Not necessarily; Canada is also very good. Women’s ice hockey has been an Olympic sport for the last six Games. Canada has won four golds, the U.S. has two. Those two teams have met in the finals five times.
“a favorite” not “the favorite”. I remember all of the Canada vs. US hockey finals the last few olympics. Grrrr…I want to beat Canada in every winter sport now.
Short track speed skating is the best to watch. High speeds, jostling for position, place more important than time.
The Peacock app is great. It’s like sitting in the stadium. You even get to watch the zamboni.
I don’t like Peacock, mostly because it still has ads and my adblocker isn’t stripping them. If you have cable, I’d go with NBC Sports, on which my adblocker still works.
Most background shots of the Winter Olympics are rather picturesque, showing snowy mountains and the like. China has decided to give us backgrounds of multiple nuclear reactor cooling towers.
I don’t get the skiing being held next to a nuclear power plant. A debate about nuclear power isn’t appropriate for the Game Room, but it’s weird that the host country decided to push buttons on a highly divisive issue.
What debate? It works.
Oh, my buttons aren’t pushed and I have no problem with nuclear power. It’s just such a weird image, this venue in the middle of an industrial park or something.
I don’t think it’s a nuclear plant. The site used to be a steel mill, but they shut it down in the run up to the 2008 games due to pollution concerns.
Why The Fuck are there bird tweeting sounds in the Downhill commentary???
It is very ugly, whatever it is. I mean, sure, industry gotta go somewhere. But i agree with @asterion that this is a much less picturesque background then most Olympics have.
I like how USA network just decides, “Well, fuck it! We’ve seen enough of this Old Bullshit. Let’s just ditch this event half-way through and switch to something else”.
Every time I watch the ski jump I think it’s insane. They have to build a huge purpose built ski jump structure for this one, relatively niche sport, which is basically a daredevil stunt that they do for Olympic medals.
And a really controversial team competition going on today with a number of the favourites being DSQd for “equipment violations” without any further explanation.
Same old same old on the coverage. Mikaela Shiffrin wipes out in the first part of the first run, and they’re like “now what do we talk about??” Let’s cut to commerical (which is you guessed it a Shiffrin themed commercial.) When they come back, they show her crash three more times, and interview talking heads about how bad it is she is out, while behind them many many other competitors are making runs successfully that we never get to see.
I watched the US team win silver in the team figure skating.
I…do not remember previous Olympics giving out medals at a later date, but it is apparently a thing. They handed everyone a little panda and apparently they get their real gold-silver-bronze medal later.
Watching the men’s downhill. A bad wipeout early on means the rest of the skiers have to wait until the course is clear, and a lot of them are visible anxious, but knowing how bad it is.
Okay, weird, the sound is off. The commentary is several seconds later than the video. So the commentator is describing one guys last couple of turns as i and watching the next guy do his first few turns.
Lots of fun at the Feb 7 short track. Many tears from Koreans because of borderline disqualifications. No appeals allowed, so that’s the end of it. The judging has been extra strict this year; I don’t think it’s been unfair.
The highlight has been the Turkish short track skater, Furkan Akar. Turkey has no history at all in short track and I don’t know the exact story of how Akar qualified for the Olympics, but there were zero expectations of him. He’s in the “it’s an honor to even be here” category.
But in the first heat of the Mens 1000m, he qualified for the quarter-finals. Not because he was fast, but because he was plucky and survived to the end–received no penalties and finished.
Then, in the quarter-finals he put in another solid performance. He won his quarterfinal race! Not fast, but avoided mistakes, penalties, crashes, etc. He was the only competitor in that race to do so.
He made it to the semi-final. That is far, far above any realistic expectation, but he did it. And he did remarkably well in the semi-final–he qualified for the final based on speed! Only the “B” final, though, which is basically a consolation race. However, if not enough racers in the “A” final successfully completes the race, the “B” final can determine medals. It’s happened; short track is not a sport where everyone reaches the finish line.
So, in the “B” final, Akar … comes in second. And no medals given out for that race. But for a kid from a country with few short track resources, it was a remarkable journey. Got to love short track!
I love stories like that! thanks for posting
Brian
It’s common in winter Olympics; apparently, it first started in 1998. There is a “common” area where all actual medal ceremonies take place.
Speaking of figure skating, although Nathan Chen set a “world record” of 113.97 points, there’s still room for improvement; if I crunched the numbers correctly, the maximum possible score for a men’s short program under the 2022 requirements, assuming nobody can do a Quadruple Axel, is 127.04.
Congrats to Jessie Diggins, as a recreational XC skier it is nice to see a US medal in the sport.
Brian