Beijing Blech

This Winter Olympiad sucks.

I've had the TV tuned to the Winter Olympics while involving myself in online activities.   My mother has never been able to comprehend how I can possibly go online and watch television at the same time and give both my full attention.  Well, maybe I can't, but it's still a good way to economize my time.  Anyway, I was watching the Olympics while working on my laptop a couple of nights ago, but when it became apparent that the opposite was true, I turned off the TV.  And for good reason.  The competition is dull, the most interesting events don't get decent coverage - would you believe that I've only seen one long-track speed skating race, and it wasn't the one Erin Jackson won? - and there always seems to be one of the following events on when I do tune in . . .  figure skating, freestyle skiing, and curling.

Definitely lots of curling. 

And I don't think I want to see another curling match unless one of those stones blows up.

Another reason not to tune in is because, thanks to the thirteen-hour time difference between New York and Beijing (or the sixteen-hour time difference between Los Angeles, where Mike Tirico is hosting the Winter Games from thanks to COVID, and Beijing),  you know the results of the competition before you see in on TV no matter how hard you may try to avoid hearing what happened.  Oh, sure, I was glad to hear that Kamila Valieva ended up out of medal contention before I saw any figure skating Thursday night, but I also heard who won and, as I expected, there were no Americans who won medals.  By the time the gold-medal game in women's hockey was broadcast late at night, and I lost complete interest in men's hockey once I saw online - again, before seeing it for myself - that Americans were out of medal contention. (Oh great, now Christine Brennan is going to talk again about how well the women have done at the Winter Games and made no attempt to hide her smugness - you can almost hear her thinking, "The women keep winning all of the events the men lose.  Nyahh!")  

And I completely lost interest in skiing - both sexes - when Mikaela Shiffrin got disqualified in a third race. 😢

Do I miss the travelogue features that NBC obviously couldn't do this time due to the COVID outbreak?  No.  I see stories about Chinese culture on the evening news!  And unlike NBC's puff pieces, these stories tell the truth!

Would you believe that the motto of the Beijing Winter Olympics is "Together for a Shared Future?" 

Ha ha, charade you are!

I'm definitely not tuning in to watch the closing ceremony tomorrow night - there are to many other programs on TV tomorrow that I want to watch anyway.  Besides, if the Winter Olympics are so damn terrific, how come NBC, which aired the Super Bowl this past Sunday, devoted so much air time to Super Bowl coverage before the game even started?

What, they don't like curling? 😛

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 . . .

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