My favorite Winter Olympics moment

I enjoyed the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

There were parts that annoyed me, particularly the tape delay broadcast of events that could have been aired live, especially during the weekends.

But the good outweighed the bad.

I'm a skier, a former racer, so I really enjoyed the coverage of Bode Miller and Lindsey Vonn and the rest of the ski racers.

In fact, I'd like to think I identified more with the ski racers than anyone else who competed in the Vancouver games. I had fantasized for a long time as a kid that one day I'd be standing in the start house of an Olympic ski race.

But it's curious what age will do to you.

Instead of identifying with the Bode or Vonn I took a real liking to snowboarder Kelly Clark.

And it was because she sang.

If you watched the coverage of the women's snowboarding halfpipe competition then you caught Clark singing out load to the music on her iPod before she dropped into the halfpipe for her run. The viewing audience couldn't hear her iPod tunes, of course, all we could hear was Kelly blithely singing along ... and she was wonderfully awful.

It was snowboarding and karaoke rolled into a single event.

She can't carry a tune to save her life, but it was so enjoyable to watch her get into her competitive mode by singing away to the music we couldn't hear.

I liked this moment a lot because I could identify with Kelly.

The reality is that I'm more like Kelly, singing along to my iPod at moments that might be inappropriate, than I am like Bode hurtling down a mountain at 60-plus miles an hour.

My days of complete abandon on skis are long gone (more like cautious abandon these days), but my days of abandon singing along with my iPod are not ... far from it, in fact.

I listen to my iPod while I work out at the gym and, like Kelly, when I get into the zone of what I'm doing I tend to sing along to my music. Most times I'll catch myself, realize I'm amongst a group of people, and look around to see if anyone's noticing. Usually, most everyone else is locked into their own music with their own ear buds, they're just not singing karaoke like I am.

But the momentary embarrassment passes, and I'll continue my reps and my 4/4 beat with Green Day or The Who or Mark Knopfler or whoever.

At least I can carry a tune, at least I think I sound pretty good as I belt out "Dead Flowers" along with the Rolling Stones.