More biathlon. Amazingly close finish. I have not seen much ski jumping, but I am also not watching religiously.
And nothing on the US women getting fifth in various XC events.
Brian
Absolutely.
I totally love the cross-country skiers. It* is *hardcore, and the skate skiing uphill is brutal. It was a joy to watch some of them actually run uphill on their skis. Magnificent.
The US women have done well in hockey. The US men are still not playing as a team. The Sweden-Finland hockey game showed great team play. Although the wrong team won (I always root for Finland, and yell at the announcers, correcting their pronunciation of the Finnish names), it was a great game.
Hands down my favourite Olympic events are the downhill ski races.
Russians should not have been allowed to compete.
Those of us who curl are saying “WTF???” I mean, yeah, sweeping is hard work, but I don’t think you need to dope to do it that well. :eek:
Wow! I liked the snowboard high jumping whatever it’s called ( big air??). Very cool!
Do they get style points or just height and length??
I don’t think length has anything to do with it - just height and style.
I saw a bit of the ice dancing tonight. Honestly, I don’t think I ever need to hear the word “twizzle” again.
The ice dancing is kinda a non-starter with me too.
I wonder if the pairs skaters, with all their tricks, jumps and lifts think the dancers are just sell-outs or less of an athletic pursuit?
I bet you could ice dance if you were a bad jumper or had injuries that made jumping impossible. Do they have singles Ice dancers or is it only pairs?
I see how dumb that last question is, now that I thought about it.
I actually like ice dancing a lot, especially the free dance. When done well it combines artistry and athleticism in a way that brings me a feeling of elation.
It’s funny how figure skating and gymnastics mirror each other on this. The figure skating scoring system was overhauled after the scandal in 2002 with Jamie Sale and David Pelletier. Gymnastics adopted an almost identical system following the 2004 Olympics after the crowd booed the high bar score given to Alexei Nemov for so long that the competition had to be stopped. It would be nice if the ISU and FIG would get themselves together and make decisions proactively rather than in response to public humiliation, but I suppose that’s asking too much.
That Vox explainer was indeed very good. But the following two excerpts show that one reaction to my complaints (that it’s reflective of being a layperson without a deep familiarity with figure skating) is a canard:
So for all the many decades that figure skating developed, right into the dawn of the 21st century, falling was doom. Did this mean we only saw safe skating? Judging issues aside, was the skating really so timid and uninteresting through all that time?
This is a better analogy than the ones I used, and a great question. And it comes from a “skating legend”, so how can this perspective about falls be shrugged off as that of an amateur who doesn’t really understand the sport?
Further, this piece revealed that the under-penalizing of falls is even worse than I thought. So in 2002 it “spelled doom” to fall once (which, as I said upthread, is as it should be IMO), but now you lose ONE measly point, out of a total that will be somewhere in the 170s or 180s?!? That’s beyond absurd.
I would be willing to bet the penalty for falls will be increased. Probably not as much as it really ought to be, but some. I don’t understand how this one point idea was not laughed out of the room when it was proposed. It has nothing to do with the problem of subjectivity/bias of judges, which was supposed to be their mission in changing the scoring system. After all, can there be anything more objectively clear than that a skater landed on their keister?
USA beats Canada in men’s curling, 9-7 in 11 ends. Hell of a game.
Whatever you may think about Mr. Button’s argument, that pole vault example is pretty silly.
Pole vault is the epitome of a one-dimensional sport. The only thing anybody cares about is “Can you clear the bar at height X?” That’s it. No style points. No extra points if your head clears the bar by three inches as opposed to two inches. No penalty if you graze the bar and it teeters back and forth a few times before deiciding it isn;t going to fall. No one measures the curvature of the pole and adds or deducts points based on some Platonic ideal of what it “should” look like.
That’s fine. There are lots of one-dimensional sports. Most of swimming, track and field, cycling.
But there are lots of sports that aren;t one-dimensional, where various skills go together (or can go together) to score you points. Most team sports. Figure skating is one of them in a different way. Judges are supposed to score based on a combination of artistry and athleticism, and both of them are rather broadly defined.
So OF COURSE a pole vaulter doesn;t score points if she knocks over the bar. Not knocking over the bar is the only way to score! Unless Button is arguing that the only thing that should count in a figure skating routine is whether you fall (and I don;t think he’s arguing that), it’s a bad analogy.
–I don’t know much about Button–he was skating well before my time, and I’m a fairly old guy, so we’re talking a LOOOONG time ago. But I would not NECESSARILY take what he says about skating too seriously. It’s really common for older, retired athletes to firmly believe that the people who played their sport back in the day were more focused, more knowedgeable, and generally better than the spoiled kids of today. They very often dislike the changes in the way the sport is played and hearken back to a more pure and pristine style of play when participants cared about X and didn;t care about Y. Baseball players have done this for generations: back in MY day we didn;t just try to hit home runs all the time, and striking out was an embarrassment, and we didn;t have those humongous fielder’s gloves like they do today…back in MY day we played the game the RIGHT way, dammit. Button’s comments quoted upstairs sound just like that. Doesn’t mean he represents the thinking of the powers that be today.
The finish of the two-man bobsled was incredible. After 4 runs down a course over 1 km, Canada and Germany tie for the gold medal.
If pole vaulting went by artistry we’d never have had the Fosbury Flop. But now that awkward move is pretty much done by everyone. That’s probably the worst event you could ever use as a comparison because if any event was the complete polar opposite of figure skating, that is it.
Pole vault/Fosbury Flop?
Re: ice dancing - tough to consider a sport anything that involves the Twizzle! 
Eh, for me, with the rules as they are, I watch Ice Skating every 4 years.
If they changed the rules to something I liked a little better, I’d watch…every 4 years.
As long as everyone competing understands the rules and the scores and they’re applied as evenly as possible, I’m likely to be OK with it.