Olympics
 

My students are not really all that interested in these Olympics. I think part of it is because they have no frame of reference for these snow sports. I'm wondering which Olympics you enjoy more and if you have a fave event.

Since I'm blessed in my life to know several former Olympic athletes, a few even have medals .... and all of them are in the summer games venues .... I guess I'll say I prefer the summer ones, though the skating events can be so very beautiful to watch. My favorites though would have to be the volleyball ones ... indoor and beach ... I love em both.

Easy...Winter Olympics---Hockey!!

winter games ,down hill racing ,ski jump

Speed Skating, Bonnie Blair and I learned on the same track. I got to meet her after she won her first Gold metal. Also like short track racing.

I guess I am getting old (like I really need to guess, boy can I say some stupid things sometimes) but recently I have come to enjoy the finer points of curling. Must be all that Canadian air that is blowing down I-5 to Seattle, eh?

Winter here...figure skating (love those short skirts), short track speed skating, skeleton(Tristan Gale is HOT), Luge, Snowboarding, Hockey, hell..I like just about all of it, I'll even watch Biathalon!

I love love the winter games. May be my background in snow sports, but I love all the skiing events, especially moguls. I also like speed skating, luge, and bobsled.

I JUST MET A GOLD MEDALLIST TODAY!!!! Donovan Bailey was at my office! AT MY OFFICE!!!! 100 m sexy man!!! I saw him run across the road!!! :D

(The Americans who work in the office didn't know who he was -- he's a big hero here for the '96 gold in the 100m & the relay with Bruny Surin)

It's a wonderful international cultural event celebrating dedication to the body.

My fave event will be hockey. We won gold for female & male hockey in 2002 & it was a happiness that can't be explained. I don't think we'll do the double this time but I'll be cheering like a madwoman (cuz I'm not crazy as it is).

LOL They're going alphabetically & Dan just yelled, "Venezuela? What the hell? There are two of them!!"

Same as the Jamaican bobsledders, I guess.

I like the winter Olympics better - I love watching the hockey as well as all the rest because it's all stuff I would really suck at if I tried :D

I like the summer games. I’m hoping to see Steph on the Javelin Catching team in 08. :D

I've been dying to catch your javelin for years now. :rolleyes:

I've been waitin' 12 minutes for this reply...lmao!!

You'll catch something, anyway.

I never thought I would see this in type! *faint*

Back to the original topic (is this an anti-Jacques?), you should maybe try Territory Biathelon.

You drag a skier around a measured course and then you shoot him.

Snow skiiers are thus an uncommon sight up here.

Very interesting OF. I like it!! :rolleyes: I'll get my jeep, you bring Steph. :D

Lilith,

I prefer the Summer Games. My favorite event is diving.

The Opening Ceremonies were as strange as always. Yoko Ono? You'd think she'd have better public speaking skills by now.

Pavarotti was awesome!

Yeah Steph...I just don't get the appeal of that woman either!!?? Peter Gabriel's rendition of "Imagine" coulda been done better too. Oh well!

I LOVED the torch lighting though! At least this year there were no doves set free to fly into the flames...lol!

I totally enjoy both winter and summer events. Figure skating and all forms of skiing are fun to watch. The luge is pretty cool too. I'm glued to the TV for the summer gynastic events.

Whenever I am home I turn on the tube and see what event is going on!

Well, aside from the fact that ice hockey is the best sport ever invented...I like biathlon.

Because we suck at it, we get absolute minimum coverage of it, but I too find the biathlon very interesting. There aren’t many events that cause you micro adjustments of how far away to stay from going all out.

Speed skating, skeleton, luge....speed, baby!

Oh yeah, and cross-country skiing because TV usually makes a big production of it to make it into this mythic competition of not only person against person and country against country, but person against his/her inner demons.

The first period of women's hockey just ended. Canada 5, Italy nada

I'm assuming they let Italy play because they're the host country?

Yeah, I just turned off that game after a while. Italy was playing like Canada had a power play, even when they were at full strength.

Yes, the host country automatically gets a seed into the preliminary rounds. After that, it's what you can do with the skill & talent you have.

Earlier, the USA women beat the Swiss women in the same sport, 6-0. International ice hockey, particularly among women, doesn't have a very even distribution of skill.

CBC cut away from the game after the second period because it was so mismatched. The Italian goalie wasn't even as tall as the net!

Canada's only competition is the U.S.

I like both olympics equally. I just heard this morning Michelle Kwan has withdrawn from the Olympics. I can't imagine how Emily Hughes must feel to be "in", "out" and back "in" again

For those who watched the pairs figure skating last night. What do you think of the new scoring system?? I can not figure it out yet.

So, I ran over to the olympic web site to check: sure enough, Kwan pulled out due to a groin injury.

Good, she really had no business being on teh team this year anyway: it kind of pissed me off that the US Olympic Committee bent the rules, gave her special dispensation, and bumped Hughes off just for her.

For the life of me I thought for sure this comment would get a response from someone other than me!

Do you think they'll cancel the Olympics now that Michelle Kwan has pulled out? Shoot - she should have never been allowed to go with an injury in the first place. Time for some new talent I say.

This might help:

In Fitting Twist, Pairs Will Provide the First Olympic Test of New Scoring
NY Times
By LYNN ZINSER
Published: February 10, 2006

TURIN, Italy, Feb. 9 — The scandal's hard edges have faded in time, the details etched into Olympic lore under the phrase "French judge." But the figure-skating scandal that sidetracked the Salt Lake Olympics four years ago will reverberate here Friday, when a new Winter Games begin.

In attempts to avoid scandal, which shook the 2002 Olympic pairs, judges keep a running tally of points, adding or subtracting after each move.

<snipped>

But there will be an instant reminder of the judging scandal — not only does the pairs competition open the skating on Saturday, it will also serve as the Olympic unveiling of the scoring system created to fix the corruption. But while the new scoring is more transparent, it is also maddeningly complicated and comes with its own built-in debate: anonymous judges.

"At least in the old system, you knew" who had misjudged you, said Richard Pound, an I.O.C. member from Canada. "Now you can't tell." The competition may end in 17 days with as many questions as answers.

But Salt Lake's Games introduced a new platform for Olympic controversy. The French judge Marie Reine Le Gougne became the focus of international intrigue after she said she was pressured into helping a Russian pair win. Thanks to insistent television announcers and an enraged North American audience, the silver medalists Jamie Salé and David Pelletier became the sympathetic victims of a fix. They eventually walked away with their own set of gold medals, matching those of the Russians Anton Sikharulidze and Yelena Berezhnaya, after the I.O.C. intervened.

A sport that had always been at the mercy of murky judging was suddenly under siege.

<snipped>

The double gold medals quelled the initial furor somewhat, but the scoring system took two more years to reform.

Le Gougne, who denies the conspiracy charges, was banned from international judging for two years, but she now says that she believes the scandal was worth it because the skating union was forced to install a new judging system before another worldwide audience would pay rapt attention again.

<snipped>

The new system has been generally applauded by the athletes, although some are still struggling to learn its nuances. It replaces the old, simple 6.0 system, in which deductions were taken from the 6.0 to produce a set of technical scores and a set for artistic impression.

Now, a routine is evaluated in what appears to be a blizzard of numbers, assigning values to each element performed based on its difficulty. Judges are still given a set of marks to judge artistry as well, all rolled into a confounding total. Sasha Cohen won the United States championships with a 185.98.

"I think it's alienated a few in the public because it's complicated," said Peter Oppegard, a former Olympic pairs skater and current coach. "They look at those numbers and say, 'What does that mean?'

"You lose that immediate reaction of, '6.0, wow.' You do lose that excitement. But if it means these athletes are competing on a more even playing field, it is a good tradeoff."

That was ostensibly the purpose of the new system. In the old one, judges were allowed to give the same score to several skaters and decide later how to rank them. It was standard practice to judge early skaters lower in order to "leave room" for the more accomplished skaters to come.

All that is gone. What exists now is anonymity. There may be a French judge, but no one will know. The skating union insisted on this because it said judges felt it would keep nations and federations from trying to influence their judging.

"It worries me that the system is so corrupt that judges cannot make proper judgments without anonymity because of retaliation," Pound said. "That's a problem."

Pelletier agrees. "A system that protects the judges makes me laugh," Pelletier said in a recent teleconference. "It should be a system that protects the skaters."

The United States Figure Skating Association argued against anonymity when the new system was formulated, but has since supported it because the I.S.U. instituted a judge-review process. Now, a panel reviews the judges' marks at every competition. Wayward marks draw an official reprimand, which affect that judge's future international assignments.

But the general public's ability to match a set of marks with a judge is gone.

"Before, I think people liked to see the country identified with the judges and could understand it very quickly," said Jim Scherr, chief executive of the United States Olympic Committee. "Now it's something of a black box."

Pound and others say a better solution is for the International Skating Union to train a staff of professional judges instead of relying on each country's federation to train and nominate judges for international duty, leaving them open to outside influence.

Still others say that judged sports, by their very nature, can never be free of controversy.

Many skaters will point out that under the new judging system, the Russian pair would have finished first and the Canadians second. All the upheaval would not have changed that result.

"I was sitting in the front row and I saw both teams compete," said John Baldwin, half of the top American pair, with Rena Inoue, at this Olympics. "What happened was one team won by a tenth of a point. That's how figure skating is. It's a judged event. I don't know if you're ever going to get rid of that.

"The new system is good on the technical side. But as long as it's a subjective sport, you're not going to get rid of it."

The sport of figure skating was turned upside down, but may have landed nearly where it started.

Love the winter games esp the tea tray event.......sorry the luge :P


Also the new scoring system for the skating sucks, I can remember when Torvil and Dean got their scores...The cheeres just got louder with each 6.0 while the announcer was very calm. You dont get that with the new 158.9..bleagh

I can't believe the US lost to Finland today in Curling! :mad:

They were just too straight for the task.

I enjoy watching the downhill skiing and of course...


Brokeback Luge! :D

Another loss for the US curling team....this time the ladies gave one away to the Japanese.....I guess I need to find a new sport.

Can anyone tell me when Michelle Kwan skates?

bare4you... she's no longer in the olympics ;)

I knew that Maddy, just wanted to see if anyone was awake :D

The US men's curling team lost to Italy today.....can anyone tell me when Bode gets his downhill gold medal?

/me smax bare4you's butt - smarty pants!

Maybe they could make this an Olympic sport! I just might become more excited (and even about the Olympics!) :p