Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The Hunt for Rick Mercer

So if you don't know who Rick Mercer is, he's hosts The Mercer Report on CBC. Over the past few years, he's done more than a few stories about Canada's Paralympic athletes and he was out here today to ski with Brian and Robin McKeever. Andrea and I decided that we'd go try and find him partly because we actually did want to meet him and partly because we were looking for something entertaining to do. So I phoned our media relations officer Chris and he had no issue with us showing up at the shoot so off we went!

Because these Games are being covered by CTV (or at least that is what CTV is pretending to do), Rick and his crew couldn't get access to Whistler Olympic Park so they had to do the interview at Callaghan so we put on our skate skis and went looking. It wasn't too long before we found him, but we really hadn't thought that far ahead about what we would do when we actually did find him so myself, Andrea, Margarita and Robert basically just stood in a group watching. Very suave on our part, wouldn't you say? Not so much!

Anyway, we got invited over by the cameraman so we skied up and he basically just asked who we were before heading out on skis with Brian and Robin. So mission accomplished, but I didn't have the guts to ask if we could get a picture with him. So we skied back to Whistler Olympic Park, got some good photos at the ski jump (the photos don't do it justice as to how steep it really is) and made a beeline for the first bus we could find because it rained all morning and we were soaked. The only one who was remotely dry was Robert who chose to ski in a poncho, but us three girls put getting wet ahead of skiing in plastic.

Anyway, when we got back to the village, who should show up in our Canadian athletes' lounge but Rick Mercer! So in the end, I got my photo. It was amazing to see how quick he is in person. If he made any sort of mistake while being filmed, he would pause for about a second then redo it so they could just edit it out later. Anyway, it was an entertaining day! I'm not usually a celebrity chaser and I certainly felt like a geek asking to get a photo with him, but as soon as I did it, so did a whole bunch of others so apparently, I'm not the only fan.

2 comments:

  1. Wow, that's awesome! I would love to meet that man, I've been watching most of his shows since he's been in Vancouver, and am now a big fan :)

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  2. Very cool. I remember the presentation that you did to Burnaby Central kids and the part of Rick Mercer trying to ski was hilarious.

    Go Courtney!

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