February, 2010

alpine skiing — definately my favorite olympic sport, ever since i snuck out of bed as a 9 year-old to watch the mahre brothers during the 1984 olympic games in sarajevo. i’m a little over Lindsay Vonn’s shin, but glad she (and Bode Miller) both picked up a win as nothing is worse than seeing nbc sports commentators blabber after watching their network-picked olympic stars fall flat on their faces.

biathlon/cross-country — fire al trautwig. seriously.

curling — what the bejezus happened to the u.s. olympic curling teams this year? what is the point of having minnesota and wisconsin in the union if they can’t produce decent curlers?

figure skating — the men’s program was more flamboyant than ever, and i am seriously still trying to wrap my head around the thinking behind Johnny Weir’s pink corset number. i have no idea if he is gay, but if he is, the GLBT community needs to give him a lifetime award for “worst contribution to stereotypes by a gay man.”

ice dancing — normally, this is my place to slam ice dancing … but you know what? it’s better than pairs ice skating. at least the result wasn’t determined by who fell down the least. i’m all for going out and giving it your best, but if the programs have gotten so hard that only *one* pair can make it through the whole thing intact … maybe it’s time to rethink things.

freestyle skiing — moguls. i would love to hear the backstory behind the creation of this sport. pound your knees into your jaw a dozen times, pause for a flippy-twisty thing, more pounding, more flippy, more pounding. i’ve got a wide view of sports, but this seems more inline with bush-era interrogation techniques.

luge — i’m pretty sure this is the first time i’ve ever had the “honor” of watching doubles luge. all i can say is that you’ve got to really, really like your partner.

short track speedskating — watching this year has made me realize that i have developed an unhealthy dislike south korean athletics. it started back in 2002 with the reaction to their speedskater Kim Dong-Sung getting disqualified for cutting off Apollo Ohno, and made worse during the FIFA World Cup that summer when a goal-scorer (forget which one) celebrated the tie-ing goal by pretending to speedskate.

actually, it may date back to 1988 when South Korean boxer Park Si-Hun was given the bout over American Roy Jones, Jr., despite Jones out punching Park 86 to 32 … though at least during *that* controversy Park later apologized to Jones for the loss. anyway, the animosity lives on.

skeleton — i’ve got an idea … luge isn’t dangerous enough, so let’s do it head first.

ski jumping — every olympics has to have a sport that’s like the equivalent of watching paint dry. what really trips me out is that determining the winner by distance jumped isn’t enough, they have to use some utterly uncomprehesible, esoteric artistic judging to make sure it is completely unwatchable for the average lay person. oh, and if i hear Simon Ammann refered to as the “Harry Potter of ski jumping” one more time … pow! right in the kisser.

snowboarding / snow-cross — i’ve got to admit, i’m all about the snow-cross thing … any even which sends four people down the same course at the same time (rugby-style) is what i call a sport. i’m not looking forward to 2014 however, because Linsey Jacobelis fell *again*, which means we have to endure another four years of “redemption” coverage.

snowboarding / half-pipe — i eat this stuff up, and it’s a great addition to the olympics. that said, two small complaints:

(a) i saw the coverage of shaun white face planting on the pipe edge at least two dozen times, which was about three dozen times more than i needed to.

(b) the tricks are becoming so ridiculous — the Double McTwist 1260 involves two flips and three and a half spins — that it’s near impossible for the naked eye to figure out what’s going on. either nbc’s got to figure out how to telestrate these things, or we need to go back to the days where a backside 540 was the shiznit.