Oopsie in the women’s 30K – one of the competitors took the wrong turn and got out of medal contention.
Brian
One of the charms of curling is that it is possible to curl at almost any age. Juniors can do it (we have special rocks for them). Seniors can do it; we have poles that allow you to push the rock while walking upright if you are unable to squat down on the ice to deliver the rock. Amateur fun leagues rarely involve vigorous sweeping. And the social aspect of the game (getting together after the game is over to share a pint and socialize is almost de rigueur in many locales) makes it quite enjoyable.
For example, here in Charlotte, we started out in an ice rink, curling on Friday nights only. After four years, thanks to a couple wealthy members, we were able to put up a building dedicated to curling. Now, we curl seven nights a week, plus weekend days and Thursday days, plus high schools on one afternoon, I believe.
Arena curling is actually more fun in some ways; you can’t always easily predict what the ice will do, since it’s not absolutely flat (variations of as little as a few millimeters can cause a huge swing in the direction of the rocks). We were lucky that our ice arena facility had an upstairs bar facility; it made broom-stacking afterward quite enjoyable. Arena clubs also often have one major advantage over dedicated clubs: they usually play through the summer, since the ice isn’t taken down.
I would encourage you to get in touch with your local club. They probably are full of classes right now, as clubs try to maximize the value of the Olympics. 
Resurrecting this post…both summer and winter Olympics have certainly ballooned in size since I started watching, but the Winter Games have gotten enormous. New disciplines (snowboarding, short-track, curling…), new events in old disciplines (mass start for speed skating, team figure skating, super-G skiing), the inclusion of women in previously all-male events (ski jumping, bobsled, hockey).
In the end Canada had 11 gold medals–three of them in events that were contested in 1988. One was in the 10,000 meter speedskating, one in the 2-man bobsled, and one in the ice dance (figure skating). That’s it. The others were all in curling, freestyle skiing, snowboard, short track (new disciplines) and team figure skating (new event). 73% of the Canadian golds were in “new” events.
The US–even more so. They won nine gold medals. One in the women’s giant slalom skiing event, which was a medal up for grabs in 1988, but eight in the new disciplines of snowboarding, curling, freestyle skiing, and the new events of cross country team sprint and women’s ice hockey. 89% of the US golds were in “new” events.
Pretty crazy.
Congratulations on getting your own club. There were new ones in Denver and Portland (Oregon) in the last few years, I think. Nashua just built a new facility, but it replaced an existing building. Still, it’s definitely increasing in popularity. An arena club just started in Boston’s North End this year. I’ve heard of different efforts to build another club in the Boston area, but no one has found a location that would work yet.
There was a temporary skating rink set up on City Hall Plaza in Boston this winter. Comcast had en event to kick off some of their Olympic content a few weeks ago and invited some local curlers to come for a demo/game. It was kinda disappointing, though; they cut our time down from 2 hours to 45 minutes, and most of the guests just hung out in the hospitality tent talking with Jim Craig. And the ice looked level, but it had a definite slope to the left. I told folks to aim for Cambridge, but it still wasn’t enough.
Still, I got to trow a couple stones in downtown Boston. I really want to play at Fenway Park someday.
My club is having an open house on March 10th. It’s gonna be bonkers.
The Olympics have gotten bigger and more extravagant in recent decades, but I don’t think the number of events is the problem. A lot of the new events make fuller use of the existing facilities. Skeleton, women’s luge and bobsled are on the same track that the existing sliding events are on. There’s no four-woman bobsled or women’s doubles luge, but I don’t know if there’s room on the schedule to add those without making the Games a few days longer. I think short-track speedskating is held during the days on the same ice that has the figure skating in the evenings. Events like snowboarding and ski cross are new, but I’m not sure how expensive it is to build things like a half pipe.
Is this the first time they have had a Skating Gala? I don’t remember the last winter Olympics I watched. May have been Calgary, I watched Shaun White win gold, I know that much.
Shaun White was a year and a half old during Calgary so likely not.
They’ve had a skating exhibition of some kind as long as I remember.
I suppose now NBC is in surgery, getting its lips surgically removed from Lindsay Vonn’s ass. If she’s truly finished, how will they manage to cover Beijing 2022 without obsessing over her?
Ain’t that the truth. They showed her practice runs plus interviews on the slopes and in the studio. I get it. She’s well known and attractive, but c’mon.
I enjoyed watching biathlon and curling more than anything else, I think. I am amazed that the biathlon shooters can hit anything with their breathing and heart rates after skiing. I like downhill skiing, snowboarding and short track speed skating, as well. Way too much figure skating, IMO.
Oh, I’m not complaining about the rise in the number of events. It’s harder than it used to be to keep track of all the competitions that’re going on, if you’re inclined to be a bit obsessive over trying to keep up (cough cough). But 102 events spread over, what, 15 days is certainly not excessive. And I’m sure you’re right that there’s a certain degree of recycling current venues and equipment and tracks.
My point is just that we have now more than twice as many events as we did thirty years ago in Calgary (and about twice as many athletes), and that’s a lot of medal opportunities that didn’t used to be there. And North America (by which I mean Canada and the US) has been very adept at taking advantage of these new events.
Does anyone else have trouble counting the number of rotations or flips in snowboarding or figure skating? I can’t tell a triple toe loop from a quadruple toe loop. Or a toe loop from an axel. Four flips or five on a snowboard? No way.
Me, too. I guess it becomes easier the more you watch, especially if you do the sport yourself. Me? I have no idea what they are doing, especially the snowboarders who rotate around several ways at the same time.
To use 1988 as a benchmark, if I am counting right, there were 46 events to win a medal in. In 2018, there were 102. By way of comparison, the 1988 Summer Olympics had 237 events and the 2016 Games had 306, so it’s grown just as fast in absolute terms, but not in relative terms.
It is easy to forget this, but until 1988, the Winter Games was not doing especially well and there had been some mild discussion of maybe doing away with it. Previous Winter Games hadn’t made much TV revenue, it seemed to be impossible to make money, and it just wasn’t getting the attention they wanted. TV and marketing revenue started really increasing in 1988, but the addition of new sports has been an important part of making it a more successful event. It’s not just that a lot of the new sports are, well, new; it just gives people more to cheer for. More countries win medals now, and more countries compete.
Yeah, I count the revolutions sometimes, but snowboarders are spinning on two axes at once.
As for the jumps in figure skating, I know it has to do with which skate edge you start from. I think an axel is the only one that’s entered going forwards, so a triple axel is actually three-and-a-half spins, so it’s the hardest of the triple jumps.
I wonder if all the possible jumps have been tried and named. I think all the ones in the competitions land on an outside edge going backwards, but do they have to? Has anyone tried a jump that lands going forwards, or on an inside edge? Does a skater have to do all their jumps turning in the same direction?
I"m a bit torn on the Olympics, sometimes. I think there’s something worthwhile about them, but I can also understand why cities are becoming more reluctant to host them. Boston was chosen as the U.S. bid city for 2024 but voted not to continue the bid.
That’s what got me thinking about the post above, and how the Winter Games have added events without needing more infrastructure. I suppose my favorite sport is an outlier in that regard, since curling does require its own facility. And I’m not sure if women’s hockey uses the same rink as the men.
You can’t land on your skate going forward without seriously running the risk of the toe pick catching the ice and causing you to have injury issues. Similarly, landing on the backward inside edge is risky. Several skaters turn the opposite direction from the most usual direction, but I put that down to footedness; so far as I know, none of them rotate different jumps in different directions, since I don’t think scoring adds value for that. There are other jumps that use different edge to edge combinations, but they are, for various reasons, not widely used. The one I can remember being used in the past is the Walley, which is back-inside to back-outside of the same foot, and is, thus, like the Lutz, a counter-rotated jump (you enter on a curve that is clockwise in turn, and exit on a curve that is counter-clockwise in turn). You can read about all the possible jumps here.
There were five indoor ice venues used for the 2018 games. The only shared facility was for short track and figure skating; men’s and women’s hockey had their own, as did curling and long track speed skating. Fortunately, ice arenas can pretty easily be converted to other uses, so I don’t think Gangneung is needing to fill up five ice centers worth of activities after the Games (one of the facilities already existed on the campus of Catholic Kwangdong University). I don’t know when they built each facility, though I do know the curling center was built for the Asian Games back in 1999.
Er, could you clarify your statement? I’m not entirely sure what you are referring to.
What event got excluded, and by whom?
I thought the toe pick might be part of it. I know they’re needed for some things, but could you have a toe pick on one skate and land jumps going forward on the other? And are those jumps really more risky than back outside edge; is it just that landing on your ass is better than landing on your face? I suppose if the toe pick caught it could make your knee bend in a way that knees really aren’t supposed to.
(Sorry for that mental image, everyone.)
Intresting reply, thanks; but I don’t think your link goes where you think it does.
Thank you for your encouragement.
I was going to say that I am no where near a local club, since I’m in south Florida caring for very elderly parents, but I just did a search, and danged if there isn’t a club in West Palm Beach! Offering introductory sessions next week! I will figure out a way to get away for a few hours to try it out. It will be great to be in a cool environment, with ice!
No, never mind, every session is already booked up. Next year, though. And maybe I’ll be living back up north by then.
I’d almost recommend waiting a year, honestly. My club tries to do an open house every year. We get swamped during Olympic years and have to bring people on and off the ice more quickly so that we can have more people attend.
I seem to recall that in the 90s the IOC went to some specific effort to bump up the event count in the Winter Olympics, because it was seen as very lacking compared to the Summer.