2022 Beijing Winter Olympics
 

I don't think we have a thread yet. Curling starts tomorrow!

So, I'm already confused about what's going to be broadcast.

Tomorrow morning, I could wake up and watching USA vs Australia curling... but on what platform? Do I have to pay for Peacock? Can I watch it on NBC's website?

SI

I read somewhere that Peacock is the one to get for Olympics.

Gotta love curling season every 4 years. Them Canadians can curl.

If you have cable then you can use NBC Sports app. If not then I think Peacock for streaming.

For the Curling tomorrow, it looks like it is tape delay tomorrow night at 6, but their next match is live at 8 PM tomorrow.

I think the first USA game is at 6am tomorrow if I can figure out how to watch it (NBC website, hopefully)

SI

Dola,

Looks like you have to pay to watch on Peacock. $5 per month.

Double dola,

Curling starts at 0705 this morning on Peacock.

I was able to just pull up the website on my computer today and am currently watching curling on nbcolympics.com (not a Peacock subscriber)

SI

US might have just screwed themselves with that shot

SI

Huge shot to make up for the bad shot last end

SI

Had to go drop off the kid at school so I missed the end. Will have to catch on replay tonight at 5

SI

USA absolutely gifted the win against Australia. I'm sure the Australian skip (is there a skip in mixed doubles?) has hit a similar shot hundreds of times but just missed it today.

Unfortunately, USA just gave up 4 in the 2nd end to Italy in their 2nd game. Yikes.

SI

what a bizarre, anticlimactic ending to that end

Caught some curling. Seems like the best chance for me to ever qualify for the Olympics.

Not a lot of fans in the stands from what I can see.

It's kindof like trying to qualify for bowling, if it were an Olympic sport. You don't have to be Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps fit but it takes a lot of skill and there's a ton of random so to make it through qualifying takes a ton of luck to get past similarly qualified players who have been doing this for 20+ years.

SI

So we've started watching the DVR'd Opening Ceremonies. Inherently, there's Jingoism with every Olympics - cheer for your flag, etc. But, man, the USA broadcast is laying the animosity on thick in the intro. I mean, it's somewhat understandable, considering the geopolitics of the time - the only really contentious ones in my lifetime were when I was a little kid (1980/1984). I don't know what those were like.

SI

2018 Winter Olympics: Breaking down Elizabeth Swaney's ski halfpipe run | NBC Sports - YouTube

Just be like her and show up enough to the qualifying events and you can be an Olympian too.

Which brings up the question why anyone should care about these games especially with the atrocities China is committing.

Because its sports and we all grew up watching the Olympics.

I'm okay with boycotting the Olympics in China. But we made a half hearted political boycott, not many joined, no momentum and ultimately, it was meaningless. It showed how weak we are.

Ultimately, the answer is to come up with a strategy (economic, political, military, technological etc.), play the long game. Until then, let me enjoy my curling guilt free ...

Peacock interface could be better. Give me a menu to get all live games going.

They have that menu but more often than not, the live game is done. Something is out of whack there

File under "we're all old".

Shaun white just announced that he is retiring after the Olympics.

That's not quite the we're old part. He's 35 years old. Where have the years gone?

We just finished watching the Opening Ceremonies - I guess we now know what the Chinese equivalent of "I have black friends" looks like. Especially since the Uyghur skier was a co-torchbearer, the only time there's two torchbearers and not just one.

SI

I get how you get started skiing or skating or hockey or curling. Even living in Houston, I've done all of those and there are easy beginner on-ramps.

How does one get started with, say, luge or ski jump? Are there like "bunny tracks" for sports like that so you don't die the first time out?

SI

I remember 1980/84 quite well. Dueling boycotts, not sure any point was made other than screwing up the competition. And it led to violence in 1984 in Ann Arbor (perhaps in other places as well).

I was working for McDonald's that summer. It was my first job. They had spent millions on a promotional campaign surrounding the Olympics. The centerpiece was this elaborate set of scratch-off cards with names of US athletes in a gold, silver and bronze position.

The idea was if your card matched a gold-medal winner, you'd get a premium sandwich, maybe fries for silver, a coke for bronze. And then the Russians boycotted.

All of a sudden, a promotion with maybe one winner in dozens of cards... nearly every card won something. And the rules were you give one card with every purchase and people could ask for one free card per day.

The downtown Ann Arbor McDonald's was a strange scene. It was summer, so very few students around. And it was a very large restaurant - two floors of seating. So that's where all the teens in the area spent their days and evenings for a couple of weeks.

There was no way to cook enough food to meet the demand from the cards. Lines of kids demanding more cards. A couple of fights when employees declined to hand out free cards to kids who had already asked the same employee for a card earlier. Employees quitting. The police a constant presence.

I didn't normally work in that McDonald's, but the call went out after a few days that if you were a reasonably-sized male and wanted to remain employed where you were, you'd have to take night shifts downtown for the duration of the promotion.

Since jobs were impossible to find then (even at the minimum $3.35 per hour, don't even think about a raise), I did a handful of night shifts there. Talk about tension. Fortunately, by then they had pretty much worked out how to get enough Big Macs made to satisfy the crush and we were instructed never to say no. So we had incident-free shifts amid the tension and life eventually returned to normal.

Sports is supposed to be this refuge from politics. I don't know what we can or should do about the Uyghur camps in China. I doubt boycotting the games would have any effect. The "political" boycott was greeted with laughter over there, which should have been an obvious result to those making the statement in the first place.

You hold these games to try and bring people together. There's always going to be tension between Communist governments and Democracies. One can't become powerful without threatening the other in some critical way, and China, like the USSR before the Cold War ended, is becoming extremely powerful. But the games should be an opportunity to get people to see the other side as human rather than an opportunity to make ineffective and divisive political statements.

However, it does illustrate that there are places in the world where people are suffering far worse fates than we can even imagine over here. Hopefully, that strengthens our resolve to treat each other better and stop hating so much over relatively trivial issues.

Ok, I found out how to learn to luge! While my back may protest, I'm going to add this to my bucket list:
Muskegon Winter Luge Track - Muskegon Luge Adventure Sports Park

Can combine it with the CCC toboggan track in northern Indiana
DNR: State Parks: Toboggan Run at Pokagon State Park

Now I want to make a little winter trip out of these two events. I know weather can do awful things to travel in the Midwest in winter and I will probably feel it afterwards and there's still a pandemic so it's not happening right now. But it's on the list for the future

SI

What a great ending for the biathlon relay

SI

The US mixed doubles curling team dosen't seem like a top 4 team. Vicky is a good player. Hopefully Chris plays better in the team competition.

I've been watching some events in Peacock without commentary. Also watched some NBC (under Peacock) with commentary.

Commentary is definitely much better.

Anyone else think that wreath-panda bear thing looks a little scary?

(see middle of page)

https://nypost.com/2022/02/05/usas-j...in-slopestyle/

So I am watching the mens 1000M speed skating where it is the two brothers from Hungary. Odd sport where the race ends, they look at the tape, and literally rearrange everything so the host nation wins gold and silver but I am sure its just a coincidence.

All sorts of shady stuff in short track today. There was this gem, too

"Sportsmanship" shown by the Chinese skater in the Beijing Olympics : gifs

Watch the Chinese skater toss the marker at the Canadian skater but make it look like the Canadian was who threw it. The Canadian behind was DQ'd for causing the crash.

Apparently, the Chinese skater has a history of this:
ISU releases images of infringements by China and Canada in the Ladies 3000m Team relay final : olympics

SI

The way the Chinese were advanced into the final of the mixed relay was also shady AF.

I would like to see someone do a figure skating routine to "What would Brian Boitano do?"

SI

This wins the thread. Gold medal.

Chen is godlike!

C'mon, guys. No need for Chinese conspiracy theories here. The Hungarian short track skater Liu Shaolin Sandor deserved his disqualification in the 1000m. I thought he deserved to get disqualified twice, but that's technically impossible.

I'm split on Eileen Gu. I'm glad she was able to fulfil her childhood dream.

On one hand, it doesn't sit well with me that a US born Asian American has decided to represent China (if she gave up her citizenship, that would be a different matter). On the other hand, there are examples of other athletes, born in one country but representing another (either as naturalized or dual citizen).

I'm sure the US has benefited from such arrangements also. The question in my mind is ... did Eileen Gu give up her US Citizenship to represent China? China does not recognize dual citizenships. Apparently in a news conference, she hedged and did not answer. And the Olympics has long stopped being just for amateurs and guns for hire are not unusual.

Don't know. I think I lean towards being okay. Won't root for her but happy for her (we can only hope to be that talented), sad for the US, let it play out in future sponsorships, endorsements, court of public opinion etc.

Short Track is the "Whose Line is it Anyway?" Quadrennial event where everything is made up and the points don't matter.

This happens seemingly all the time for the Olympics. If you watch the parade of nations, a lot of the smaller countries that only have a couple of athletes - the announcers will talk about one of them and often they're from larger countries but compete for a smaller country where their parents are from or where they have dual citizenship with. I mean, cynically, it's probably something like "athlete X is in the top 20 in the world but not top 2 in the US/Russia/Germany/whatever so they can't make that local team in the sport but if they compete for another country, they can easily qualify for the Olympics". That seems fine to me, especially if it's a country where their parents are from. We want the best people in sports at the Olympics and they probably shouldn't miss out due to limits from top-heavy teams.

That doesn't mean there isn't some manipulation like the whole Elizabeth Swaney thing, but, generally, it seems fine.
Elizabeth Swaney - Wikipedia

SI

Plus, it's just the fucking olympics not war.

It's partially, maybe completely, a business decision for Gu. She was going to make money in sponsorships even before she won gold, but now she's poised to be the face of winter sport in China. She'll make millions and most of that wouldn't e available to her in the U.S.

Is it really fair to judge an 18-year old for picking a side (when she was 16) between the country she lives in and the country of her heritage? Aside from randomly being born into that situation, her additional bad luck is that there are political issues between the USA and China. Would the backlash be the same had her heritage been from another country?

At the same time, although she had to pick an NOC, it doesn't mean she turned her back on the USA as a country or as her home, she just made a decision of NOC, that to her felt to be the best for her ability to ski. And apparently it was the right decision for her.

Or that, in which case she made an even smarter decision to be able to make a living out of her sport. She created the chance to live the American dream while milking Chinese businesses. Donald Trump should be proud of her. :D

The Olympics this year seem like a complete and total shit show. Perhaps they should have passed on this one.

I blame Tanya Harding.

Not directly, more a butterfly effect of, well, shit show. That was the moment when the networks realized that they could be telling stories (which they do very well) rather than doing the legwork necessary to make pageantry out of sometimes difficult-to-understand sports in difficult places.

On nights when Tanya and Nancy skated, there were 38 commercial minutes per hour. Ratings were astronomical and CBS made a fortune.

There were 24 skaters in the final. How many of them did CBS viewers see perform? Maybe half, maybe less. The figure-skating long programs are one of the crown jewels of Winter Olympics. And how much did we see from other events?

Now, all you get is profile pieces for the telegenic US athletes, a handful of foreign competitors, the pageantry of the opening ceremony (interspersed with more profile pieces), incredible numbers of commercials. Sometimes you get to see a tiny piece of a sporting event that happened half a day earlier, but not enough of it to really follow it.

And curling and hockey on the side channels. Since those are team competitions with two teams, at least the networks know they have to televise them in full. But curling is never going to be more than ordinary people playing shuffleboard with brooms and granite slabs on ice. OK once every four years. And hockey still has to compete with odd start times.

It's not just skip this one. It's figuring out how to get back to what made the Olympics interesting in the first place.

I don't know about making things interesting, but my wife said something I took note of the other night. It boiled down to all the "new" events, which mostly seem to have a lot of judging in them, vs "old" events where there is something measurable (time, distance). There's probably a fuddy-duddy instinct there (where I am probably with her; "shouldn't this be in the X-Games?") but I think there's also a bit of, "what the hell is going on?"

I mean, it's very simple to understand that bobsled A went down the track .015 seconds faster than bobsled B. It's not quite as easy to watch someone shoot off a ramp, flip and spin and twirl a bunch of times, and then have a score thrown at you. Like, I don't know what the hell they just did or why it was good or bad. It looks cool, but I am completely at the mercy of the broadcast saying why it was what it was and taking their word for it. It's not a race, there's no "go go go!"

(At the same time though, she likes watching skating. *shurg*)

Regarding what nations athletes compete for, I've never been a real fan of mercenary athletes. "Oh, they are competing for Andorra because their great-grandfather..." Yeah, that's a bunch of crap. Compete where you come from.

With Gu, I'm trying to not feel irrational jingoistic anger. At the same time, part of me still whispers if you like it there so much....

I don't whisper.

They're all welcome to do as they see fit. But I don't want them coming back to the U.S. under anything other than the same rules that apply to any other foreign national either.

I found the USA coverage to be pretty good in terms of showing everything. I'm pretty sure, if I wanted I could see every luge run, men's skating, slopestyle, big air and Mens super G skiing run (at least the top 25 contenders) over the past few days.