He Knew He Was Right

When I first tried to create some writing momentum here three months ago, I did so courtesy of the just-concluded Winter Olympics in Vancouver, with my first four posts being about the great cold-weather sports I had thoroughly enjoyed watching. While I will enthusiastically watch the next Summer Olympics in 2012, I’m more interested to see what happens in Sochi, Russia, in 2014—will Team Night Train do it again? Will Team USA get a shot at redemption against Team Canada in another hockey classic? Will Ohno, Vonn, Davis, Spillane, etc, come back? It’s way too far off to think about such stuff, let alone write about it. Right? It seemed too far off to be relevant until the NFL revealed the site of the 2014 Super Bowl--the Meadowlands--and I remembered that it was an Olympics year as well. So come February 2014 we will have a local Super Bowl affair and then the winter games—which could overlap from the dates I’ve seen given for each, although I doubt the networks covering the events wou...

Ok, I know it is time to move on to other topics, but there are still a number of things I wanted to say about these just-concluded Olympics. I've covered things that were on my mind in the three preceding posts. So, I will skip over those thoughts and randomly summarize the remainder in list form (I like making lists...) 1) Night Train!!! I have little doubt this is one of the things my mom would have loved to see happen: The US winning (seemingly easily) the 4-man bobsled for the first time since 1948. Great job guys! 2) US Hockey: It's Canada's sport. I would have liked for us to win this game, but Canada winning would have been my second choice at the start of the games. In what was easily one of the best games EVER (and certainly for me the most memorable in the last 15 years), the US fell behind 2-0, tied it with 24-seconds left, and then lost it on a Crosby goal in OT. Yesterday, I mentioned how social networking made these Olympics more enjoyable for me. We...

Before the Olympics even started, I had 'fanned' on Facebook the pages of the Vancouver Olympic site, the US Olympic team, the hockey team, the curling team, Shaun White, Lindsey Vonn, and then added Apollo Ohno, Johnny Spillane, Shani Davis, the Norwegian Curling Team's Pants, and...well, maybe that was it. Seeing the unedited comments made by these folks appealed to me and enhanced my enjoyment of the games. It's one thing to have Bob Costas draw questions from athletes, but it is quite another reading about these folks talking about what is on their mind at any given time they choose to post, be it their restlessness or butterflies before events, their elation or torment after, etc. Sure, the media will play up the Nancy-Tonya-lite spat that could be taken from a few of the posts made by those on the women's Alpine team, but what I didn't hear anybody read on air were the more humble comments they posted (these were from Vonn): "Watching the opening ...

I like the racing events of the Olympics more than the others. Luge and Skeleton are kind of the exceptions, as the riders seem so unprotected and in little control. I think you know where this is going. How chilling was that footage of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili? First, I think the networks erred in showing the footage, a mistake that they stopped repeating several hours after showing it. And, how weak was the response of officials, that it was driver error--a failure to correct a maneuver from the previous turn--that led to his death. Ok, fine, you make a mistake in a high-speed event and you can get hurt--there are risks of injury inherent in most sports--but it sounded like they were saying that death was an expected risk for this event. And the initial fix of padding the cement column? Come on, at 90 MPH would padding have helped? The only solution was what they finally did, boarding up the track to keep drivers who have crashed on the course, to prevent such sudden ...

A few friends have been nagging me for years to blog. I already do Facebook and Twitter, so why do I need to blog? Well, as the Olympics were unfolding, I remember night after night finding some story or event amazing, and wished I could preserve it. Sure, NBC put its emphasis on things as it saw fit, but I realize a blog may be the way to help me remember the things that I liked in these games. For example, there was opening night. NBC kept wondering how it would compare to Beijing, and then they kept talking about how that fourth arm got stuck in the floor. Me? I loved the whales. And, I thought that kid "running" through the wheat fields was just amazing. Ditto for kd lang. Finally, there were those unmentioned extras who were dressed in white pants and white jackets and white hats, dancing while the countries marched in--they were just funny. Captivating me the first few nights were the Freestyle events, starting with Hannah Kearney vs Jenn Heil in the Women'...