Miscellaneous

Redeye Returns

By Chris Stevenson

Okay, so where was I...oh, yeah.

Winter Olympics

1. Audra and I are going to the Vancouver Olympics.  We're leaving Saturday the 20th and staying for a week.  We've got tickets to men's curling on Monday and 4-man bobsled on Friday.  We might pick up tickets to another event if it's convenient and cheap.
2. Speaking of the Olympics, I love them.  I've watched a ton of coverage and followed every story.  The two sports that have surprised me with how exciting they are:  biathlon and snowboard cross.  The biathlon event mixes cross country skiing (perhaps the world's most grueling endurance sport) and target shooting.  Sounds stupid, but it's actually very exciting.  Every competitor has several rounds of shooting five small targets at a time.  Try holding a rifle steady when your heartrate is at 180. Each miss of a target is a pretty severe penalty.  So much so that 60% of gold medalists shoot clean.  In other words, if you miss even one target you are probably out of gold medal contention.  It's really riveting to watch.
3. I don't particularly care for the sport, but the butt-pucker factor is pretty high in pairs figure skating.  They have to execute 3 or 4 really difficult tricks plus a ton of lifts and other elements that the average person misses altogether.  The jumps and throws are where most teams blow it.  One of the two will fall, you hear the crowd groan and you know what they know - four years of work obliterated.
4. Seth Westcott repeated as the gold medalist for the U.S.A. in snowboard cross.  Exciting final.  Well spoken during his interview with Costas.
5. There are actually several Texans on the U.S. Olympic team.  Chad Hedrick is probably the most decorated.  He's a middle distance speed skater from Spring, just north of Houston.  We've also got Amanda Evora, pairs figure skater from Sugar Land, Jordan Malone, short track speed skater from Dallas and Justin Olsen, four man bobsledder from San Antonio.
6. I wouldn't call the Vancouver hosting effort an epic failure, but it's certainly been the worst in my memory.  First, a guy dies on the sliding track on the day the games are supposed to open.  Then, at the opening ceremony, they have a mechanical failure where one of four giant arms bearing a portion of the Olympic torch fails to emerge from the floor.  Meanwhile, four prominent Canadians are standing on the stadium floor holding Olympic torches looking like dumbshits.  Gretzky was REAL happy.  Dude looked uncomfortable.  They finally just went with it and lit three of the four arms.  Then they have Gretzky trot outside the stadium to go light the official torch, which by Olympic rules has to be outside and visible to the rest of the city.  So he gets into the back of a Chevy pickup truck and they drive his ass a few blocks to the other torch.  In the rain.  After the pomp and circumstance of all of the visuals, special effects, stage pieces, costumes, dancers, performers and all it looked a little weak.  What, they couldn't afford a chariot or some shit?  They're also having trouble at the Whistler events area because of the weather, which is known to provide poor conditions for world-class skiing events.  They cancelled the regular World Cup event there a few years ago for this reason.  They also had problems at the speedskating rink because a specialized Zamboni broke down.  They showed a picture of the ice that they were proposing to have the skaters use and it was horrible.  You want to see a bunch of people from Holland riot?  Make shitty ice for speedskating.

Other Stuff

1. As a nice segue from the Olympics, last week the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition came out.  It featured four Olympic athletes.  Although there was no Marissa Miller for the second year in a row, they do have Daniella Sarahyba.  The Swimsuit Edition comes out every February when winter has dragged on forever, things still look dead and the cold is too depressing to even contemplate doing anything outdoors.  I wonder how many suicides the Swimsuit Edition has prevented?
2. I learned something recently about politics.  One political party will try to prevent important legislation just so that the other party can't take credit for it regardless of the benefits of the legislation.  That's apparently what is happening with the health care legislation.  The Republicans can't allow it to pass because they can't afford to let Obama take credit for it.  I'm not pointing the figner at the GOP; the Dems do the same thing.  This probably should not have been a revelation to me.  I guess I'm still a naive idealist to some degree and think that the government is actually trying to do things for its citizens and for the overall well-being of the country.  Politics is massively counterproductive to government.
3. I'm doing the Texas Water Safari again this year; this time on a six man team.

Full post as published by Cursed With Ambition on February 16, 2010 (boomark / email).