Yesterday was a holiday, so the grab bag has been pushed back a day. Today's grab bag will have a more singular focus: the general suckitude of the Vancouver Winter Olympics up to this point. Granted, it's only been a weekend, but the level of facepalm and bad luck that transpired over the past 4 days needs to be noted.
Luge Accident: The games got off to a horrific and tragic start on Friday when Georgian Nodar Kumaritashvili slid off the Olympic sliding track and collided with a series of support beams. Even before the games had opened, the entire Olympic Games had a shadow cast upon it. To compound the horror of the incident, the IOC went about blaming the athlete in an attempt to distance themselves from culpability. Whether the accident could be blamed on Kumaritashvili or not, to publicly denounce the man as a poor and inexperienced luger mere hours after his death, especially in an attempt to blame-shift, comes off as callous and downright mean spirited. To then go about changing the course to lower speeds and wall off previously exposed supports comes off as hypocritical. It may be that Nodar's inexperience was to blame for his untimely death, but that doesn't mean the IOC should go running to tell that to the world. They could've just as easily held an investigation after the games and announced their findings quietly.
Opening Ceremonies: Under the shadow of the luge tragedy, the show, as they say, went on. After hours of slam poetry (of all things), flags, and K.D. Lang (We couldn't have gotten Rush? Seriously the portion with the trees and interpretive dance could've been replaced by Rush rockin' "The Trees." Hey Canada, if you've got the club in your bag, you should be prepared to use it.) we got the the ubiquitous torch lighting ceremony. Problem is, it went off rather half-cocked. Only 3 of the planed 4 bases could be raised, and the malfunction proceeded to hold up the show for minutes while the 4 torchbearers held their positions. Forget for a second the fact that they were holding the ceremony indoors (WTF?!), the image of Wayne Gretzky standing there with a look that can best be described as "Facepalm without the ability to palm ones face" was absolutely priceless.
(Via Deadspin)
NBC then proceeded to yammer on over the next few hours about how the following truck ride to the "real" torch outside made up for the indoor torch failure. It didn't. There should've only been one torch to begin with, and a pick-up truck ride to a second torch, through the pouring rain, shouldn't have been necessary. Which brings me to my next point...
Poor weather: After a week of Fox News telling America that snowstorms in the Mid-Atlantic region prove that Global Warming is a lie (suck it Al Gore?), it's been interesting to note the relatively terrible weather in the general Whistler/Vancouver area. Obviously weather has little to do with climate change, but throughout the weekend Vancouver was socked with rain, relatively warm temperatures, and sunlight. It was colder in Dallas for Pete's sake! The snow on the downhill runs was so inconsistent that the organizers had to repeatedly push back the start of the down hill competition. Puddles were forming on the infamous luge track due to sunlight, but organizers couldn't turn down the temperature on the course for fear of frost forming (which apparently causes inconsistent sliding, as if slushy ice would be better). The mogul run was a slushy mess; Gold Medalist Hannah Kearney repeatedly referred to it as "wet" in her press conference. My guess is that inconsistent temperatures and snowfall was not what the organizers had hoped for. The IOC dodged a bullet in 1998 when snow finally started falling in Nagano in the weeks leading up the the games; not so lucky this time. Temperatures finally started falling over the past few days, however, and the hope is that consistent conditions may finally show themselves.
Faux-Zamboni failure: Last night the Men's 500m speed skating competition was held up for hours as 3 Olympia ice making machines failed to properly repair the surface. Ruts left all over the ice made skating near impossible. Organizers had gone with the all-electric Olympia machines over the traditional (and awesome) propane powered Zamboni machines in an attempt to "green-up" the Olympics. US skater Shani Davis even withdrew from the competition saying "bad ice is bad ice." Here's my point: where the fuck are the Zamboni's? Now's not the time to be experimenting with a new type of ice-making machine. It's the Olympics. Billions of Canadian Dollars have been sunk into this event, and you decide to go without the industry standard in ice-making machinery? No offense to Olympia, which I'm sure is a fine and capable company, but now's not the time to be calling somebody up from the minors. People have written songs about Zamboni's, I haven't heard any odes to the beloved Olympia. In addition, they're having to ship in Zamboni's from Calgary. Vancouver, in hockey-mad Canada, has no God's Honest Zamboni's? I'm calling BS.
Yet another Olympic judging controversy: It's widely known that coming into these Olympics, Canada had yet to win an Olympic Gold Medal on home turf. Which brings me to the goings on of the Men's Moguls Finals. Alex Bilodeau broke through for good ole Canada, even besting Australian Spam-mogul (no pun intended) Dale Begg-Smith (native born Canadian, who turned his back on his country to spend more of his time creating pop-ups to annoy people. When watching the event live, I thought for sure Begg-Smith (who was the defending gold-medalist) had won, even going as far as to say "That's a gold-medal run right there" when he hit the finish line, yet the gold went to Bilodeau. An Australian official suspected malfeasance, saying “My own opinion is that probably Alex is not capable of a 4.8 or a 4.9 [on his turns], because five is a perfect score." It's not unheard of for judges to get influenced by a crowd; to let emotions sway their scores. I wouldn't be surprised if that happened in this case. Bilodeau's run was good, I just felt Begg-Smith performed better. I generally dislike judged events, precisely for this reason. Canada gets their gold medal, but was he really the best on the day?
NBC's tape-delay idiocy: While not necessarily a part of the string of Olympic bad luck, many are frustrated with NBC's persistence that American's don't want to watch live coverage of Olympic events. Deadspin gives a pretty comprehensive run-down of the displeasure here. The money quote:
"In the age of DVRs, Hulu, and mobile phone scoreboards, the pointlessness of NBC's broadcast strategy—Olympics and otherwise—has never been more obvious. People don't eat dinner during Nightly News then settle in for three hours of prime-time network programming anymore. They want things when they want them, not when NBC wants them. Even the network knows this. Another reader wrote to me saying that we should post the results of events as they happen to shame NBC and ruin their "secret" prime-time specials. And we totally would—if NBC didn't already do it for us. They aren't ignorant, just stubborn."
It's just plain idiotic the way NBC has handled their coverage the past few years. When ESPN uses their "pact with the devil" money to wrest coverage rights away from them in the upcoming years, maybe I'll finally get to see events live (OMG!). Every time Costas gives some leading innuendo about what we're about to watch, a little part of my sports-fan soul dies. It's no wonder their ratings are suffering, everyone already knows the outcomes. Sports are only fun because of the unpredictability; the illusion that anything can happen. Costas, with his knowing smirk and lead-in, kills that illusion, and it's painful to watch.
The Chicago Curse: I can't help but wonder, while watching these Olympics stumble out of the gate, could the epic snubbing of the Chicago bid for the 2016 Summer games be paying the IOC a karmic bitch-slap? Maybe the Rio bid, and its emotional pull of the first games to be held is South America, makes for a better story, but Chicago would've held a first rate Olympic party. Chi-town certainly didn't deserve to be the first bid voted out. I bring this up because there has to be some reason that the Vancouver games have had this massive of a stretch of bad luck. The good people of Canada are too hard-working, earnest, and friendly to have earned this on their own. So I'm going to choose to lay the blame at the feet of the evil IOC.
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