Olympics part 3, closing remarks

Ok, so the witty title or tag never really came, but whatevs. Frankly i was more interested in watching the games and admiring athletic prowess than talking about it. Do you know why? Cos I'm a do-er, not a talker.

I do things like watch the games on TV. end.

But there was some pretty awesome stuff going on. Skeleton and Luge were still exciting, despite the efforts of mr. no-fun-pants from georgia (poor taste, moving on). Bobsled remained the most boring of the sledding sports, largely because there was no John Candy coached team from Jamaica. Frankly I have a hard time following any bobsledder not named Doug E Fresh.

Snowboarding, meh. Ski-cross -- awesome. And mr. I-used-to-be-an-alcoholic biffed in the final to come in 4th, out of 4, to not medal.

Buddha Miller finally had a good games. Vonn took the cheese off her shin long enough to medal as well, though she may have screwed up her teammate. -- Oh, and Chris Collinsworth, please know what you're talking about before you say it. "I still think they should separate anyone that has a chance of medalling and have them running the track by themselves" (in reference to 2 skiiers being on the track, Vonn crashing and causing fellow american to restart) -- well they do usually do that, but if you watched it, you would also notice the huge amounts of fog and all together poor weather conditions. Hmmm, could this cause any sort of delay? Yeah, I think it did. Long delay = 2 runners on the track regardless of quality. And if theyre the best skiiers, shouldn't the threat of crashes be smaller? Thought so.

Crosby won a gold for hockey on the 25th, then managed to get on canada's other roster to score the game winning goal over america in ot to get them the gold. Dunno how that happenned. BTW, same medal order for both genders of hockey -- Canada, USA, Finland.

Biathalon, fun.

Figure skating, hate to agree with lyceck or whatevs, but the score for the long program is not based off one jump (which less than a handful of skaters can do) but off the whole program, you know, actual skating, transitions, spins, little jumps, putting something cohesive together. I didnt watch either, cos I don't really care about figure skating, but you got to look at everything when you're judging it, not one damn trick. You can't win a dive meet by simply having a really high DD. It doesn't work that way, you have to execute.

Moving on.

Curling's not a sport.

Moving on.

Canada finished with the most golds, making them the victors by some counts. They finished 3rd in overrall medals, coming after USA and Germany with 26 (14 Gold, 7 Silver, 5 Bronze). That's well short of the mythical "40" goal they were going for, but maybe canadians are just too nice to be that ultra competitive. Not to mention they had little to no balance. They had decent bob sledding, but they couldn't luge or skeleton for shit. Good on freestyle skiing, but not on any other kind of skiing. Good but not awesome in either short or long track speed skating. If one is to "win" the winter olympics, they need a solid presence in alpine skiing and sledding. They did not have that.

America passed it's single winter olympics medal count record with 37 (9 Gold, 15 Silver, 13 Bronze). They had 34 when they hosted the games in Salt Lake City in 02. Unless they add alot more events, I think 40 may remain a mythic number for the winter games.

-- Knuttel