The sun came up over the mountains of Vancouver, the light coming off the timber that laid green and dark and washed in snow fresh on the branches. The hills were white with their ski runs, the lines running up and down, the banners and flags standing as points of color on those fields. The Olympic world lay waiting as the day began and it was, I thought, a beautiful thing. Looking at that scene, the way it felt festive and energetic and poised for worldwide greatness, I didn’t know how anyone could say they didn’t like this event.

It was the second day of the games and Vancouver was exactly what I imaged as a setting for the winter Olympics. It was a virtue of geography and season; a northern country in the grips of winter can hardly be anything but perfect. But it was also desire: Canada, a country that notoriously loves its hockey and winter sport, has geared up to make these Olympics the best there have ever been. And they’ve done an excellent job.

Olympic sport is unlike anything else. The first days have been filled with excitement, with victory and loss and triumph and defeat. There was the first American metal in the Nordic Combined since the games began, when Johnny Spillane took the silver in a race that came down to the wire. There was the collision when, with three Korean skaters leading the Short Track into the final turn, looking to sweep the medals, two skaters came together and crashed out to let the rest of the field into the metals.

Exhilarating. Two days in and the games have been nothing less.

There have also been the blowouts, the early-round, lopsided victories. The Canadian Women’s hockey team beat Slovakia 18-0. On average, that’s a goal every 3.33 minutes. There are always those types of games, those crushing victories, and we’ll see more of them. Hockey seems more prone to them than anything else, with powerhouses like Canada and Russia facing off against countries in which hockey is not anything close to a premier sport. But by the end, the hockey will be as competitive as anything else.

And there has also been tragedy. On the eve of the games, a young Georgian luge athlete, Nodar Kumaritashvili, lost his life in a training accident when he crashed near the end of what has been said to be one of the fastest luge tracks in the world. Kumaritashvili was young and his death hit his family and his small Georgian resort town as hard as anything can. His father talked to the press, standing outside on the slopes of those mountains with the snow falling, but his mother couldn’t. She was inside and surrounded by photographs of her son. It had been an eve of excitement, waiting for their son’s dream to be fulfilled at last, and it had been cut short. It had been lost there on the track across the sea.

In that tragedy, there is perspective. The Olympics have since their dawn been a coming together of countries, of cultures, of peoples. They have been a festival. And that is where they need to stay. There will of course be competition, but what it truly important has been brought back into view with the passing of Kumaritashvili: the lives of these superb athletes. The cultures and peoples they represent. There has always been a sort of camaraderie in the Olympic Village, a sort of gathering. It is an atmosphere of celebration. It is an atmosphere of forgetting our differences and finding common ground in sport. These people and their lives and their countries, all finding that bond where they can meet each other and shake hands and embrace when the events close. These are the things that are important, that need to be remembered.

For Nodar Kumaritashvili, for his family, for the town that watched him cross the ocean and then together mourned his loss, the Olympics should be a time of remembering that the vibrant life found in these people gathered in Vancouver is the most important and cherished thing of all.

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