Wayne Gretzky played for Canada during the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano and then managed the men's hockey team for each of the next two Olympics -- Salt Lake City in 2002 and Turin in 2006.
He has a different role in mind for Vancouver 2010 -- spectator. Gretzky plans to be in attendance when Canada stages a Winter Olympics for the first time in 22 years, but his intention is to watch rather than participate.
One of Gretzky's primary regrets from his previous three Olympic experiences was how his focus needed to be squarely on the task at hand -- trying to help Canada win a gold medal, which happened in 2002, ending a 50-year drought.
But he had few opportunities to get out to the other Olympics venues and watch speed skating, skiing, curling, figure skating and the other sports on the schedule, something he intends to remedy this time around.
Gretzky is mindful that his replacement as executive director, Steve Yzerman, is under enormous pressure to deliver a gold medal, in the same way he was eight years ago.
"It's a fine line for both Steve and I, in the sense that I really don't want people to think I'm influencing him," said Gretzky, who estimated he's spoken to Yzerman two or three times over the past seven or eight months.
"It's his team and his management group.
"What I can give him is the experience of what I went through and what we went through as a group. So we really don't talk about individual players.
We don't talk about the style of player. We really just talk about what to expect -- the things you need to do to protect the players, to get them ready, things that I have first-hand knowledge of because I went through it."
Gretzky is particularly well-known for his rally-the-troops rant in the middle of the 2002 Olympics, when Canada got off to a slow start, losing its first game in one-sided fashion to Sweden and then getting through the preliminary round with a modest 1-1-1 record.
Gretzky's us-against-the-world press conference put the focus squarely on him and helped lift the pressure off the rest of the team. Canada went 3-0 in the playoff round and played its best game in the gold-medal game against the United States, a 5-1 victory.
Yzerman, playing despite a bad knee, held a pivotal leadership role on that team.
With about six weeks to go until the 2010 roster needs to be submitted to the International Ice Hockey Federation, Gretzky suggested this was "the most critical time" in the evaluation process for Yzerman and his staff.
Barring injury, players such as Sidney Crosby, Jarome Iginla and Martin Brodeur will be chosen no matter what. The controversies will focus on the bottom end of the roster, where "you're always going to have questions about the four or five guys people figure should be there, and the four or five guys people think shouldn't be on the team."
Gretzky made a controversial choice in 2006 by adding Todd Bertuzzi instead of Crosby, the emerging young star, who would have been a far more popular choice.
"The bottom line is, if you win the gold medal, you picked the right guys -- and if you don't, you're subject to questions. But they'll have a very good team. I think he's got tremendous goaltending, good depth, size and speed. I think this is going to be one of the better Canadian teams that we've ever put together."
Canada lost in the semi-finals in 1998 to the Czech Republic in a shootout, the only Olympics in which Gretzky played. He watched the defeat unfold from the bench, as five of his teammates were foiled, in succession, by Czech goaltender Dominik Hasek.
Still, playing in the games was far preferable to sitting high above the ice surface, in the manager's box, with his hopes and aspirations in someone else's hands.
"When you're playing, your nervous energy is before the game, or the night before," Gretzky said. "Once you put on your equipment and go out for the warm-up, all that nervous energy goes away and you just want to go out and play well.
"In management or coaching, you're really not that concerned the night before or the morning of. But then when the game actually starts, you physically can't do anything about the outcome of the game. That's when your nervous energy starts -- when you're watching the game. So it's the complete opposite of being a player on the ice."
As for being a fan this time around, Gretzky relishes the prospect.
"There's always a lot of pressure on the Canadian hockey team," Gretzky said.
"Obviously, with this being in Vancouver, the pressure is going to be even greater than it was on the teams in the past. But they have good management, good coaching and the leadership of the players -- guys like Iginla and Crosby -- they've faced these pressures before and they understand what it's all about. I'm sure they'll be fine."
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