Conspiracy at the World Hockey Championships! Russians bury coin?!

I'm saying this in my best frustrated Sidney Crosby voice, like in the NHL commercial where he ends up with all the food at his hotel room door.

OVECHKIN!!!!!!

I have found the commercial in question- please watch it below if you don't know what I'm talking about.



Ovechkin is a player I love, by the way, read older posts and you'll see what I really think of him....but I'm cursing him today as it appears that it wasn't a puck-over-the-glass delay of game penalty in OT to Rick Nash that killed Canada in the Gold Medal Game of the World Hockey Championships. It wasn't a game winner on a perfect shot by Ilya Kovalchuk. It wasn't Evgeni Nabokov besting Cam Ward in the duel of the goalies. It wasn't even Canada surrendering a 4-2 third period lead. NO, it was something totally different. Read on.

Apparently, on CANADIAN soil (or ICE, for those into technicalities) the Russians manged to bury a coin under the Colisee Pepsi ice surface in Quebec City. HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN? Now I know how the Americans must have felt at the 2002 Olympics when Canada won double hockey gold and dug a loonie out of centre ice. I know HOW that happened in that instance. NHL Iceman and Canadian Dan Craig buried the loonie.

Here's something REALLY funny- I GOOGLED "Loonie Under Ice Salt Lake Olympics" and one of three pictures that came up was actually one from this very blog that I took last year during our trip to the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. The fact there is a display in the Hall for the thing is further proof that the "lucky loonie" is quite revered.

Further proof- read below- No coin in the ice in 2006- No win for Canada. Coincidence? Or COIN-cidence? hmmmm.

TURIN, Italy (AP) - The head ice-maker at the Winter Olympics isn't putting his money on the Canadian hockey team. Or any team for that matter.

Canadian Dan Craig said he has turned down a request to place a loonie coin in the ice - something one of his workers did in 2002 at the Salt Lake City Olympics, where the Canadian men and women both won hockey gold.

"My job is to make the ice for everybody," Craig said. "I can't have the Czechs come up to me and say `What the heck?' I can't have the Swedes, Finns, you name it, come to me and say I did something to favour Canada."

The Lucky Loonie from 2002 has become part of hockey lore in Canada. Wayne Gretzky held it up after the gold medal game as proof that the team had a lucky charm on the ice, and the coin later went on display at the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Craig, who was born in Jasper, Alta., insists there will be no loonies going into the ice.

"I had three Americans and three Canadians on the ice and they must have checked six times to make sure there was no loonie there," said Craig, who is the NHL's chief ice consultant.

NOW- back to the reason I am bringing this all up- See the below video, where Ovechkin joins another Russian player at centre and they can clearly seen digging something out of the ice. The video says it is a lucky Canadian loonie. I don't know how they KNOW what it is, but I'm going to find out. I'm also going to contact some of our leading Sports Stations in this country to GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS!