He worked 12 to 16 hour days and didn’t have a day off for more than a month. While he was in Vancouver during the Olympics, he hadn’t had a chance to even go outside and see the sights. Even the opening ceremonies, for which he had tickets to the dress rehearsal, he had to watch on television like the rest of the world. He was even using his own equipment for work.

When you look at it like that, it doesn’t seem like such a great job. But talking to Peter Bridge, Jasper’s icemaker at the Activity Centre, 30 minutes after the bronze medal women’s hockey game between Sweden and Finland on Friday (Feb 26) at Canada Hockey Place, he isn’t complaining.

His work there is pretty much done. Now, he’s just trying to stay out of people’s way as he stands at ice level, watching people slowly file in to take their seats for the women’s gold medal game between Canada and the USA.

“Well my role is pretty well over. I’m just trying to stay out of people’s way here and help when I can. I was one of the head ice makers at UBC, and now I’m just enjoying myself a little bit because it was a lot of work,” he says. “Everything went really smooth for us over at UBC. Everybody was happy, the athletes were really happy, so everything went really great.”

Bridge has been so busy he hasn’t even been in touch with the Block family, also from Jasper and working on the ice – who have been at different rinks. But now, while talking on the phone, the Blocks are just arriving.

Bridge was on site for every hockey game held at UBC, but only caught glimpses of the games since he was busy. After the actual ice making was pretty much taken care of, Bridge sat back a little bit and enjoyed the last two days of the Games, watching the hockey games from the best seat in the house – ice level where the Olympia ice machine come on and off.

“I was looking on eBay the other day for what the gold medal tickets were going for, and for the men’s the highest ones I found was $67,000 for a set of four tickets. So I think I’m gonna be pretty good being in the front row.”

Bridge was asked to stay for the Paralympics, but says he couldn’t take that much time off of work at the Jasper Activity Centre.

Earlier in the week Bridge spoke with some members of the Team Canada women’s team – for whom his last job at the Activity Centre was.

“I talked to Team Canada, the women, they said they had a blast when they were in Jasper, so they were really happy,” he says. “They had a blast on our rink and they really enjoyed going out and playing some pond hockey at the Lodge, they were pretty happy – I think we’ll get them back again,” he adds in reference to their week of training in Jasper in February.

Bridge missed the women while they were in town. “I had to leave to come down here. I set everything up for them and never got to really see them.”
But as he is speaking, he admits he will get to see them at a much bigger scale – the gold medal game – from ice level.

“This place was packed for the bronze game. There were very few empty seats. And then the men’s game will be really interesting, we had a couple really good men’s games over at UBC in the last few days, they were quite exciting, so I’m looking forward to it.”

And we all know how those games turned out.