Let the Games End

Tonight is the closing ceremony at the Vancouver Winter Olympics. And, in case you didn't hear about the gold medal men's hockey game . . . Canada won.

In overtime.

I'd like to thank the following people who inspired me in covering these Winter Games: Calixa Lavallée, Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier, and Robert Stanley Weir, for writing the stirring words and music for the Canadian national anthem, which I got to hear a lot; ice dancer Tanith Belbin, for being hot; halfpipe snowboarder Shaun White, for simply being on fire; the U.S. ski team, for winning all those medals, particularly in Nordic combined, and sticking it to the Austrians, but especially: Julia Mancuso, for also being hot, and Lindsey Vonn, for being hot and blonde.

Special gratitude goes to the Canadian hydraulics engineers who screwed up that fourth arm of the indoor cauldron at the opening ceremony, if only to prove that Americans aren't the only ones who screw up with things like this; the Vancouver organizing committee, for not thinking to invite Chilliwack to play at either the opening or closing ceremony, and; the United States Olympic Committee, for being too busy being dysfunctional and arrogant to interfere with their own athletes. Special thanks go also to the former Soviet republics of Estonia and Kazakhstan, the only countries to rank lower in the medal count than the United Kingdom, so my four British friends don't have to be completely humiliated by the British presence in, ironically, British Columbia.

My friend Mackenzie Reide, who is from Vancouver but did not go home to watch the Games in person so she could continue pursuing her writing career in New York, hopefully read some of this blog and felt like she was home as a result. I dedicate this Winter Olympics commentary to you, Mackenzie.

Finally, a heartfelt and completely irrelevant and irreverent tip of the hat to Janis Kipurs . . .

. . . the aforementioned Latvian bobsledder who competed for the Soviet Union in 1984 and 1988, who in 1988 won the gold medal in two-man bobsledding and bronze in the four-man competition and provided me with such a wonderful name to whimsically riff off, and who, in 1846, invented the sewing machine. :-D ;-)

By the way, who won curling? :-D

On to Sochi in 2014.

Cocky Hockey, Part Two

In progress: the United States versus Canada for the Olympic gold medal in men's hockey.

I can't look . . .. :-D

Two of Canada's players are named Sidney Crosby and Rick Nash.

Crosby and Nash.

Yeah, I have their Wind On the Water album. But without Stills, it's just not the same. :-D

Crosby, Stills and Nash won't be performing at the the closing ceremony tonight, but Neil Young will. So who needs Rush? ;-)

All Aboard The Night Train!

Oh, this is sweet . . ..

The four-man bobsled team United States 1, whose sled is known as the "Night Train," made history today by speeding to an Olympic gold medal in Vancouver - the first American gold medal in the four-man bobsled event since 1948. Steven Holcomb was the driver, supported by Steve Mesler, Curt Tomasevicz and Justin Olsen. They set the pace in the first of four runs and never looked back. Their final margin of time on the fastest sled track ever built was .38 of a second.

To give you an idea of how significant this is, American bobsledders had long been considered more of a novelty than the Jamaican bobsled team.

The Night Train crew beat a German sled piloted by the esteemed Andre Lange, a friend of Holcomb's. Now the Americans can take their places among great Olympic bobsledders such as Lange, Peter Kirby of Canada, Eugenio Monti of Italy, Jean Wicki of Switzerland, and the Latvian bobsledder Janis Kipurs.

I remember Janis Kipurs, a member of the Soviet team in the 1980s, very well, largely because of his name - pronounced "YON-is KIP-ers." I like saying it over and over - "YON-is KIP-ers." "YON-is KIP-ers." "YON-is KIP-ers." :-D

Of course, Steven Holcomb, Steve Mesler, Curt Tomasevicz and Justin Olsen are four more names worth repeating. :-)

Winter Olympic TV

NBC's coverage of the Winter Olympics has proven that the network has expertly honed its skills in broadcasting the both the winter and regular Games since it started doing so on a regular basis at Seoul in 1988, adding the Winter Olympics in 2002. Ironically, the network may soon lose its broadcasting rights for the Olympics soon, as the rights to the 2014 and 2016 Games are up for grabs (London in 2012 is already settled for NBC). ESPN and Turner are interested, but NBC may still have the upper hand.

Anyway, the fabled National Broadcasting Company has done a good job (I think) covering Vancouver - no sob stories (the death of Joannie Rochette's mother doesn't count here, as that was a legitimate news story), more insightful interviews with athletes, fewer human interest stories about local traditions. Mary Carillo, for one, did an informative piece about the evolution of snowboarding. There was still content that didn't belong in the coverage - Tom Brokaw's piece on how a Newfoundland airport helped passengers on U.S.-bound planes forced to land there on September 11, 2001 belonged on a news magazine show and had nothing to do with the Olympics - but on balance, it's been very good.

There haven't been many annoying commercials, with the exceptions coming from - you guessed it - fast-food restaurants. Subway's ad for its foot-long sandwiches have a mindless jingle that gets in your brain and stays there, but this is nothing compared to the McDonald's ads. One ad notes that a new sweet sauce for its Chicken McNuggets made for the Olympic village in Vancouver is now available at all McDonald's restaurants. The commercials say you can now eat like an Olympian.

Guess what: If you eat at McDonald's, you're not eating like an Olympian. You're not even eating like a Little Leaguer.

Another McDonald's ad shows a husband and wife fighting over who gives their son a Happy Meal and gets bragging rights for it, each one taking it from the other on the way home. The husband gives the kid the Happy Meal, but the wife gets the credit. ("Thanks, Mom!") Will he thank Mom for his obesity and diabetes when he's eighteen?

And don't get me started on the Coke ad in which a snowball fight starts in the Olympic village.

But you're not going to hear me complain about NBC's coverage; I have plenty of other things to complain about. Overall, it's been fun.

Those curling matches were really fascinating. ;-)

But there's still a little more competition left. If anything important happens (*cough cough*, men's hockey, *cough cough*), I'll be sure to comment on it.

The closing ceremony is tomorrow. If Rush doesn't play in it, I'm going to be ticked off. :-D

Meanwhile, I caught the tail end of one of those celebrity "news" shows that people with no life watch, and he was broadcasting from Vancouver. He signed off saying he hoped to be at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, "wherever that is."

Note to overpaid TV show host: Sochi is a Russian city on the Black Sea, near the Caucasus Mountains in the southeastern corner of Europe.

Nimrod.

Let The Games Continue

And so it went. The medal podium for the women's figure skating event at the Winter Olympics was without an American last night for the first time since 1964. To give you some perspective, my parents were still dating, the first Beatles album on Capitol had just been released in the U.S., and Lyndon Johnson ("Let us continya") was beginning his third month as President during those Winter Olympics.

Already some people are asking if maybe the Americans are slipping in women's figure skating. Considering that the United States has been shut out of the medal podium in this sport for only the second time since 1960 (when American Carol Heiss won the gold), I don't think it's a crisis just yet. Indeed, Marai Nagasu finished in fourth place with a personal best score and might have won a medal (not "medaled;" "medal" is not a verb!) if the judges had been more generous. She's already being talked about as a potential medalist - maybe even a gold medalist, which would place her in America's most exclusive women's club. One caveat: Yes, she's the future of American figure skating, but it's possible that she always will be. I remember when Katarina Witt won the gold medal in women's figure skating in 1984 and another American fourth-place finisher, Tiffany Chin, was being talked up as a possible medalist for 1988. What actually happened was that Chin quickly entered the "Where Are They Now?" file and Witt became the 1988 Olympic champion. (Congratulations to South Korea's Kim Yu-Na for setting a record score in winning the gold at Vancouver.)

Nordic combined is another story. Let me . . . Spillane! :-D Johnny Spillane won silver medals in three Nordic combined events - the individual normal hill / 10 km race, the team large hill/4x5 km race, and the the individual large hill/10 km, finishing in the the latter race behind fellow American Bill Demong. There's been a lot of history made, as Americans had rarely been competitive in Nordic combined before; now they're winning medals in silver and gold.

Apolo Anton Ohno is already the most decorated American winter Olympian ever, with eight medals, and he could add to his total tonight with two short track skating races, including the 500-meter race. Enjoy it; these could be his last Olympic races ever.

International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge is making more noise about dropping women's hockey, because, as noted, it's not competitive enough (the American and Canadian teams always seem to play in the gold medal game) and has indicated getting rid of women's ski jumping for the same reason. Though these actions - along with eliminating softball from the Summer Games - are regarded as sex discrimination, let me repeat that softball's male counterpart, baseball, was eliminated for the same reasons.

Ugh, I'm done . . . for now. :-)

Miscellaneous Olympic Musings

You'll notice that very rarely in the past twelve days have I commented on political issues in America. There's an obvious reason for this; I've been so obsessed with the Winter Olympics, as I reliably am on a quadrennial basis, I've been commenting on the Games almost exclusively, so I don't have much time for much else . . . though that could change as the CEO of Toyota prepares to testify before a U.S. congressional committee today and the ballyhooed "health care summit" is held in Washington tomorrow.

It's sort of an Olympic truce I've been following, you might say.

In the meantime, the Winter Olympics. Bode Miller hoped to get another medal, this one in the men's giant slalom, but this time he didn't finish the race. It wasn't a case of being unprepared or ill-prepared; he simply missed a gate and went off course, a mistake that could have happened to any skier.

In women's figure skating . . . Canada's Joannie Rochette somehow managed to put on a flawless performance in the short program last night two days after her mother died of an apparent heart attack. She should get a medal just for competing so well under personal pressure. :-) She is currently in third place.

Meanwhile, it seems ironic that, even as Americans advance in ice dancing, they could be shut out of medals in women's figure skating for the first time since 1964. (No one in America noticed the shut-out at the time, apparently because of Beatlemania. :-D) Americans Rachael Flatt and Miari Nagasu are respectively in fifth in sixth place, and the real favorites for the gold are South Korean Kim Yu-Na and Japan's Mao Asada.

It's been said that the that the American female figure skaters who won the Olympic gold medal (roll call, please: Carol Heiss, Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, Kristi Yamaguchi, Tara Lipinski, and Sarah Hughes) are the most exclusive women's club in America. Michelle Kwan, alas, isn't on that list for reasons that boil down to nearsighted judges in Nagano, but her silver medal from those Games put her in good company with the likes of Linda Fratianne and Rosalynn Sumners. This year, an American woman might not even get as far as bronze. :-(

Even so, the United States is gaining in winter sports that it had been uncompetitive in for decades; they just won the silver medal in the men's team Nordic combined skiing event. Americans remain also-rans, though, in the biathlon, even though it involves rifles. You'd think that, with the gun culture in the American heartland and the NRA rolls overflowing in snowy states like Michigan, we'd excel in that event. There's only one thing to do to insure more competitiveness in the biathlon . . ..

Put rednecks on skis! :-D

Dancin' Fools

 Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir became the first Canadian couple as well as the first couple from a North American country to win the Olympic gold medal in ice dancing last night in Vancouver. Their American friends, Meryl Davis and Charlie White, took the silver medal, the second consecutive Olympic silver medal - the second consecutive medal of any color, in fact, and only the third medal in history - for the United States in this event. History was indeed made.

Even more history could have been made had the Russians - who have had at least one couple on the medal podium for ice dancing since it was first added to the Winter Olympics in 1976 - been shut out entirely. But the bronze medal went to Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin, edging out the American darlings of Torino, Tanith Belbin (who's still hot) and Ben Agosto. Domnina and Shabalin managed to skate well enough to keep Belbin and Agosto in fourth place, where they started going into the free, despite Shabalin's earlier injuries. But as far as I'm concerned, they shouldn't have won the bronze.

Okay, maybe they were techincally better than Belbin and Agosto, and there was no controversy about whether they deserved third place - not like at Sarajevo in 1984 (the year of Great Britain's Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean), when another pair of Russian ice dancers, Soviets Marina Klimova and Sergei Ponomarenko managed to edge out Judy Blumberg and Michael Seibert of the United States despite the evidence that the two Americans deserved the bronze. (I discussed this on my blog four years ago, so go here for that.) Unlike Blumberg and Seibert, Belbin and Agosto were happy with their finish, and rightfully so, believing the results were fair. So why don't I think Domnina and Shabalin should have won the bronze medal?

Because they're the most vulgar ice dancing couple I've ever seen.

This is the same Russian pair that caused a stir for their Australian aboriginal dance routine, particularly with their aboriginal costumes, which had leaves, brown body stockings and loincloths, and that's not to mention the white face markings. It was Domnina and Shabalin's idea of a "folk dance," which was apparently a required theme in the Olympic ice dancing program this year. Their poorly conceived routine was enough to drop them from first to third place in the end, but as far as I'm concerned, they didn't drop far enough. Not only did Australian aborigines take offense, but even Native Canadians expressed concern. Domnina and Shabalin toned down their costumes and skated in the final program looking more tasteful but still somewhat vulgar. Oksana Domnina looked a bottle-blonde disco queen, and Maxim Shabalin was a disheveled mess.

For more on the native costumes controversy, read this excellent column from Tracee Hamilton of the Washington Post.

Anyway, the continued Russian presence among ice dancing medalists leads me to wonder if some wags are right in suggesting that ice dancing should be dropped from the Winter Olympics. Some say it should be eliminated due to its redundancy (to the layman, at least) to pairs figure skating, but I propose it be dropped because the Russians keep winning at least one medal in it every four years. After all, baseball and softball are no longer Olympic sports because the same countries kept winning all the medals. Maybe Russia doesn't win as many ice dancing Olympic medals as it once did, but when you remember that non-Russian couples like Torvill and Dean (ever notice how women in figure skating pairs always get first billing?) have traditionally been an exception when it comes to the gold medal, you have to take that into serious consideration.

Oh yeah, the Kerr siblings from Great Britain were also-rans, disappointing Brits who were hoping for Torvill and Dean Mark Two.

Miller Time Again

Bode Miller has redeemed himself. He finally has a gold medal after winning one of each other color in the Vancouver Winter Olympics and after having won nothing at Torino in 2006. Yesterday he won the gold medal in the men's combined skiing event. Coupled with the silver he won in the Super G and the bronze in the downhill, this kid's on a high like never before.

And for once it didn't involve alcohol.

Four years after having wasted opportunities at Torino by skiing wasted, Miller is now considered a bona fide, not a potential, Olympic champion. He continues to insist that skiing for him is not about the medals, only going out and skiing your hardest and most aggressively and, when the situation demands it, your most conservatively. I'll let Miller himself explain it:

"My proud moment and my feeling of accomplishment doesn't hinge on those things [winning medals]. It hinges on the skiing that I put down. That's what means a lot to me right now. To do it this way at this point in my career in the Olympics, and in the super combined in particular, is just an unbelievable challenge, and for me to rise to that challenge felt really cool."

Miller still has a chance to win more medals at the Vancouver Winter Olympics. what that the regular and giant slalom races still coming up.

Meanwhile, on a completely unrelated note, American ice dancing couples Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto and Meryl Davis and Charlie White are each in a position to get something ice dancers from other countries, even Great Britain, have that Americans have always lacked. Public medical insurance? No, an Olympic gold medal in ice dancing! (The British victors referred to are Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean from Sarajevo in 1984.)

Cocky Hockey

The United States and Canada are playing each other in men's hockey right now, and I keep hearing about each of these players coming from different National Hockey League teams. Call me a traditionalist, call me a curmudgeon if you will, but I pine for the days when NHL professionals didn't play for national teams. After all, it wasn't crack professionals that made up the gold medal-winning 1980 U.S. "Miracle On Ice" hockey team, but a bunch of students who played for their country and not necessarily their egos.

Never mind the fact the Cold War is over, it doesn't matter as much if the U.S beats the Russians when you have players on each team who might happen to play on the same NHL squad.

Fiendish Thingy

I'm finally watching curling at the Winter Olympics after finding it on CNBC by accident. The American men are playing the British men, and there's been plenty of hurling and sweeping. So far none of the rocks have blown up yet.

If that happens, the curlers will need . . . HELP! :-D

Skiing and Sledding

More from Vancouver:

Lindsey Vonn had a dismal run in the women's super-combined skiing race on Thursday, but she turned out to be grateful for her bronze medal in the Super G run. Julia Mancuso more or less batted about .500 (to cop a phrase from another sport) as well, in reverse order. After winning the silver medal in the super-combined event (behind Vonn's German friend Maria Riesch), she failed complete the Super G run. I'm sure many Americans are happy that the darling duo of American women's skiing won medals just the same.

Even if they don't know what the difference between super-combined and Super G is. :-D

Meanwhile, the bobsled races have started. Finally - my favorite sledding event! :-) I've always considered bobsledding to be the safest of the three sledding sports, comparatively speaking, if only because bobsledders have steel protecting them on three sides and they're sitting rather than lying on their backs. The two-man races are underway. One American team got off to a slow start and almost lost control of the sled, but finished the race, and almost took the lead in record time. :-)

Very Brief Winter Olympic Musings

I was going to offer more extensive commentary on the Winter Olympics tonight, but I'll have to keep my commentary to a minimum . . . for now. I'll just say that I think Evan Lysacek, in terms of pure heart and soul, deserved to be the first American man since Brian Boitano in 1988 to men the gold medal in men's figure skating, and it's great to see Bode Miller back in to form.

So why am I both late and brief? Early this afternoon, a nasty computer virus attacked my PC and incapacitated the Internet connection on my account, and after incessant debugging and reconfiguring, I finally got it back to normal. I'm not complaining. I've just had one of those days where I've done enough of that already.

I'll be back tomorrow, God and my computer willing.

Brotherhood At the Olympics

Oh, brother.

In the men's luge doubles event at the Winter Olympics last night, the top two finishing teams were two fraternal pairs. Andreas and Wolfgang Linger of Austria won the gold medals in this event last night, and the silver medals went to two Latvian brothers, Juris and Andris Sics. The Linger brothers also won in this same event at Torino in 2006. (Do you have to, do you have to, do you have to let it Linger? :-D)

The luge doubles event requires one rider to lie on top of another. I guess it makes sense that, if you're going to have some guy lie down on your stomach on a little sled going down a hill at 84 miles an hour, it might as well be your brother. :-O :-D

Colbert Notions

In between Lindsey Vonn becoming the first American woman to win an Olympic downhill skiing race and snowboarder Shaun White cleaning up on the halfpipe, I keep looking for satire at the Games, but Stephen Colbert, who's practically a neighbor of mine (he lives about four miles from me), pretty much finds it without even trying. It helps if you a) get to go to Vancouver yourself and b) happen to be Stephen Colbert.

Colbert, who has generously sponsored the U.S .speed-skating team and mockingly dismissed Canadians as "syrup suckers," was on the NBC late-night Olympics show last night with Bob Costas. Colbert was telling him how he became the speed skating team's assistant psychologist and helped Shani Davis (who called Colbert a jerk for his comedic style) win the 1000-meter skating race by running alongside him and getting him angry enough to race to the finish line. He reportedly told Davis to remember to wear his headpiece and that he had to skate to win. In between that and explaining the blade duels between American and Soviet Winter Olympic athletes during the Cold War, he cuddled up to the studio fireplace and then climbed into the "fireplace" while the "fire" was going.

I didn't think they really had a chimney at the International Broadcast Center, and I knew the fire couldn't be an authentic one, but it never occurred to me that it was an electronically generated projection.

This is just a sample of Stephen Colbert's Olympic satirical genius, which he's exhibited for several days. I'll keep looking for things to make fun of at the Winter Olympics - it turns out I'm doing at least as well at that as I did in 2006 on Torino and better than I did in 2008 on Beijing - but Stephen is the master.

I thought I was the Olympic parody king, but I've just handed my satire crown to him. :-D

Downhill Delays

The PBS NewsHour reported the results of the women's downhill skiing race at the Vancouver Winter Olympics before NBC had the opportunity to show it, so I watched it knowing that Lindsey Vonn had won, getting the gold medal, with the perky Julia Mancuso taking the silver medal. (Elisabeth Goergl of Austria won the bronze.) Three other skiers, including Sweden's Anja Paerson, crashed, but no one was hurt. The crashes were the big surprise.

I'm pleased that Vonn won, since she had injured her shin and took advantage of the delays of this event to nurse herself back to form. Normally, knowing the result of an Olympic event would discourage one from tuning in to see it on tape, but to me, watching the Olympics on tape delay is like watching a movie I've already seen. I love it when I know the ending. :-)

Slipping and Sliding

More about Vancouver:

People who are talking about Jacob Ellis screwing up a bid for an Olympic snowboarding medal are obviously not paying enough attention to the Winter Games. It was Lindsey Jacobellis who, vying for a gold medal in the women's snowboard cross competition, hoped to overcome the humiliation she experienced when she showed off on the way to the finish line at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino and tripped, letting someone else beat her and settling for silver. This year, she didn't even get that far, going off course, missing a gate, and getting disqualified. Unless she pulls a comeback at Sochi in 2014, she's destined to be a trivia question.

And when is she going to do something about that hair?

Meanwhile, if you think football has too much scoring, then by all means, don't watch women's ice hockey. China lost its first game to the United States, 12 to 1, and they lost to Finland 43 to 5. The Americans beat the Russians 13 to 0, and Canada won 18 to 0 against Slovakia, a team that defeated Bulgaria in non-Olympic competition in 2008 - 82 to 0. The Bulgarian women's hockey team sustained the kind of loss normally associated with Charlie Brown's baseball team.

The incessant scoring by mostly the same teams - the Americans, the Canadians, and whoever happens to be playing China or Bulgaria - has led many to declare that women's hockey favors the same few countries too often and therefore should be eliminated as summer Olympic events like baseball and softball were. The event's defenders noted that ice hockey - unlike softball, apparently - is slowly gaining among women in parts of the world other than North America, and that players in other countries should soon be up to speed.

Meanwhile, in men's hockey, the U.S. beat Switzerland, 3 to 1.

In men's figure skating, American Evan Lysacek is well on his way to medal contention and possibly the the gold medal. Not so for American Jeremy Abbott, who stumbled last night while skating to an instrumental version of the Beatles's "A Day In the Life." Jeremy proved to be . . . a real boob.

(You have to be a fan of a certain animated Beatles movie to get that joke.)

Ah, satire. :-D

See You In My Dreamworks

Now that I think of it, there is an opportunity for satire coming out of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, but it has nothing to do with the athletes or even the uncooperative weather. Rather, it has to do with the contributions to NBC's Olympics "coverage" from Dreamworks, the studio found by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen - namely, animation showing how the Winter Games likely would have been contested in the days of the Vikings.

Dreamworks, of course, is using NBC's sports division (and NBC is happy to let them do so, for a price) to promote their new 3-D computer-animated movie, How To Train Your Dragon, about a young Viking lad who decides he's rather keep a dragon as a pet than slay it. Based on the 2003 children's novel of the same name by British author Cressida Crowell, the movie has been promoted with numerous ads for it during the commercial breaks on the Winter Olympics broadcasts. This is fine by me, but NBC has also seen fit to include animations of the movie's characters demonstrating what skiing, snowboarding, and medal ceremonies might have been like in the days of the Vikings. Bob Costas himself introduces these clips as if they were part of the Olympic experience.

I don't want to contemplate how the Winter Olympics might have been contested in the Viking age any more than I want to contemplate what casual Fridays might have been like in Victorian England. Because it's dumb. This synergistic tie-in with the movie only cheapens the Olympic viewing experience for those of us who want to see luge sledding, or even curling. It also blurs the line between advertising and event coverage even more than the placement of Coke machines in movies made by Columbia Pictures blurred the line between art and advertising back when Coca-Cola owned that studio in the eighties. Show the ads for How To Train Your Dragon, by all means, but don't make the movie part of the event it's sponsoring.

Oh yeah, the inevitable human interest stories are back. Last night, Mary Carillo reported on polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba - a part of Canada, sure, but nowhere near Vancouver, where the Winter Games are actually taking place. Churchill, apparently, is enjoying more suitable weather for winter sports than Vancouver these days. Well, you can't have the Winter Games up there with all those polar bears wandering around.

Polar bears. . . . For white bourgeois American liberals who pretend to care about the planet, polar bears are the new whales.

Miller Time

Johnny Spillane became the first American to win a medal in the Nordic combined ski jumping and cross country event at the winter Olympics, earning the silver medal and just barely losing the gold to Jason Lamy Chappuis of France by four-tenths of a second. Meanwhile, a Canadian finally won an Olympic gold medal, winter or summer, at an Olympiad held in Canada by winning the gold medal in men's freestyle moguls - Alexandre Bilodeau, of Quebec, won that event yesterday.

But the big news is - Bode Miller finally won another Olympic medal!

Everyone's favorite sot from the 2006 Winter Games, who had won two silver medals in Salt Lake City in 2002 but got wasted in Torino and went home empty-handed, won the bronze medal in the men's downhill skiing race, missing out on a higher podium position by less than a second. (Didier Defago of Switzerland took the gold medal and Aksel Svindal of Norway took the silver. Mller's was just .09 seconds behind Defago and .02 seconds behind Svindal.) Miller credits his unlikely comeback - more incredulous due to the abysmal season he had last year - to a more serious attitude and a simple desire to race. The fact that he became a father two years ago might have also taught him some responsibility.

I don't know how many other races Miller is entered in, but it looks like he's on his way to fulfilling his Olympic promise of four years earlier. It's nicer to know that he's back, but, dude, what's that going to do to my Vancouver coverage? I'll have to look elsewhere for satire!

I've been going over my commentary on Torino from four years ago, by the way, and I think I peaked in terms of Winter Olympics ridicule. And apparently, Miller was a primary source for a good deal of that ridicule. :-O

More 2010 Winter Olympics Commentary

Apolo Anton Ohno became the most decorated American male winter Olympian in history by winning a medal in short track speed skating last night, earning a silver in the 1500-meter race. Fellow American J.R. Celski won the bronze. The silver medal win was treated as a victory for Ohno, even though South Korean Lee Jung-su won the gold. The jingoism in NBC's coverage has already begun to creep in.

So far, nothing has happened at Vancouver that demands flat-out ridicule, although that could happen once skiing (not freestyle or mogul skiing, real skiing) finally begins. Bode Miller, the biggest loser from Torino, is back. Olympics fans will recall that Miller had an excellent chance of winning a slew of gold medals at the Torino Winter Games and skied so sloppily and so lackadaisically that he ended up winning nothing. He's out to redeem himself at Vancouver.

If he skis there like he did at Torino, he may help the Canadians win an unprecedented gold medal on their own home turf.

In the meantime, inclement weather and slushy snow has prevented Miller from undistinguishing himself. Fortunately, NBC hasn't had to do local interest stories to fill time, as there are plenty of other events for them to cover. When bad weather forced the cancellation of ski events at the Winter Games in Sarajevo in 1984, ABC had to do stories about Bosnian produce cart vendors and had John Denver serenade tourists at local lodges. Vancouverites don't live any more exotically than Seattle residents, and quite frankly, I don't want to hear John Mayer sing in place of even mogul skiing, especially after what he said about not dating black women. Most black women wouldn't want to listen to him either.

I could go for Jack Johnson, maybe . . ..

Live From Vancouver - NOT!

I haven't seen much to make fun of on this first full day of competition at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, but the opening ceremony was certainly entertaining. The Canadians put on a tasteful, understated show (too bad about that pillar that failed to lift during the torch lighting ceremony, though), much different from the the kind of Olympic ceremonies their neighbors to the south stage. Fess up: If not for Muhammad Ali lighting the torch, would you have remembered the opening ceremony at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics fondly? Or even remembered it? I'm still trying to forget Kiss at the closing ceremony at Salt Lake City in 2002. That's the real reason, I believe, why the International Olympic Committee said no to Chicago's bid for the 2016 Games.

Oh yeah, Vancouver. Well, I'm pleased that Hannah Kearney won a gold medal in women's skiing moguls and all that, but, uh, you do realize that this is a sport involving twirls in the air and going over bumps deliberately placed on the course! I'll be impressed when an American wins a gold medal in a real sport, like ice dancing.

On a serious note. . . . The luge competition is on as I type. They've moved the men's starting line down to where the women's starting line used to be and the women's starting line even farther down. Since that fatal accident involving the luger from Georgia, safety is being taken even more seriously.