Billy Demong posted a picture on Twitter tonight. It’s a photo of Todd Lodwick, Brett Camerota, Johnny Spillane, and Billy holding up their Olympic silver medals from today’s Nordic combined team event. Under the picture Billy wrote, “Paul Robbins is proud.”

Paul would be proud. No one in this hemisphere loved and promoted Nordic skiing more than Paul. He was a press officer for the U.S. Ski Team and devoted his winters (and most of his summers) to writing news releases and media books, as well as freelance stories for myriad newspapers and magazines. He was probably the most prolific ski writer in the country, if not the world.

We would fight to sit next to him in the pressroom just to be closer to his witticisms and knowledge of all things skiing. He wouldn’t just make you laugh. He would make you laugh all the time. Samuel B. who?

Over the years, Paul became especially close to the guys on the Nordic combined team — a team of guys who have trained and competed for 20 years out of the lime light. Until today, most people in the United States probably didn’t even know what Nordic combined is. One of Paul’s dreams was to change this.

Paul died two years ago today — exactly two years too early to witness the U.S. Nordic combined team win an Olympic silver medal. At age 68, he suffered a heart attack at his desk while covering that weekend’s ski races.

But Paul was there at Whistler Olympic Park today, and not just in spirit. Paul’s son, DC, brought his ashes in a Dunkin’ Donuts Styrofoam coffee cup and put them in the broadcast room (DC works for NBC) overlooking the start/finish stadium at the cross-country ski venue.

As Billy Demong battled it out with Austria’s Mario Stecher for the gold medal in the last lap of the Nordic combined relay, I like to think Paul was smiling from that cup.

After the ceremony, a few of us — including one of Paul’s closest friends, Peter Graves, who has done the Nordic race announcing at these Olympics — walked down one of the cross-country ski trails and said a few words after DC sprinkled Paul’s ashes under a giant hemlock tree.

I said nothing. I was too choked up. Which Paul never would have approved of. He would have said something to make me laugh — like why were we dumping him in the snow and not at a nude beach in Maui.

DC lightened up the mood, saying that someone earlier in the day had asked hopefully where he scored a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee out here. And DC said how happy Paul was when a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise opened near his home in Vermont, so he didn’t have to drive across the river to New Hampshire for his favorite coffee and confections.

Although it felt sad to leave Paul alone there in the snow, it’s nice to know that part of him now rests at the location of the U.S. Nordic combined team’s first Olympic medals.

And not in a Dunkin’ Donuts drive thru. Although he would have liked that too.