Canada's Sidney Crosby celebrates after scoring against Sweden in the 2014 Olympic gold-medal game. Crosby is looking for a third gold medal the 2026 Games, having missed the past two Olympics.Reuters
Sidney Crosby’s first great Olympic moment was demonstrating how not to go to the Olympics. Most people thought the then-18-year-old should have been on the Turin 2006 team that blew all four tires in the quarter-finals.
The only person with any pull who disagreed – Crosby.
Right after he’d been let down, he let his bosses and all of Canada off the hook: “I’m not there, but I can say I gave it a good shot.”
You can go on and on about Crosby’s ability, but the most unusual thing about him is the way he is in the world. Has there ever been an athlete of his accomplishment who made so few ripples outside of his play? Without becoming a misanthrope – a real danger for the greats – he is still able to move through life unnoticed. That is, until it’s time to show up, at which point he becomes a human rabbit’s foot.
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Some of the great ones are larger than life. By dint of personality, Crosby is smaller. You can imagine him as your favourite neighbour, even assuming he was also the best hockey player in the world. He’d be the guy who’d mow your lawn because he happened to be out there mowing his lawn, so why not.
Milan 2026 will not be the judge of Crosby. He’s already up on hockey’s Mount Rushmore. But it will be the moment that he crosses over from being a great Canadian hockey player to the great Canadian hockey player. A heavy emphasis here on the word ‘Canadian.’
Crosby doesn’t just play the game in the Canadian way – heavily, relentlessly and quietly. He does it while bringing every positive cliché about this country’s residents to life.
Polite? Yes, absolutely. There is no one more approachable in the game. Friendly? That, too. Seemingly genuinely. Self-effacing? Incredibly. Confident? Brimming with it.
When you say the words ‘Team Canada’ to anyone, it’s Crosby’s face that pops into their mind. Not Paul Henderson’s. Not Bobby Orr’s. He’s reached the Pelé tier, where he is more synonymous with the national team he plays for once every few years than he is with the professional one he’s played nearly 1,500 games for.
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A lot of things had to happen to make this the case, several of them recent developments. The least of them is maintaining a best-in-the-world level for 20 years. Then a weird confluence of business and politics intervened.
Had the NHL never recognized that it gets more out of the Olympics than it gives, Crosby would be frozen in amber at Vancouver 2010. A great Canadian moment, but the great Canadian career? It’d still be a debate.
Then Wayne Gretzky went to a party, wore a hat and had his picture taken.
You can’t argue that Gretzky isn’t hockey’s greatest player. The numbers only leave room for that conclusion. However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that he should have been acclaimed as Canada’s greatest player, which is what happened. That’s more than goals and trophies. That’s an implied covenant with the country.
If you want to be Canada’s best, you have to maintain faith with the little people. Over the last year, Gretzky has blown that relationship up.
Given numerous chances to make it right – the guy is on TV most nights – he’s taken a pass. There is no hope of a complete reconciliation. It would be very Canadian to paper it over, but fully healed? No chance.
It’s so bad that you can’t imagine anyone ever doing a testimonial to the Canada Cup teams Gretzky led, or the Olympic team he was on. Unless they did it in Florida, the main man would be booed off the stage.
So, who’s the heir to the throne? It’s so obvious that it didn’t require any sort of discussion. It’s Crosby.
He hasn’t said a mumbling word about any of this, and never will. It isn’t his place to do so (another Canadian virtue). He just sits by the phone waiting for the call. 4 Nations. Olympics. If Canada called Crosby up to do a tour on an Arctic trawler, he’d ask what time he should show up and what to pack.
His patriotism isn’t loud. He’s never wept on the jersey. His celebrations don’t cross over the line to rubbing it in. He has maintained the balance between always trying and never trying too much for longer than Team Canada colleague Macklin Celebrini has been alive. He’s never fumbled.
There’s that often referenced Warren Buffett line about “20 years to build a reputation, and five minutes to ruin it.” Buffett wasn’t interviewed every night after the markets closed. Crosby has been, and never once stepped wrong.
At 38, he’s still humming along. Since 40 is the new minimum for an all-timer, that must be the target. And then we’ll see. It would still bring him up well short of French Alps 2030. Is this it? Probably.
If so, it’s time to recognize the scale of the accomplishment. Crosby has won everything you can win, and still seems a little unknowable. He is laden with hardware, and still has the lightest touch with people. He has never pressed himself on the country, instead inviting the country to press him whenever it needs reassurance.
There is an old aphorism that sports build character, while professional sports reveal it. By that measure alone, Crosby is the great Canadian hockey player. Another gold medal doesn’t change that. It would only make it more so.
These Canadians travelled across the Atlantic to attend the Milan Cortina Winter Games in person. Would you make the trek?
Robyn Doolittle