Happy Year of the Horse!
Well, the 2002 Winter Olympics are in full swing over in Salt Lake City, and you know what that means: there is nothing else in the world worth reporting on. If it's not Olympic-related, I seriously doubt I'd even be aware of it right now. So, without further delay, here's my official mid-Games report...
First off, logically, the opening ceremony... it was good, I don't think it topped the Sydney ceremony but I really can't hold that against them. They brought out the entire 1980 US hockey team to light the torch, which was cool, and, since this is America, they brought out John Williams to compose and conduct the 2002 Olympic theme.
But on to the games -- Cross-country skiing and the biathalon both have offered some close finishes this year, which is amazing considering these races go anywhere from 10 to 50 kilometers and are still decided by a matter of inches (I'm not going to go through all the medalists here, since they're easy enough to find on olympics.com).
If close finishes are not your thing, though, and you prefer total blowouts, then you should be watching the women's hockey matches. The North American teams are pretty much walking over everyone there, and the Canadian team has yet to give up a single goal. The men's hockey games seem more evenly matched, both are done with the round robins and have moved on to the tournaments.
Back to the ski slopes, though, the Winter Games, moreso than the Summer games, have a few of the more "X-Treme" events like the snowboard halfpipe (which the Americans took 4 out of the 6 medals for), aerial skiing, and freestyle moguls, which are just some fun sports to watch, and people do some rather downright insane things.
Australia won its first ever Winter Games gold medal just recently, with Steve Bradbury on short track speed skating, in a bit of a fluke victory where all four other racers, who were all several seconds ahead of him, collided right before the finish line and left him the last man standing and a gold medalist. (As a side note to this story, Apolo Anton Ohno, who was in the lead before the crash (which was caused by someone else) and wound up with silver was still absolutely thrilled with it (as he and anyone else certainly should be), which was real nice to see after media overcoverage of this one other story.)
Still in speedskating, but this time the women's 1000m, Chris Witty managed to not only win gold but set a world record -- despite the fact that she had *mono*.
... and then there's curling. A peculiar event to say the least, I'd say I'm one of a minority of Americans who understands the basic rules of the sport and perhaps the only one to have watched more televised curling since Nagano than televised professional baseball. If you've never actually just watched a game (i.e. "what the heck is this? i'm gonna go watch something else now.") it's worth at least giving it a chance.
There's plenty of sports I haven't covered yet, but they're all still cool (no pun intended)... I'll wait to cover them another time...
Until then, enjoy the rest of the Games...
-- Ky
P.S. Forgive me for something so unrelated to the Olympics, but between the past two news posts, we've plugged every webcomic I read *except* Megatokyo (www.megatokyo.com), and I'd feel bad leaving them out so I'm plugging them now.