The White Stuff

I don't have any stamps for the upcoming Sochi Winter Olympics so I looked at what I might have for countries surrounding the Black Sea and found these Bulgarian ones issued for the 1964 games in Innsbruck, Austria. Bulgaria only sent a small team but the largest group of this was those participating in the

cross country skiing. The Innsbruck games are memorable in Britain for a rare medal at the Winter Olympics, and not only that, it was gold.  It was one of the great upsets in Olympic Bobsleigh history when a country that did not even have a bobsleigh track won the two man bob with Tony Nash and Robin Dixon. Nash was a director of an engineering firm and one of the key figures for technical development of bobsleighs in the 1960s, Dixon was the brake-man.

Not surprisingly for a country in the tropical zone Cambodia (Kampuchea at the time of the issue of these stamps in 1987)  has never participated in the Winter Olympics so they chose the Swiss 2 man bob team for one of their stamps. They got the right sport for a Swiss medal but in actuality at the 1988 Calgary games it was the Swiss 4 man bob that won gold. 

The Winter Games returned to Canada in 2010 and the slopes of the Blackcomb Mountains saw one of the fastest bobsleigh courses in the history of the games at the Whistler Sliding Centre and this stamp captures the speed.  Now the Brits at home became experts in the skeleton as they followed Amy Williams winning gold, sliding at Whistler on what is often described as a tea tray at 145 mph. Canada's Jon Montgomery won the Men's event. 

and both Canadian ice hockey teams won gold.  Despite the small size of this stamp the post has managed to frank nearly all of it, so honestly there is a ice hockey player under there somewhere.

Not to disappoint here is a more easily seen hockey player on an Albanian stamp.  I'm not sure what country it represents as they did not make their Winter Olympic début until 2006

but produced over the years attractive stamps for the event, such as these for the Games at Grenoble in 1968

An entry to Viridian Postcard's Sunday Stamps theme of Sochi or other Olympic Games