Winter Olympics!

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Anyone watching? Anyone care? I enjoyed watching the ski jumping -- it made my knees hurt just watching it, though.

I can't help but wonder how many of the star athletes are using designer steroids that aren't detected by current tests.

 

I loved the opening ceremonies, but the ski jump just doesn't tickle my fancy. I'm waiting for the more gymnastic events like the snowboard 1/2-pipe.

 

Don't judge ski jump before you've been to the top of that tower - those guys are crazy . Hockey is my main interest in Vancouver, but I'll check some other events too.

 

Oh, I'm not saying it's easy. I'm just saying it isn't really exciting to watch. Now the Alpine skiing is crazy and fun to watch!

 

Oh no! Our hero Sven could almost have died at Svencouver

 

I watch the Olympics. There are, in my opinion, a lot of good TV events. I even like the speed skating. My wife loves figure skating, although I maintain that that is a sport where there should be no men competing by themselves. I don't have a problem with the couples thing, but there is just something very effeminate about that sport that is exemplified when there is only a man doing it. The outfits certainly don't help their cause either. A guy should not be wearing sequins. Some of the "shirts" I saw the men wearing last night in the couples skating looked more like a woman's blouse.

I did like the opening ceremonies, and I like the skiing events, and I caught a bit of the luge on Saturday. One thing I will say about the winter olympics is that the people who compete are absolutely nuts. There are a great many events like the luge, skeleton, bobsled, alpine, ski jump, etc., where they are travelling at close to 90 mph! You don't generally see those kind of speeds for most of the summer olympic sports. I like both the winter and summer games, it just seems like the winter ones are more dangerous overall.

 

My mother-in-law argues that any 'sport' that requires a judge to assign points or determine the winner (and not just enforce laws) is not really a sport and shouldn't be included. It would certainly save the IOC from some of the embarassments of the past, especially around figure skating (I have a few questions about last night's scoring on that note), but it would also remove some of my favorite events: the half-pipe, uneven bars, aerial skiing, etc.

One of my complaints about it all, though, is the coverage. Here in the US, NBC has the contract, and I swear they spend as much time on random bio-pics and useless information as they do on the actual games. As a result, we generally see all the US competetors, maybe some of the host-country ones, the ones who end up with medals, and few if any others. For example in the ski jump, there were 20 people in one heat. We actually saw about 5 of them, and 3 of the 5 (all 3 Americans) weren't even in the qualifying number. The rest of the time? Random interviews with people who at one time participated in the sport, the complete history of the sport, someone's life story (especially Apollo Ohno's, I think I've seen that 5 times now), and other stuff that I don't care about. At one point in one of the events, they even took time away from the program to talk about the other comentators for other nations (specifically a couple of Canadian comentators).

Do other countries suffer similarly?

 

The best thing about the Winter Olympics is that many of the sports are bizarre and you can't believe they are actually sports. That makes watching them more exciting. We were watching the short track racing. When the two South Koreans (I think) wiped each other out that was amazing. Stuff like that doesn't happen in the Summer Olympics in which pretty much everyone knows what the events are and what the rules are. Most of the weekend they had to explain the rules and how they were scored. I especially liked the sport that was first a long jump to establish the starting delay times and then a 10K cross country ski.

 

The Nordic Combine, yeah, that was fun. The Biathalon was fun, too.

 

The biathalon is just odd... Skiing and shooting together... I don't get it.

 

Congrats to Canada for their 1st home gold!


I've got a question for all Canadians *not* living in Québec. Does it annoy you that the announcers speak French first, then English? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the official languages of Canada are English *and* French....but ummmmm, last time I checked, Vancouver is on the completely opposite side of the country as Québec. Hell, it's not even alphabetically correct!

To me, it would be like speaking Spanish first, then English during the 2002 games.

(Spanish might not be an *official* language...yet...but there are more people who speak Spanish as their 1st language in this country than there are people who speak English as their 1st. )

 

It comes from winter hunting in... umm... somewhere in Scandanavia or the like. They'd ski around in the winter as the easiest way of transport on foot, so logically those that hunted in the winter did so on skis.

The Nordic Combine, though, is an odd combo. Jumping and cross-country skiing?

 

In Finland, coverage isn't a problem. Every night, from about 8pm to 8am the national broadcast company shows pretty much every event possible, sometimes from two channels if events overlap. There's also reruns and recaps in normal sports news etc. Naturally sports that have Finnish athletes are covered better than the rest.

Weird but also very hard; just imagine shooting 2 inch targets from a 160ft range after tough physical exercise.. and the rifle has a standard iron sight without optics to make things harder.

As you said earlier, many of the winter athletes are totally nuts. I watched alpine skiing (mens downhill) earlier today and I would never, ever want to go down that slope, let alone skiing it down 65mph.

 

I guess I don't see what's so odd about it. It's sort of a military thing... In countries that have lots of snow and long winters, particularly before the advent of mechanized vehicles, I'd imagine that having soldiers that could ski and shoot was a fairly common necessity. I'll agree that as a recreational activity, skiing and shooting seems like a strange mix.

Also, as NOG points out, in some countries, any hunting in the winter may involve both skiing and shooting.

 

Actually, WWII shows that trained men with skis and rifles can best mechanized forces that outnumber them, given the right situation. Durring the Winter War, the Finnish ski troops decimated the Russian forces, including tank divisions! Later on, the Russians used similar troops to good advantage against the Germans in Moscow. Today, Sweden, Finland, and Norway still keep standing armies that include ski troops.

 

Kitrax, we are used to the French taking up more than their fair share of Canadian time, money, and spotlight. I personally hate it, but I also hate long line ups at the supermarket -- but there's not much legal that can be done about it.

 

AND

Oh, I understand the history, it's just that I don't know of any other event that has it's roots in hunting. Sure, there's skeet shooting at the Summer Olympics, but they don't make you hike through the woods first like you were going on a duck hunt...

 

Archery is an Olympic event and derives from hunting. In field archery (not an Olympic event) the competitors shoot to different targets at different ranges while moving in forest or other rough terrain by foot.

There are many variants of biathlon, where the skiing is replaced with running or swimming (both at summer) or the rifle is replaced with a bow. Apparently there's even Primitive biathlon with snowshoes and muskets

 

I am not aware of any of these events. Sure, there's skeet shooting and archery, but they don't make you run, hike, whatever to different areas to perform the shooting part. And I've never seen any form of biathlon where you run/swim and fire arrows instead of ski and use a rifle.

EDIT: Did the Canucks do anything cool with the medals? I haven't seen a picture of any of them, and I haven't seen any medal ceremonies yet. Anything cool like the Chinese did in '08 putting jade in the middle?

EDIT2: One other question - why do men figure skaters cross dress? Most of them wear shirts that indistinguishable from what a woman's shirt would look like. I mean, the sport is effeminate enough the way it is - why do they have to dress like women?