The Cost of the Games

The Paralympic Winter Games disabled winter athletes begin in PyeongChang today, and once this Olympic event becomes a thing of the past, so will PyeongChang's Olympic stadium.  The South Korean town will demolish the stadium . . . and possibly several other venues built for the 2018 Winter Games as well.  The reason is obvious: A sports venue built to accommodate tens of thousands of people in a town too small to find on a map is unsustainable.   (An open-air stadium for Winter Olympic ceremonies? I remember a time when Winter Olympic ceremonies were held indoors.)  Once the Olympics are over, who's gong to use this stadium?  Olympic celebrations, winter and summer, have become like world's fairs, where much of everything built for them is taken down or abandoned afterwards. 

With the costs of staging the Olympics increasing into the billions, hosting the Games has become more of a burden than an honor.  Zeeshan Aleem has an excellent article from Vox.com exploring this issue in greater depth, citing factors such as terrorism threats, debts incurred, and the impracticality of building venues that become unnecessary and too costly to maintain after the Olympics are over.  The disappointment of losing an Olympic bid has been replaced by relief in democratic countries where people refuse to spend so much money on an international sporting event, while more autocratic governments like in China and Russia spare no expense in staging an Olympiad over the objections of citizens who have no say in the matter.  After Chicago lost the 2016 Summer Olympics to Rio de Janeiro, conservative commentator Bill Kristol said that the U.S. didn't need the Olympics to enhance its prestige and standing.  He may have been on to something, because the prestige and standing Brazil gained came at a heavy price.  Remember when swimmer Katie Ledecky was in Rio seemingly breaking her own records every few hours?  Well, this is the building she did it in, the Rio de Janeiro Olympic aquatics stadium, as it appears today, the photograph appearing in Aleem's article.

An incredibly empty hulk.  Not exactly the economic catalyst for Rio promised by the Brazilian government.  Facilities built for the Rio Games clearly haven't helped the locals, and they haven't brought more tourists to city already known for tourism.  And if massive sports facilities are unsustainable for a city as big as Rio de Janeiro, how can we expect similarly big facilities to be sustainable for towns like PyeongChang?  

And as far as the Winter Olympics being a more intimate, cozy affair . . . anyone who saw any of the hockey games at PyeongChang and saw the long shots of the Gangneung Hockey Centre could have been forgiven for thinking it was as big as Madison Square Garden.  In fact, it's half as big - but still bigger than the Lake Placid arena the 1980 U.S. hockey team won their Olympic gold medal in.  Putting an arena like the Gangneung Hockey Centre in such a small town like PyeongChang is like building a Soldier Field-sized stadium in Grand Island, Nebraska.  But the Koreans had no choice.  The 1980 Lake Placid Winter Games was a twelve-day affair with 39 events and a thousand athletes from 37 countries, but the PyeongChang Winter Games lasted seventeen days, with 102 events and nearly three thousand athletes from 92 countries.  PyeongChang was an ideal place for the Winter Olympics thanks to its topography and climate, and it may indeed benefit from its ski slopes and its snowboarding facilities, but most of its Olympic facilities are too out of proportion in scale; its stadium may not be the only thing that faces the wrecker's ball.  By contrast, Beijing, with a population greater than even metropolitan New York, can certainly absorb the costs of new venues (the skiing and bobsledding events will be held way outside of town) and accommodating what has become a bigger sporting event.  However, winters in northeastern China are notorious for not having reliable snowfall for skiing, and there are concerns over the environmental impact of producing enough artificial snow.

Meanwhile, it's easy to romanticize places like St. Moritz, Innsbruck, and other small Winter Olympic towns of yore, and how low-key the Winter Games once were, but just remember - these small places are hubs for other winter-sport championships, especially skiing, they being popular winter resorts and all.  Coziness and intimacy take a back seat to tourists' money.  Non-Olympic and recreational winter sports may be quieter affairs in such places than the Winter Games, but the only time the locals in these towns get any serious peace is during the off-season.

The only way we're going to make the Winter Olympics the small, low-key affair they used to be is to move them back to leap years and quadrennially concurrent with the Summer Games, which would once again make them an afterthought, and get rid of some of the events, like trick skiing and trick snowboarding, which would offend thousands of athletes.  No one wants any of that.   As for the costs of staging the Summer Olympics . . . well, they've gotten so bad that, as Aleem notes, five cities started out bidding for the 2024 Games but only two - Paris and Los Angeles - stayed in the contest.  The International Olympic Committee, desperate to avoid the appearance of a lack of interest in the 2028 bidding, awarded the 2024 Games to one of the bidders for that year and awarded the 2028 Games to the other.  Paris goes first; apparently the IOC didn't want to take the risk of holding the 2024 Games in LA during what might be the final year of a two-term Trump Presidency.  And by the way, cost concerns are nothing new; Los Angeles was the only city other than Tehran to bid for the 1984 Summer Olympics due to lack of interest from other cities owing to the staggering costs of the 1976 Montreal Games, and LA got the 1984 Olympics by default when the Shah of Iran was deposed; in a nice bit of ironic symmetry, Iran's Islamic Republic boycotted the 1984 Olympics so as not to dignify its worst enemy, the United States . . . and the LA Games were the first privately funded Olympics to turn a profit.

It's obvious that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is going to have to find a way to economize and help cut the costs for staging the Games if it wants to give cities and countries an equal chance of hosting them and make the Olympics something that residents of host cities can look forward to, not dread.  Of course, if the folks on the IOC want to do the Olympics on the cheap . . . they can always have them at my house!

I'm sure I can get them guest passes at the community pool for the swimming events.  Sorry, no diving. 

Gomabseubnida

The 2018 Winter Olympics are already history, the closing ceremony having already even held in PyeongChang, South Korea, where it's before sunrise, Monday, February 26, as I type this.  So, rather than wait for the tape-delayed closing ceremony to be broadcast on NBC - which is opposite PBS's airing of the season finale of ITV's "Victoria," the series about the first and only British monarch of that name, which I've been watching - I thought I'd offer my traditional end-of-Olympic thank-yous and other acknowledgements now.  I figured I'd do it now before I get as sick of writing commentary on the Winter Games as you must already be of reading it.

Oh yeah, but before I do that, the Olympic Athletes from Russia beat Germany in men's hockey for the gold medal.  You realize that they should not have been in that game, right?  I don't mean the Germans.    

Right.  Well, here I go . . . 

I'd like to thank Mike Tirico for doing a better job than I thought he would at being NBC's Olympic prime-time host.  While he won't make me forget Costas, I have to concede that he is as close to a Costas or a McKay as my generation (he's a year younger than I am) will likely ever come.  With a little more skill-honing, this guy could go places.  Actually, he likely will; PyeongChang is probably a good "dry run" for Tirico at Tokyo in 2020.  

Thanks also to Carolyn Manno for her cool, calm delivery as a daytime host and to Rebecca Lowe for the same.  And - you knew this was coming - thanks also to both for being hot and blonde, and to Rebecca Lowe for being British on top of that.  Sexism, you say?  What, you thought I was going to look at two female sportscasters who are gorgeous and not notice that obvious fact?

Thanks to Lindsey Vonn for her last Olympic performances, and thanks also to Bode Miller for commenting on the Olympics and not getting good and drunk the day before . . . even if his commentary, while abundant in expertise, had all the excitement of Melba toast. Thanks to Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune for suggesting in a column that Vonn ought to replace Miller as a ski commentator for the 2022 Winter Games.

Speaking of the Chicago Tribune, thanks to Dan Hicks for declaring a winner in the women's super giant slalom before the eventual winner, Ester Ledecká of the Czech Republic, won in an upset.  Seriously.  Dan, you've proven yourself worthy of being a sportswriter for the Chicago Tribune, the paper that, on the day after the 1948 presidential election, declared Thomas E. Dewey the 34th President of the United States.

Back to the athletes.  Thanks to Mikeala Shiffrin, the U.S. women's hockey team, Red Gerard, Chloe Kim, Mirai Nagasu, and so many other American athletes that space does not permit me to name for competing, whether they won or not.  Hey, the most important thing is to take part, right?  Thanks to all the ice dancers, but next time, please don't overshadow your pairs figure skating counterparts - I actually had to go to Wikipedia to find out who won that!  (For the record, Aliona Savchenko and Bruno Massot of Germany won the pairs figure skating gold, Sui Wenjing and Han Cong of China won the silver, and Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford of Canada won the bronze.)  And special thanks to the figure skaters who skated to Beatles medleys in their programs and to Maya and Alex Shibutani for skating in the gala event to Frank Sinatra's "That's Life."  That's my favorite Sinatra record. But did you have to mash it up with hip-hop, kids?

Thanks to the American men's curling team for its gold medal, but no thanks to them for their off-key a capella rendition of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" at the end of their appearance on NBC's post-game chat!  At least you didn't butcher a good song.

No thanks to Wal-Mart for its commercial during the Olympics advertising its two-day delivery service, which used "Ring My Bell," one of the worst songs of all time - an inexplicable chart topper in 1979, and an obvious influence on Madonna - as its music.  Another Wal-Mart commercial used "Bust a Move," which I used to dislike but now appreciate because "Ring My Bell" makes "Bust a Move" sound like "Stairway To Heaven" by comparison.

Which reminds me . . . thanks to Blogger.com for spell-checking me.  It didn't get all of my typos while I was doing my rapid-fire, get-it-out-fast Olympic commentary, but it saved me from many embarrassments, because you know sometimes words have two meanings. Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiving . . . how everything still turns to gold.

The United States is rumored to have toyed with a boycott of the Winter Olympics because of tensions of the Korean peninsula, so I'd like to thank Rex Tillerson or whoever was responsible for preventing a boycott for doing just that.  No thanks to the Trump administration for its choice of representatives for the U.S. at the opening and closing ceremonies - Vice President Pence, who only stood for teams from nations that refuse to honor the Paris Agreement, at the former, and Ivanka Trump, who, last time I checked, is still Ivanka Trump, at the latter.  Thanks to American skier Gus Kenworthy, who questioned Ivanka Trump's presence at the closing ceremony - "Honestly, [WTF] is she doing here?"

I don't know any Koreans or anyone of Korean descent to dedicate my commentary to, so I'm just going to thank Kim Jong Un for not pressing the button.  In all seriousness, I hope the inter-Korean truce doesn't end with the Winter Olympics today, Sunday the 25th.  Because, as I recall, the original inter-Korean truce from the late 1940s was ended by the North Korean invasion of the South on . . . Sunday, the 25th (June 25, 1950).

And so end the 2018 Winter Olympics.  On to . . . ugh - Beijing?  What, again?  Weren't we just there in 2008 for the Summer Games?  (Almaty should have gotten the 2022 Winter Games; my commentary on 2022 would have make much benefit for glorious nation of Kazakhstan.)

I'll be back on Wednesday with more miscellaneous opinions and thoughts on just about anything.

Did We Really Count To One Hundred?

After 94 years of the Winter Olympics, the United States finally won its one hundredth Winter Olympic gold medal at the 2018 PyeongChang Games when Shaun White - he of the dubious character - won the gold medal in men's halfpipe snowboarding.  The U.S. has won more gold medals at PyeongChang since then.  Including a gold medal in men's curling!  Can you feel the excitement??

Americans have won ten times as many gold medals at the regular Olympics since the modern Olympic movement began in the 1890s.  Why did it take so long to get a hundred gold medals in the Winter Olympics?  Because we've become a serious winter-sports nation only recently.  We Americans had long paid more attention to sports played in milder weather, and the Winter Olympics were always something of a lighthearted diversion for us. Everyone talks about how we haven't been doing so well this time, 2018, but given that, at this writing, we're fourth overall in the number of medals won - with nine gold medals, eight silver medals, and six bronze medals for a total of 23 medals overall - we've been pretty competitive.

I remember the 1980s, when our performances at the Winter Games were so horrible, most people in this country didn't even bother to watch the Winter Games on TV.  The champion 1980 U.S Olympic hockey team was an exception.  But it was worse before that.  Four American athletes, including figure skater Scott Hamilton, won gold medals at the Sarajevo Winter Games in 1984. Compare that to only two at the Cortina d'Ampezzo Winter Games in 1956  - Hayes Alan Jenkins and Tenley Albright, in men's and women's figure skating, respectively - or only three for the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games -  Barbara Cochran in women’s slalom skiing, Anne Henning in the 500-meter women’s speed skating race, and Dianne Holum in the 1500m women’s speed skating event.  You know how the group of U.S. female figure-skating Olympic gold medalists is considered the most exclusive women's club in America?  Peggy Fleming, the 1968 Olympic women's figure skating champion, is an even more exclusive club - the club of American gold medalists in the 1968 Grenoble Winter Games.  She's the only member.  Just as speed skater Terry McDermott, who won the 500m men's speed-skating race at the 1964 Innsbruck Winter Olympics, is the only American Winter Olympic gold medalist from that year.  (And no one was likely paying attention to McDermott because the Beatles were paying their first visit to America at the time.)  And if the U.S. hockey team from the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics, where the United States won six gold medals, wanted to have a reunion with all of the other gold medalists from those Games,  it would be a reunion of only themselves . . . and speed skater Eric Heiden, who won the other five.

My point - and I do have one - is  that Team USA has improved greatly since the bad old days when athletes from the Communist countries kept besting Americans at the Winter Games. We've recently been moving more closely to becoming a winter-sport powerhouse because, as I wrote in a blog post during the 2014 Sochi Winter Games, we decided that we didn't want to be a laughingstock in winter sports anymore.  We'll never be as good as Norway - being so close to the Arctic Circle would give any country a huge advantage in skating and skiing - but at least now we're not the never-rans we always seemed to be in decades past.

Let's just hope that it doesn't take us another ninety-odd years to win another one hundred Winter Olympic gold medals.

The list of the first one hundred U.S. Winter Olympics gold medalists is here.

Russia, Russia, Russia

So maybe letting Russian athletes with no previous (previous - note word!) doping history compete in the Winter Olympics on the condition that they compete for themselves and not for their country has had an effect on the Russian psyche, and not been an issue in the competition after all.  The rump Russian team at PyeongChang, as of this writing, was sixth overall in the medal count and won its first gold medal only this past Thursday - in the women's individual figure skating competition.  Alina Zagitova took first place over her fellow Russian Evgenia Medvedeva, who won the silver. Canada's Kaetlyn Osmond won the bronze medal.

(Mirai Nagasu, the triple-axel heroine of the team competition and America's best hope for an individual women's figure-skating medal, came in tenth.)

So, despite a Russian presence, Russian prestige has never been lower than at these Winter Games.  I suppose the Olympic Athletes from Russia's male hockey squad could still win a gold medal, but it won't mean as much if they have to hear the Olympic, not the Russian, anthem played in their honor.  Unlike the old Unified Team of 1992, the team comprised of athletes from Russia and eleven of the other former republics of the Soviet Union in the wake of the U.S.S.R.'s dissolution in December 1991 (the Baltic States, having seceded from the Soviet Union in September 1991, were able to put their own teams together in time for the 1992 Winter and Summer Olympics), these Olympic athletes from Russia aren't really unified . . . or a team.  

Diggins It

Cross-country skier Jessie Diggins was best known to Comcast viewers for commercials for the Internet service provider, showing everyone in her hometown of Afton, Minnesota, a town supposedly out in the middle of nowhere (it's actually just east of St. Paul) waking up in the middle of the night to see her compete in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics.  Now everyone knows who she is; she's the American who, with partner Kikkan Randall, won the Olympic gold medal in the women’s team sprint freestyle in PyeongChang, the first cross-country gold medals for the U.S. and the first U.S. medal on the sport since Bill Koch (pronounced "coke") won a silver in 1976.

Ladies and gentlemen, cross-country Olympic champion (and Comcast spokeswoman) Jessica Diggins!

I dig! :-)

And here's Kikkan Randall.

Nice hair. :-D

Talk about Olympic highlights! :-D 

Lindsey Bronze

The women's downhill ski race at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics is over, and Lindsey Vonn has won . . . the bronze medal. 

She finished behind her friend Sofia Goggia of Italy, who became the first woman from her country to win this event, and to win the downhill, and she was expected to take silver until Ragnhild Mowinckel of Norway - Norway again! - came in second.

Lindsey Vonn was very emotional about it, and she knows she'd done the best she could, but she also knows that this will be her last Winter Olympiad.

She's not done yet.  She and Mikaela Shiffrin will both be competing in the women's super combined slalom/downhill.  I managed to see the downhill race, but I might have to miss the super combined.  Other commitments, you understand . . .

Miscellaneous Winter Olympic Musings 2018

Gimme a C!

You may have noticed that I changed the spelling of the South Korean city hosting the 2018 Winter Olympics from "Pyeongchang" to "PyeongChang."  I capitalized the C when I saw that the South Koreans had done the same.  Apparently the locals in PyeongChang did so when their town got confused with Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.  I heard an anecdotal story about how a Kenyan on his way to PyeongChang in 2014 for a conference ended up in Pyongyang instead.  Not fun for him, I hear.

Be that as it may, Pyeongchang - which had changed its name from Pyongchang by adding an "e" in 2000 in an earlier effort to avoid confusion with Kim Jong Un's hometown - decided to capitalize the "C," although most sportswriters haven't reciprocated and have continued to use a lowercase "c."  Me, I chose to respect the Koreans' wishes.  I tried using the new spelling, with the capital C, in my tags, but Blogger.com kept changing it back to the old one.   I had to check all of the posts I used the tag on and change them all to conform the tag to the new spelling . . . and I inadvertently reverted one of posts (my January 24 post about inter-Korean dialogue because of the Winter Games) to an unpublished draft in the process.  For those of you who may have been looking for it, there's your explanation.  Of course I republished it. 

Anyway, the competition.  Canadian ice dancers Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, gold medalists at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and the silver medals at the 2014 Sochi Games, won the title again last night, and even though ice dancing is a subjective sport, based on judging and not who crosses the line first, it is more fact than opinion to say that they earned the gold medal over everyone else.  I saw it myself.  Maya and Alex Shibutani, the so-called Shib Sibs, came in third for the bronze. The Shibutani siblings are probably the most popular American brother-sister act in figure skating since the Carruthers siblings at the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics . . . and maybe even the most popular brother-sister act of all since the Carpenters.    

Despite the Russians, the U.S. men's hockey team made it to the quarterfinals after beating Slovakia in a rematch, 5-1.  They may, however, have to face the official non-official team from Russia again.  And even thought the U.S. women's team has been more successful against their Russian counterparts than the U.S men's team has been against their Russian counterparts . . . I still say that neither Russian hockey team should be in PyeongChang at all.

And then there's skiing sweetheart Lindsey Kildow Vonn . . . 

. . . currently appearing in a Bounty commercial showing her in a house built on a slant to play on her living life on a slope . . . 

. . . in one of the slinkiest ski outfits I've ever seen! :-D 

Just remember, when the Summer Olympics are on, one of my ladyfriends enjoys checking out the posteriors on male divers, so please hold your comments about how misogynistic I am.  

Anyway, Madame Vonn skis for gold in the downhill in South Korea Wednesday morning . . . which is tonight in the U.S., and so it will be broadcast live tonight.  It's too bad I won't get to see it - I have to go out tonight for a standing commitment.

Oh well, I missed Mary Lou Retton's perfect ten in 1984, as well as other legendary Olympic moments, so this is nothing new for me.

But I hope Lindsey Vonn wins tonight.  Because if she does, she'll be invited to the White House, and she's already made it clear that she will refuse the invitation because Trump nauseates her.  Breitbart News is already rooting against her for it.   So go ,Lindsey, go! :-) 

A gold medal would be a real quick-picker-upper for her. :-)

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 . . .

Havard Degree

I've never taken the saying "You don't win silver, you lose gold" seriously, but in this case I'm willing to make an exception.

At PyeongChang in the men's 500-meter speed skating race, South Korea's Cha Min Kyu tied the Olympic record of 34.42 seconds and led the pack with only three pairs of racers to go.

One of the six remaining racers, Norway's Havard Lorentzen (below), won the gold from Cha by coming in at one one-hundredth of a second sooner, setting the new Olympic record and becoming the first Norwegian man to win this event since 1948. 

Ironically, bronze medalist Gao Tingyu of China had earlier set the record for the track at the arena, at 34.65 seconds.

Norway currently leads in the medal standings at PyeongChang, with 28 medals - 11 gold, 9 silver, 8 bronze.  The United States is in sixth place in the medal count, with 10 medals - 5 gold, 3 silver 2 bronze.  Respectable, but disappointing for many.

Now I get it!  Now I know why Trump wants more immigrants from Norway!  He wants to get immigrants who can build up our Winter Olympics team!  Hey, I have an idea - why not admit Norway as the fifty-first state?  No, better yet, an equal merger - they get to take over the national government and we not only get rid of Trump and Congress, we get their (Norway's) health-care system and public education system!  And together we clean up at the 2022 Winter Olympics!  Everyone's a winner! 

I'm not sure King Harald V would want to become king of America, though . . .     

The Crash Years

Imagine being in the lead in the Winter Olympic two-man bobsled competition.  Imagine almost making it to the finish line after the second run, practically inches - or, in the case of the Olympics, centimeters - away from the end.  Then you crash, and you blow it.

Well, Christian Poser and Nico Walther of Germany did all of that . . . except for the "blowing it" part.  Just as they neared the finish line in PyeongChang, their sled turned over and made its way to the end of the track on its side, its runnings protruding into the air.  Poser and Walther still made it over the line in first place.    

They're actually the ones to beat for a gold medal.

Also in competition are teams from Canada and - of course - Latvia, home of the great Janis Kipurs (you knew I was going to bring that name up eventually).  The Americans?  Not so much, but their problems may be more psychological than athletic.  Steven Holcomb, the American champion bobsledder who won a gold medal in the four-man competition at the 2010 Winter Games, died in May 2017 of a combination of alcohol and opioids, and his death still seems to have an effect on the team; the NBC commentators have even suggested a mental block holding back the U.S. competitors.  Kudos to the Americans for continuing and carrying on.  It wouldn't be a cliché to say that Holcomb would have wanted it that way, but even if it is, clichés aren't the same as lies. 

Russian Interference

The United States men's hockey team lost big time at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics to the Olympic Athletes from Russia team, 4-0.  What was galling about this game is not that the Americans lost to a Russian team.  What was galling is that they lost to a team that should not even be there.

Sportswriters are inevitably blaming this defeat on the National Hockey League for not letting its players take a couple of weeks off to participate in the Winter Olympics and forcing national teams to rely on college students and minor-leaguers, which decimated the American and Canadian teams more than it did the Russian team, and even though veterans of the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" team may disagree, there is probably some truth to this, as the Russian team was able to find enough players from a major professional league in Russia itself.  But that's hardly the whole story.  The anti-doping ban on the Russian Olympic team made exceptions for athletes who don't have any record of cheating with steroids, and while I expected female figure skaters to dodge the ban, I never thought that there would be so many Olympic athletes from Russia who technically aren't competing for their country still being able to compete in Winter Olympic events.  Nor did I suspect that there would be an opportunity for enough Russians to compete in a team sport like ice hockey.  Both sexes.  As I see it, the International Olympic Committee's exemption on the ban against Russia that allows drug-free Russian athletes to supposedly compete for themselves and not for their country is comparable to a man who gives up buying and eating baked goods for Lent - cake, pie, muffins - but making exceptions for cake, pie and muffins he doesn't have to pay for . . . and being married to a pastry chef who takes home some of her work.   

I'll come right out and say it: The ban on the Russians is a joke.  The mere presence of a men's hockey team from Russia at these Games, even if it doesn't compete under their red, white and blue flag, is courtesy of a big loophole that one of the Flying Wallendas could have jumped through.  Heck, there are so many "Olympic Athletes from Russia" in PyeongChang that the Russians might as well have sent an official team there.  Look . . . a ban is a ban.  No Russians should mean no Russians.  Sometimes the innocent have to pay for the crimes of the guilty.  Life isn't fair, and it shouldn't be any fairer to today's Russian athletes than it was to  the Soviet-era Russian athletes who had to stay home during the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics . . . or the American athletes who had to stay home during the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics.  (Why didn't the International Olympic Committee allow would-be 1980 U.S. Olympic team members compete as "Olympic Athletes from America" in Moscow then? They didn't want the boycott.  Jimmy Carter did.)      

Oh yeah, I ought to tell you about that 4-0 hockey game, which got so violent as Russian and American players were devolving into fistfights with each other.  The Russians were especially aggressive, getting away with a lot of crap that the referees didn't seem to think was worthy of penalties.  There's no doubt a lot of animosity between the Americans and Russians, thanks to this election-interference issue, and this game was certainly reflective of it - and a black eye for Donald Trump, who all but promised the return of détente with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign.  But that doesn't justify all of this unnecessary roughness.  Back in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, which took place after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Hungarian and Soviet athletes went at each other, and a riot almost started when a Hungarian water polo player got cut badly over his eye during the U.S.S.R.-Hungary game.  The problem of Russian bots smearing Hillary Clinton isn't as serious as a full-scale military invasion in which people die. 

But again . . . the Russians shouldn't be competing at PyeongChang in the first place.

Medal Drought

If not for the real problems affecting our country (relax, I'll get to the Mueller indictments later), overpaid television commentators would be talking about the United States' current fifth-place showing in the Winter Olympics medal count as a national crisis comparable to expensive gasoline.  The athletes from Nordic and Slavic countries keep winning all of the skiing medals - wow, big surprise! 

Actually, there was a big surprise - Ester Ledecká of the Czech Republic won the women's Super G slalom, dethroning leader Anna Vieth of Austria and preventing a sweep of the Teutonic Alpine countries (Tina Weirather of Lichtenstein, once a favorite in this race, had to settle for bronze, and Switzerland's Lara Gut had to settle for fourth place.  Ledecká shocked everyone, including herself, by taking the gold by one one-hundredth of a second . . . on skis borrowed from Mikeala Shiffrin.  It was a "Dewey Defeats Truman" moment for NBC, which had already declared Vieth the winner and had to break into coverage of another event to report that Ledecká had won.

Lindsey Vonn, another favorite in the women's Super G, came in sixth after a solid run that was compromised by a mistake toward the finish line.  Meanwhile, Nathan Chen, despite a strong comeback in his second performance in men's figure skating, didn't come close to a medal of any color.  (The winner?  Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan.)   All disappointing, yes.  But a national tragedy?  No.  So, if you're taking these losses in skiing, including the women's cross-country, as seriously as our withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, lighten up.  Especially if you're part of the overwhelming majority of Americans who only pay attention to skiing when the Winter Olympics are on - or dismiss men's figure skating as to effeminate.  

Maybe this medal drought is Trump Karma.

Want to make America great again in the Winter Olympics?  Encourage your kids to take part in winter sports.    

Downs and Ups

Slovenia, Slovakia . . . 

Tomato, tomahto.

Ha ha!  At the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, the U.S. men's ice hockey team had a rotten tomato of a game against Slovenia, but the guys redeemed themselves in a game against another small country once part of a Communist federation, Slovakia. The U.S. beat the Slovaks 2-1, putting themselves back in the hunt for a medal.  Now they have to face the Olympic Athletes from Russia team.

This could be tough . . .

But not as tough as the break that Mikaela Shiffrin got when she skied the women's slalom, her specialty event.  Though this is the event that she is must famous and was most favored for, she finished a disappointing fourth.

Well, even Crosby, Stills and Nash sang a flat harmony every now and then.

And then there was figure skater Nathan Chen . . . 

Oh dear . . . 

At least he was able to advance.  

Down, Down, Down

I'm watching Winter Olympic team luge as I type this, but I want to talk about skiing.

The high winds in the Korean mountains subsided enough yesterday to allow skiing competition , and while the women's regular slalom is still yet to be held, the giant slalom went without a hitch.  Mikaela Shiffrin (below) won the gold.

Unfortunately. I missed it.  I tuned in too late for her first run, and her second run didn't take place until after I went to bed.  But I did see the men's downhill (Aksel Lund Svindal of Norway won), and I saw it live.  NBC has had the luck of being able to broadcast early-afternoon events live during evening prime time in North America, the time difference between the U.S. East Coast and Korea being fourteen hours.  I've found myself not rooting for any one skier or any one country in any particular ski event.  Because ultimately, you see one skier go down the hill, then another . . . then another . . . then another . . . down . . . down . . . down.

And in the slalom, it's down, curve, down, curve, down, curve . . . but then you have the super giant slalom, or Super G, which is down, curve. down, curve . . . Good Lord MAMA! - Jesus Christ and General Jackson!  - Uncle Albert and Admiral Halsey! - down, curve, down. :-D

Ha ha, you get the idea.   

Red Face-off and White Washing

American men are behaving badly at the Winter Olympics again.  Including Shaun White.

First, to get it out of the way, the U.S. men's ice hockey team.  Ahead 2-0 over Slovenia, the Americans suddenly collapsed and lost 3-2.  After the American women beat out the Olympic Athletes from Russia team in a shutout (5-0), the men shut down. Which prompted all of those silly Americans chanting "We're number one!" to shut up.  (At least one of the current White House residents, I'm sure, was secretly pleased.)  

As if seeing our guys live up to the tradition of American national men's teams choking weren't bad enough, we now learn that Shaun White is yet another celebrity involved in a sexual harassment case.  White has his own rock band, appropriately titled Bad Things, with a female drummer that has since left the band after White did . . . bad things.  To her.  It was since been reported that he texted her pictures of  private parts, and he has also been accused of having shown her hardcore porn, forcing her to drink vodka, trying to make her change her look to appear sexier, and making her smell something, uh, personal.  After his gold-medal victory in these PyeongChang Winter Games (the one hundredth gold-medal victory for the U.S. in the Winter Games' 94-year history), White, who settled with the woman out of court, admitted to the first charge but not the others, dismissing the rest as "gossip."  White sounds like a guy who's addicted to cocaine, crystal meth, and tobacco and only admits to smoking.

White has since apologized for his poor choice of words ("gossip?") and how he handled the story when it came to the fore; the case, for the record, was settled out of court.  He admits to being in a dark place at the time of his fourth-place halfpipe showing at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, leading to his bad behavior.  But the truth is that White has always been in a dark place of sorts.  No one in snowboarding likes him because of his swagger and self-importance. "To so many who saw the text messages, read the allegations," Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports wrote about White's magnificent comeback on the halfpipe course this week after his Sochi disappointment, "the notion of redemption was nothing more than a canard to distract from a far uglier story."

I'm not going to equate the U.S. men's ice hockey team's misdemeanor of sucking to White's high crimes.  But to see both stories at the same time has certainly caused a pang of rue for anyone who expected our guys at the Winter Olympics to be shining examples of American manhood in the Age of Trump.  Uh, fellas, could I see you in my office?     

The Russians Did What?

The "Olympic Athletes from Russia" team, the Russian non-Russian team at the Winter Olympics, did send ice hockey teams to PyeongChang?

You mean that, despite the doping ban on the Russians, sent full-fledged ice hockey teams competing under the Olympic flag?

Right.  First Costas is gone, now this . . . I can't keep up with this drama-mama at the Olympics anymore . . .   

Oh yeah, the Russian women's team lost to the Americans, 5-0.

Kim and White

I'm not talking about an architectural firm.

Chloe Kim won the gold medal in the women's snowboarding halfpipe competition at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics with flying colors and by just flying.  I definitely noticed that her ability to surf the snow far exceeded the competition. She was swifter, higher and stronger, just like the Olympic credo.  It was a special moment for her, not just to win a gold medal at seventeen years of age, but to win it on the snow and soil of her parents' homeland. (That's right, another child of immigrants - are you listening, Tom Cotton?)      

Of course, on the men's side, there's still Shaun White. :-)

Most snowboarders perform the same, and it's hard to tell one from the other watching it on TV.  Not Shaun White.  You know it's him from how he files in the air. And after a disappointing run in Sochi in 2014, White distinguished himself in the qualifying runs, handling the course as if he were already going for the gold medal.  And he's 31.

Chloe Kim and Shaun White are not part of American snowboarding. They are American snowboarding.  They're pretty much global snowboarding too.  The other halfpipe competitors in both the men's and women's competition are just imitators.

Those halfpipe imitations put me on the blink. ;-) 

Mirai and Mike

Figure skater Mirai Nagasu landed a triple axel in the 2018 Winter Olympic team-mixed skating event.  She's only the third woman, appropriately enough, to do so at the Winter Games. 

Why am I making a big deal over a Japanese figure skater?

Because she's not Japanese, you stupid Trump supporters.  She's an American.  An American of Japanese descent, yes, but an American just the same - she was born and raised in California.  Her parents are from Japan - they're immigrants.  And Martin O'Malley and I will be the first Irish Catholics to point this out for you.

Here's something else we'll point out for you.  She's the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Winter Olympics.  

Now, to my complaint about NBC's coverage of the PyeongChang Winter Games.  Who's this Mike Tirico upstart? 

Dammit, where's Costas?

I mean, seriously?  Bob Costas said no to the prime-time hosting gig?  Look, I can take change.  I can accept the fact that Alberto Tomba retired from skiing.  Ditto Julia Mancuso, the woman who's come closest to being my Winter Olympics crush (I had a thing for Kristi Yamaguchi until I found out she was a Republican).  And even though it took me forever to accept that Jim McKay had to retire from covering the Olympics, I moved on.  But Costas stepping aside now?  No, it's too soon.  I mean, come on - nobody does it like Costas! 

No wonder NBC's Olympic ratings are off.

Meanwhile, British sportscaster Rebecca Lowe is handling the daytime coverage for NBC.  That's going to offend the Trump voters.

Skiing just started after weather delays.  Expect at least one crash that will be played over and over and over for several days after.      

Kramer Versus . . .

. . . no one else.

Sven Kramer (pronounced CROM-mer) of the Netherlands just won the men's 5,000-meter speed-skating race at the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang.  He has won more Olympic medals than any other male speed skater (sorry, Eric Heiden) and he's won the 5,000-meter Olympic race for the third consecutive time.

And who is second.  There is no second.

King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands was in attendance at the race, and he was ecstatic to see Kramer's victory.

It's good to be king.

I meant Sven Kramer. :-)