Doped Curling and Tied Bobsledding

The Olympic Athletes from Russia, competing ostensibly for themselves and not their country, are allowed to be at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics because they were drug-free and, we are told, shouldn't be penalized for the sins of their fellow countrymen. Well, dig this: Alexander Krushelnitsky, one of those "Olympic Athletes from Russia" and the winner of a bronze medal in his sport, is believed to be doping after having failed a drug test.

Krushelnitsky is a curler.

A curler?  What, curlers are taking steroids?  What sort of a performance-enhancing drug do you need to scrub ice with a broom?

Then again, the Beatles were probably smoking pot when they were curling with those fiendish thingies in the Austrian Alps. 

Krushelnitsky won his medal with his wife Anastasia Bryzgalova, in the mixed-doubles competition.  So I guess she is under suspicion as well.

Note to International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach: Next time you ban a country from competing, be it for steroids, apartheid, or, say, withdrawing from a climate-change accord - no exceptions!  No one's going to learn to behave if you leave in loopholes only a Washington lobbyist could love!    

Meanwhile, an update on the two-man bobsled competition:  The Germans won a gold medal, but not the Germans you're thinking of, and the ones who won weren't the only winners.  Let me explain.  The victorious German team was not that of Christian Poser and Nico Walther, the guys who crashed into first place after the second of four runs, but in fact it was that of their countrymen Francesco Friedrich and Thorsten Margis with a time of 3 minutes, 16.86 seconds.  And the Canadian team of Justin Kripps and Alexander Kopacz came right after them with a time of . . . 3 minutes, 16.86 seconds.

That's right, a tie, and it came twenty years after a Canadian team tied with an Italian team for the gold medal at the Nagano Winter Games for the same event.  These are the only two times Canada has won two-man bobsled gold.

In the event of a tie for first place, there is no silver medal; both first-place finishers get gold, the silver medal on reserve apparently dipped in the first-place color.  I'd give the silver to the third-place finisher and bronze to the fourth-place finisher, but hey, I don't make the rules.

Oh yeah, Latvian bobsledders Oskars Melbardis and Janis Strenga came in five one-hundredths of a second behind the winners for the bronze, the closest three-sled finish in this event in Olympic history.  The legacy of the great Janis Kipurs lives on. :-)  (Poser and Walther were fifth; the American team of Justin Olsen and Evan Weinstock finished fourteenth.)

On to the four-man event . . .