Why do you need room for 30? Five or six could fit on the current course. Top two advance to the next round.

Afaik, the only positive drug test so far has been a curler, so it's obviously the only sport in which you can't compete against the world's best unless you're doping.

There's a skier in the halfpipe who can't do a single trick. She just skies slowly up and down the pipe. She qualified for the Olympics because she earned lots of points by entering every single event she could, especially if there weren't other top skiers in it, plus she never crashes so sometimes her score is better than people who actually perform tricks.

There's a snowboard race in which six people go down together each heat with the top three moving on, and the finals is the top 6 racing head-to-head against each other. They might also have a ski race like this.

All athletic contests with judges like figure skating, gymnastics, etc. are a farce.

That is snowboard cross and it is awesome. Unfortunately it doesn't get enough air time since everyone goes down at one time as opposed to each person going down individually and getting 3 runs each for 150 (throwing out random numbers) runs.

+1


Not terribly athletic but a cool strategy game.

Ski Jumping? Boxing?

Don't forget about all those sports with referees.

Just heard about her on NPR. She ran for governor of CA, against Arnold, as an undergrad. Kind of an attention whore, kind of cool.

The part of the Olympics that bugs me is when hey say things like “Phelps is the greatest Olympian of all time” because he has the most medals.

It’s dumb, he happens to compete in a sport that has the most events, and he dominates that sport. Ditto with sprinters and other athletes that get to compete in multiple events for their given sport.




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Yup. Add diving to the list as well.

NBC's curling coverage for every Team USA game included the story about the copstache curler "losing 30 pounds and completely changing his body!" that included the before and after photos where he looked almost exactly the same.

JT,

More details on that, please. Was he an NCAA champion sprinter or other type of elite level athlete?

I got more details.

So it was after the 92 Winter Olympics and he just graduated from high school. It was more of a recruitment program than a try out for the team. They still run it, slider search.

He made the first cut in SF and as such could go to Calgary to for training and the next tier if he paid a portion. If he passed the next cut they would pay 100% of his costs to train. He didn’t.

To answer your question, he was not a high level competitive athlete but was maybe on the cycling team in college, so more athletic than average.

I guess there really is no other way to get athletes into the sport, and the fact that this was right after the Calgary games when interest was peaked but with 4 years to train completely ruins my previous incredulity. Thanks a heap, El D.

JT,

Haha, sorry, but hopefully you can now go back to enjoying these crazy sled races!

I think it’s crazy to watch luge and skeleton and not think you need to be a great athlete to perform at the top levels of those sports.

They are not a bar game on ice like curling or some dance competition.

Edit: curling is awesome, btw. But lol @ it being a sport, much less an Olympic sport.

lol

Looool sick scam Elizabeth

Hahahaha, the replays

How much did that cost her though?


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that woman is my favorite story of the olympics

Lol yesss. Just the announcers talking made that seem like elite satire.

Re: Curling

It's awesome. It's all of our last chances to represent our country in the Olympics...if we just knew how to get started.

I truly feel it would be a great thing to do with a group of guys, a couple cases of beer, an uber, and some ice packs.

Boxing is probably the biggest farce of them all, but that's offtopic to the thread.

Precept,

It’s really fun! You get started like this:

https://www.bayareacurling.com/learn

I did that approximately four years ago. Meant to keep going and curl for the USA this year, but forgot to go again.