the crash that led to her being disqualified in the 500-metre quarterfinal.

20. "He is infamous for offering monosyllabic answers to journalists. And even in victory, or near victory, he offers nothing. To see him on the podium, between a wildly celebrating American and Canadian, while he looked like he had just sucked on a lemon, was to cringe. All of it might be forgivable if there was the slightest sense he has more than a walnut's worth of feeling for his adopted country." -- Peter Fitzsimons, Sydney Morning Herald, on moguls silver medallist and adopted Australian Dale Begg-Smith.

21. "Our second [Christoffer Svae] was supposed to hook us up with new pants and he showed up with these ones and we were like, oh no. No way we're playing in those." -- Thomas Ulsrud, skip of the Norwegian curling team. They wore the new pants.

22. "You don't want to go the Tonya Harding route of winning medals. If you wanted just strictly to win medals, you could go through a whole long start list of racers and just go to their house in the off-season -- break a leg here, pull out a shoulder socket there -- and you'd probably have a whole bunch of medals." -- U.S. skier Bode Miller, playing down the importance of winning, to The Associated Press.

23. "I am not going to stand here and bawl. It was such a long shot, did you see my bib number today? It was 47, out of 54 girls, that was my ranking. I was down with the exotics. I think I was in a Kazakhstan sandwich. No offence Kazakhstan." -- Chandra Crawford, Olympic cross-country gold medalist in Turin in 2006, after failing to advance beyond the quarter-finals in the ladies sprint classic.

24. "I told him I was kind of sick and tired of hearing the 'Luuu' chants when Chicago would come here to Vancouver, but they've never sounded better than tonight." -Canadian Hockey Player Jonathan Toews.

25. "If Julia Mancuso had knocked on your door two months ago, wearing her blue U.S. winter coat, you would have thought, 'Wow, the new mailman is cute!' " -- Michael Rosenberg, for SI.com,on the anonymity of Olympians such as U.S. skier Mancuso.

26. "The photographers wanted a picture of me holding the medal just with my teeth. Later at dinner I noticed a bit of one my teeth was missing." -- German David Moeller, silver medal winner in the men's luge, to German daily Bild.

27. "I wasn't sure what the format was. Then the coach came over and said, 'You want to go again?' " -- Sidney Crosby, on Canada's hockey shootout with the Swiss.

28. "Of course she's happy. She just made it across the finish line with all body parts attached" - a voice over the PA system after one skier smiled to the camera at the bottom of the course.

29. "They have all kinds of money for hockey in their country. They should have a solid women's program. We have North American women getting paid to play in a Russian women's league, so you can't tell me they don't have money." -- Julie Healy, Hockey Canada's director of female hockey, pointing the finger at Russia as the worst offender in the failure to improve the standards of women's hockey.

30. "Normally after appendix surgery, the doctor is saying for one week you cannot fly in a plane. But driving with a sled, he didn't know. Now I can say that the athlete can drive after 10 days. We are a little crazy. Crazy Latvians." -- Bobsled pilot Janis Minins, who took part in four-man bobsleigh training, just 10 days after having emergency surgery to remove his appendix.

31. "The 1,500 metres, you kind of go all out. You can taste blood in your lungs sometimes. That's how I would describe it." -- Kristina Groves of Canada.

32. "I don't agree with the system. They [Virtue and Moir] are not real dancers. They are very technical and don't really 'dance' on the ice."
-- Italy's Massimo Scali, questioning the gold medal won by the Canadian ice dancers Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. Scali finished fifth with partner Federica Faiella.

33. "It's another disappointment at the Olympic Games. These Games have beaten me."
- France's Brian Joubert after his short programme in which he fell.

34. "It's like living in an airport. Controls here, controls there. They even look under the bus to see if there isn't anybody hiding there"
- France's slalom specialist Sandrine Aubert about the Olympic village at Whistler.

35. "I have been around for too long to be intimidated by a quad, a flying mane of blond hair or a tanned face."
- flamboyant American Johnny Weir sizes up rivals Yevgeny Plushenko and Evan Lysacek before the men's competition.

36. "If the Olympic champion doesn't know how to jump a quad, I don't know..it's not men's figure skating, it's dancing"
- an irritated Plushenko hits out at Lysacek after the American won the men's title without attempting a quad.

37. "I wouldn't say there was a rivalry, but I and the Canadian team - I never see them except on the track and there are people I like more." -Michi Hlailovic of Germany on rivalry with Canadian sliders.

38. "Welcome to my very special news conference. I grew my beard out a little just to show that I'm a man." — American figure skater Johnny Weir.

39. "They can own the podium. We just want to borrow it. Just for the month of February, and we'll give it back." — American short-track speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno, whose country ended up winning the overall medal standings.

40. "These guys come out strong, but they tend to fade as the game goes on." — American hockey player Ryan Kesler, between periods of the gold-medal game against Canada.

edit: Moar

"I'll probably wear it in the shower. I'm not going to take it off all week.''
-- Moir when asked about his gold medal.

"We have always been a fourth to be reckoned with and continue to be so.''
-- Canadian Olympic Committee CEO Chris Rudge, making a lighthearted reference to several near-podium finishes.

"We saw four clowns coming down the ice."
-- Swedish skip Niklas Edin, talking about the Norwegian men's curling team's pants.

"Wayne Gretzky is the obvious choice. Hey wait, isn't Pamela Anderson Canadian?"
-- American skier Ted Ligety on who should be chosen to light the cauldron.

"They're (athletes) just collecting free stuff."
-- Canadian athlete mentor Marnie McBean talking about the 100,000 condoms given out in the Olympic villages.

"I didn't do too bad for an old lady.''
-- Canadian speedskater Clara Hughes, 37, after winning a bronze medal in the women's 5,000 metres.

"It was tough. There was a moment where I almost slapped someone in the front row because they kept yelling (the score) to me, but we're worried about season-ticket renewals so I held back.''
-- Canadian-born Phoenix Suns guard Steve Nash, who was teased by NBA fans about the Canadians' loss to the United States in a round-robin men's hockey game.