Pressure of Team Canada already building on Crosby

PITTSBURGH (AP) — No one needs to tell Sidney Crosby about the enormous expectations building in his homeland for Canada’s Olympic hockey team. The Vancouver Games don’t begin for another two months, yet it’s almost as if they start tomorrow.

Canada’s TV listings offer a clue: Nine networks and cable channels, including CTV, Rogers Sportsnet and TSN, the country’s version of ESPN, recently aired Part 1 of a special titled “Sid the Kid V. Alexander The Great,” exploring the rivalry between Crosby and Russia’s Alexander Ovechkin. Part 2 airs closer to the games.

Canada realistically expects Crosby and Ovechkin, arguably the sport’s two biggest stars, to meet on the ice in Vancouver. Canada expects it might be for the gold medal. Canada also expects to win. There can be no silver medal, not in these games, not on home ice.

Not with Sidney Crosby wearing the maple leaf in the Olympics for the first time.

“Oh, yes,” Pittsburgh Penguins teammate Marc-Andre Fleury, himself a possible Canadian goalie, said Monday when asked if the burden on Team Canada is huge. “My parents told me people have been talking about it for a year.

“Hockey in Canada is like football in the U.S. Everybody expects Canada to do well and to win — and nothing else.”

Especially now that Crosby, who led the Penguins to the Stanley Cup at age 21 in June, is likely to be centering Canada’s top line for the first time.

Crosby, then 18 and an NHL rookie, was passed over in 2006 as executive director Wayne Gretzky stayed loyal to many of the players who helped win Canada’s first gold in 50 years at Salt Lake City in 2002. Publicly, Crosby downplayed the snub, but he was disappointed and motivated by it.

Four years later, he is as close to a lock as it gets, although Canada’s team — to make certain the key players are healthy, productive and ready to go — won’t be chosen until Dec. 31.

Once the team is selected, the message will be clear: There can be no repeat of Turin in 2006. Then, an entire country gathered around TV sets to watch these games in near disbelief: Switzerland 2, Canada 0. Finland 2, Canada 0. Russia 2, Canada 0.

Crosby’s young, fresh legs and impossible-to-quantify desire might have helped prevent such an embarrassment, despite his youth and relative inexperience on the international stage.