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It is hard to convey just how Canadian these have been.

Multi-Olympic veterans to whom I've spoken are in awe of it. Even Canadians seem occasionally taken aback. Vancouver is a city painted red and white, partying long and loud into every night on the crest of a wave of national fervour. Each gold medal is a new excuse for Canada to celebrate the fact of its existence.

I have sat and watched as floods of fans transformed empty venues into a seething mass of maple leaves - nowhere more so than the Olympic ice hockey arena, , for on Thursday.

Enclosed arenas amplify noise at the best of times, and the crescendo as the Canadian team took to the ice must have made the home team feel 100ft tall. It is hard to recall one fan who did not turn up in national colours.

That has been replicated at every venue, in every event, and out on the streets no matter the day of the week. Is that simply what happens to Olympic host cities, or has this been a peculiarly Canadian phenomenon? Will London 2012 feel like this?

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If you build it, medals will come.

That is , one of Great Britain's most decorated Olympians. As Team GB's athletes , Redgrave believes British fortunes at the Winter Games can be transformed by one building.

He proposes creating Britain's first long-track speed skating venue and housing other winter sports within it, following the example set by the American state of Utah ahead of the in 2002.

may be a sport all but ignored in Britain, but Redgrave believes it can become the beating heart of a new era in British winter sports. Sponsors have been approached, we are told, and UK Sport is amenable. An embryonic plan it may be, but it sounds far more than a pipe dream.

Is it really that easy? If the British team, which constantly reminds us of the chronic lack of funding for winter sports, managed to build a temple of ice, will their fortunes change? How would it work, and what do athletes stand to gain?

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You if you want to. These ladies are not for Boleroing.

Nor are the men. Choices of music in figure skating are becoming increasingly varied and unlikely, as witnessed on Monday at inside Vancouver's Pacific Coliseum.

The musical accompaniments chosen by the 23 pairs battling for gold ranged from to , and from to . My personal favourites, however, were the Estonian duo skating to by Metallica, and the Hungarians who brought what they called a "hip-hop medley" to the Olympics.

"We both love to dance off the ice. We figured it would be a challenge, and a lot of fun, to do what we love off the ice and carry that on to the ice," said Hungary's Maxim Zavozin, whose routine alongside Nora Hoffmann included Janet Jackson's and the Pussycat Dolls' , with an emphatic burst of Bob Sinclar's to finish.

"It gave us so much confidence in the first couple of seconds when we started to move, the crowd started going and we heard them yelling for us and clapping."

That's what the competitors want - music that gets everybody going, from the judges to spectators at their first figure skating event. But how do you decide Metallica are the band for you? And if that's such a good idea, why isn't everybody doing it? What makes the music work?

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"Let's make sure everyone knows whose game they're playing," blasts a prominent here in Canada as the camera sweeps low over the ice.

The problem is, fewer people than Canadians think know whose game they're playing. Most people don't realise the game exists. , outside a handful of countries, may as well be frisbee golf - of interest to a dedicated community, otherwise irrelevant.

An outstanding example of the stark dichotomy between hockey-loving Canadians and abjectly ignorant foreigners is . Crosby is the 22-year-old captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins in - a league which spans Canada and the United States and is by far the highest-profile competition in world hockey. Crosby is also the talismanic forward on whom hopes of hockey gold for Canada's men rest.

Walk through Vancouver city centre and there are thousands of people wearing Canadian hockey jerseys. On the reverse of those, Crosby's name and number (87, representing his birth year) are almost ubiquitous. If he is not already a national hero in Canada, he will become one should he deliver that gold safely to the nation.

In Britain, Crosby could walk down any street and not get a flicker of recognition. You could ask a hundred people who Sidney Crosby is and I reckon one, maybe two would know. I don't think the rest could even take an educated guess.

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The walk from to the , in the city's southern suburbs, is as idyllic a 10-minute stroll as you will find here.

Passing by tranquil detached houses and fences gleaming white in the bright morning sun, I'm more minded of than a Winter Olympics.

But step inside the Olympic Centre itself, the venue for the at the Vancouver Games, and that all changes.

The temperature plunges to the point where cameramen filming the action can be seen jogging on the spot behind their cameras to keep their circulation going. Canadians wrapped in flags must wish they had brought blankets instead.

Team GB, however, will be feeling the heat. The British men's and women's curling teams are both expected to challenge for medals here, and the women began that challenge in fine fashion on Wednesday, in their opening clash.

The women's skip (or captain) is - at 19, one of the youngest women in the entire British squad for the Winter Games. But she has been handed the task of leading four other curlers .

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and refused to let it lie.

The Chinese figure skating veterans won bronze in the pairs event at the last two Winter Olympics, then retired. But after two years they came back with one, clear goal: win an Olympic gold medal.

. The husband and wife team were last to go in the free skate, making some small errors in their routine, but proved enough to earn them gold at the third time of asking.

Their almost robotic ability to deliver the goods under intense pressure here in Vancouver is remarkable enough. But it is their ages which grab headlines. Zhao is 36 and Shen is 31. They simply should not be international figure skaters at that age, certainly not Olympic gold medal winners.

As I discovered while speaking to their fellow competitors during Monday's competition, their presence is simultaneously the most daunting prospect and most valuable inspiration of these Games.

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There be golds in them thar hills - but they are not yet Canada's.

The first full day of Olympic competition had the host nation salivating at the prospect of that much-hyped first ever gold for Canada at their own Games, following failure at and .

And , the 26-year-old defending Olympic champion in , was the woman predicted to deliver it.

But as the wind whipped up and rain lashed down on an expectant, noisy, drenched crowd, America's Hannah Kearney ruined everything.

The wait goes on and, the longer it goes on, the more pressure will build on the next Canadian star in line. Except that pressure is going to have to come from somewhere other than Canada, because Canadian fans on the mountain seemed utterly untroubled by the sporting disaster they had witnessed.

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You didn't have to be an athlete to take part in the opening ceremony of the Vancouver Games.

Organisers brought a giant polar bear to life and made steam spout from whales which crossed the arena floor, while ice hockey legend helped the Olympic flame to its new home, a flickering maple leaf burning with the ambition of an expectant Canadian nation.

But the 60,000 fans inside the arena waving miniature Canadian flags did not have to sit on their hands and watch the three-hour spectacle unfold.

They - and I - became our own sound and light show, integral to the pictures beamed around the world as a long, tragic day in Olympic history ended on a resilient note.

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Canada. The "nice" country with an for friendly anonymity. But beneath those earnest smiles lies a dark, dark secret more than 30 million Canadians want laid to rest in the next two weeks.

No Canadian has won Olympic gold on home soil. Or ice, or water. They have had two attempts - the in 1976, and the 12 years later - and failed miserably on each occasion.

This time, that had better change.

"These Games are ours, and we are going to own the podium. Our target is whatever number of medals it takes to be number one," is the proclamation from , President-elect of the Canadian Olympic Committee.

"Owning" these Olympics has been more than a buzzword in Canada for years and "own the podium" is more than a sweet turn of phrase. It is , driving the team forward through a series of money-spinning, performance-enhancing government and corporate partnerships.

But it will mean nothing if the Canadians do not win three things: a busload of medals, at least one gold, and the men's ice hockey.

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The exhibition floor of the - rebranded the International Broadcast Centre for the duration of the Olympics - has become the United Nations in miniature.

National flags hang outside the offices of dozens of national broadcasters and, inside every room, reporters are tracking the hundreds of gathered Olympic athletes.

The big breaking story in one room will be passed over in the next office along the corridor. So I've knocked on a few of those doors to find out what's firing up the world's broadcasters.

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In three weeks' time, after a fortnight of action in Vancouver, Team GB's Winter Olympians are expected to come home .

It does not matter what colour those medals are - the British Olympic Association (BOA) and UK Sport simply demand that the squad return with three of them to satisfy the £6.5m investment poured into winter sports over the last four years.

To come up with that figure, senior members of the British set-up have taken the obvious step of scanning the team's performances in recent years to determine who stands a chance of winning a medal when the action gets under way this weekend.

The result is a set of "" published to much fanfare last month - a document which the BOA said "demonstrates the exciting level of potential that has developed in British winter sport".

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