SALT LAKE CITY, Mar. 3 – The athletes are gone but not the awards. In a final “shadow ceremony” here one week to the day after the 19th Winter Olympics came to a close, officials gathered for a secret meeting. The topic: Blame Canada. Sitting beneath a life-sized poster of Wayne Gretzky with a bulls-eye scratched across his face, hooded participants from Russia and Japan to The United States and France glumly awarded Canada a bottle of putrefied maple syrup. The crime? All but destroying what many officials here once referred to as “the-wink-and-a nod-winter-games.”

One leading official sounded especially bitter. “It’s always been so easy. A few of us got together ahead of time to decide who’d win what. That’s called efficient planning, OK. There was a lot of camaraderie. It kept a lot of us employed, and it worked - until Canada.”

Zeal to blame Canada is uniting traditional Olympic rivals like the United States and Russia. “Look. It started with Jamie Sale and David Pelletier crying over their silver,” said one U.S. judge as his Russian colleague nodded in grim agreement. “So we give ‘em a gold. Then, with not so much as a thank you, they kick the U.S. hockey team’s ass as they’re walking out the door. So much for the world’s longest unguarded border.”

On the heels of the U.S. judge’s comment, came a follow-up complaint from a French official throwing up her hands. “I mean, I can not even give my opinion on a glass of wine anymore without the waiter telling me I probably made my decision before the bottle was open.”

But the sharpest words came when discussing speed skating. “Maybe they take a gold in the Men’s 500m relay, and alright, the Women’s 500m competition. Fine. But don’t come back and start grabbing the short-track Men’s 500m gold and silver. C’mon.” Skating officials had planned instead for a short-track 500m silver-gold men’s showdown between U.S. skater Apolo Anton Ohno and World Cup holder Kim Dong-Sung from South Korea. “You know how frustrating that is for us? For six months we had the winners lined up. Did the Canadians care? No, they had to ‘win,’” the official said, raising his fingers up beside his ears to make quick quotation marks. “It’s just sickening.”

Anger is spilling beyond official Olympic ranks. Executives at NBC Sports are described as “miffed” by what they’re calling “Canada’s total disregard for our need to make some cash.” One NBC executive sounded especially exasperated about what he called “that damned hockey thing,” referring to Canada’s Woman’s and Men’s hockey gold medals. “Hello - in case no one noticed, we’re a U.S. network, broadcasting U.S. victories. Our audience is a traditional one. They expect melodramatic, nationalistic build-ups, finished off with a nice Stars-and-Stripes medal ceremony. Not a bunch of foreign types leaping up and down, waving weird flags.”

The executive was not at all mollified by the high U.S. total medal count, second only to Germany. “We could have delivered a heck of a lot more if the damn Canadians had shown some manners. Lots of viewers are very upset by all this.”

As he helped wrap the molding maple syrup in a COD mail-package, marked “melt down some of your damned gold to pay for this Canuk,” a Russian official muttered. “I think there’s going to be a lot of soul searching after all this settles down, deciding how to make sure it never happens again.”