VANCOUVER (AFP) – Heavy snow forced more Olympic Games alpine ski races to be postponed but Canada's star-studded ice hockey team shone brightly with a winning start to their gold medal campaign.
International Ski Federation (FIS) officials called off the men's super-combined and women's downhill training on Tuesday after big dumps of snow in the Whistler mountains, making the pistes unskiable.
So far only one alpine ski medal event has been raced, the men's downhill won by Switzerland's Didier Defago, while three have been postponed to later dates.
The International Ski Federation said it was confident the opening women's race, the downhill, would go ahead as planned on Wednesday.
In contrast to Whistler, Cypress Mountain near Vancouver is suffering unseasonably warm weather with rain and fog.
It is so bad that organisers were forced into an embarrassing cancellation of 20,000 tickets at the beleaguered venue after rain washed away 30 centimetres (12 inches) of snow and made the standing room spectator area unsafe.
It takes the total number of tickets pulled at Cypress to 28,000, putting a dent of 1.5 million Canadian dollars (1.4 million US) in the Games budget.
"We're extremely disappointed to say that we will be unable to have standing spectators at our remaining events in the snowboard stadium up at Cypress," VANOC official Caley Denton said.
Although the Games are now in their fifth day, for many they only began when the superstars of the National Hockey League took to the ice.
Hockey-mad host Canada is favorite with playmaker Sidney Crosby of the NHL champion Pittsburgh Penguins joined by a stellar cast, including all-time winningest NHL goaltender Martin Brodeur.
They crushed Norway 8-0 with Jarome Iginla grabbing three goals and Dany Heatley two.
"It is great to get that first win. We see where we need to go and see what we need to work on," said Crosby.
For Russia, Washington Capitals playmaker Alex Ovechkin scored twice in an 8-2 win over Latvia while the United States did enough to beat Switzerland 3-1 despite having just three players with previous Olympic experience.
A slimmed-down Yevgeny Plushenko opened with a quadruple jump to fire the first shot in his bid to retain his men's figure skating title by leading the short programme.
But the 27-year-old faces a battle with reigning world champion Evan Lysacek and Japan's Daisuke Takahashi, who both opted against the risky jump, but are less than a point behind the Russian going into Thursday's free skating final.
Plushenko insisted: "Without a quad it's not men's figure skating."
Maelle Ricker became the first Canadian woman to win Olympic gold on home ground when she claimed victory in the snowboard cross.
Two days after Alexandre Bilodeau's win in the men's moguls freestyle had ended the hosts' long, painful wait for an Olympic title on home soil after two barren campaigns in Montreal in 1976 and Calgary 1988, Ricker also delivered.
A day after South Korea claimed their first ever Winter Olympic gold outside short-track skating, Lee Sang-Hwa matched the feat by winning the women's 500 metres speedskating in a shock victory over hot favourite Jenny Wolf of Germany.
Germany's Tatjana Huefner claimed gold in the women's luge singles, while her compatriot Magdalena Neuner took the women's 10km biathlon pursuit title.
It put the Germans on top of the medal table, ahead of South Korea and Switzerland.
Elsewhere, Sweden's Bjorn Ferry won the men's biathlon pursuit.
