Downhill

The Beijing Winter Olympics are quickly becoming a wet blanket.

Not only are these Games turning out to be incredibly boring, Team USA's performance is underwhelming, the team being so far down in the medal count it's comparable to our country's place in quality-of-life rankings.

And what I just said may be the wittiest comment I can make about these Winter Games. 

I tried watching last night but I found myself restless and easily distracted.  The women's cross-country skiing barely held my attention, though the women's snowboarding half-pipe competition was slightly more engaging.  Then came the women's slalom . . . and the return of Mikaela Shiffrin, ready to redeem herself after  skiing out of the giant slalom.

Then she skied out a second time.

On live television.  Even when NBC went to a commercial break, a sidebar screen continued to show Shiffrin just sitting there in the snow contemplating her terrible loss.

I couldn't watch after that.  Ahh, there are too many commercials anyway. 

As for what happened to Shiffrin - twice now -  I blame the fake snow. 😠  

Maybe the Winter Games will get better . . . 

On the Slopes

Shaun White proved why he is the Michael Phelps of snowboarding, having come back from a shaky second run in the men's halfpipe at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics to nail it in the third.  It was touch and go there, and the snow on the course proved to be as hard as ice - it was too much for some of the competitors - but White came through like the champion he is, winning his third career gold medal.

Meanwhile, in skiing . . . Will the women's slalom ever be held?  Will any of the skiing competitions that have already started even finish?  Bad weather on the course has prevented Mikaela Shiffrin, the young skier with the stellar ability and the spell-checker-unfriendly name, has just had her PyeongChang on the women's slalom debut delayed for the second time because of it.  I haven't seen Winter Olympic skiing be delayed by bad weather this much since Sarajevo in 1984.  At least NBC can shift to figure skating; back in 1984, ABC had to settle for commentary and music from John Denver to fill the time.

And Bosnian turnip carts.

Wow - a country-folk-pop singer who hadn't had a hit in three years . . . and adventures in pushcart vending on the streets of Sarajevo!  Oh, the drama! 

And people wonder why ABC lost coverage of the Olympics . . ..

Though it's been a long time since I've seen a Bosnian turnip cart.

With the weather in the mountains of South Korea being what it is, the Winter Olympic organizers might have to give up the ski competition for Lent.

There are in fact a lot of Catholics in South Korea . . ..

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. ;-) 

And To the Winter Olympics . . .

Finally - 2018 Winter Olympic commentary! 

Red Gerard (his first name is short for "Redmond") won the first gold medal of the 2018 Winter Games for the United States in slope-style snowboarding.  The 17-year-old Coloradan had a few tense moments in the liter twists and turned of his sport, but he managed to hold on and win an upset despite the heavy competition - much of which wiped out.     

I'm still having trouble telling the difference between ice dancing and pairs figure skating, but in the former event, there's no mistaking Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir for anyone else.  Virtue - who is definitely going to be on my beautiful-women picture blog when I return to focusing on athletes there - and Moir rocked, figuratively with their dance moves and literally with their choice of music - a medley of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy For the Devil," a Latin instrumental version of "Hotel California," and Santana's cover of "Oye Como Va."  Hear how it goes - this pair is going to go gold like Red.

Speaking of the Reds, the North Koreans were at the Winter Olympics to take part with their southern brethren in the Games, and not just against each other.  The North and South Korean female ice hockey players are competing side by side.   And they got shut out side be side, losing to Switzerland.  But the big loser in the thawing of relations between the two Korean governments may be the United States; while representatives from Pyongyang and Seoul were talking and making nice - and South Korean President Moon Jae-in was being invited to go to Pyongyang for further talks to warm relations and cool tensions - Mike Pence, the Vice President of the United States, was being belligerent and rude toward North Koreans and also South Koreans by refusing to acknowledge the Olympic diplomacy going on around him.  More proof that the rest of the world has given up on Americans to do the right thing even if they have exhausted all of the alternatives.

But at least we're not the Russians, who have been banned from sending a national team because of doping.  Russians without a history of doping who are competing are competing as themselves, not as representatives of a country, which likely means that the only Russians you'll see at these Games are figure skaters.

Yevgenia Medvedeva is hot. ;-)

It's safe to assume that all of the Russian surnames at these Games will have the feminizing "a" at the end, yes . . .  

One more controversy about the Winter Olympics' location has also been settled.  It's spelled "PyeongChang," not "Pyeongchang" - the "C" is capitalized.

I hope that has cleared up any misunderstanding.