Year 0, Chapter 5- Bobsleigh Time???????
"Greenland is Ice, but Iceland is Nice"
-D2: The Mighty Ducks
"You realize how much this is going to wreck the budget, right?" My voice was already exasperated, and that still didn't properly convey the astonishment I was feeling.
"And you realize, Mr. Dalesson, that the amount of interest we've had in these two young women is absolutely unprecedented. This social media campaign you cooked up has provided us a great opportunity here."
Ada Thorsdottir stared at me from the other side of a video screen. The head of the Icelanic Athletic Committee was normally quite pleasant, but the conversation we were having today was an intense one, and she was making it clear that she was going to get her way in this situation. I sighed.
"It's a great opportunity, yes, but a very expensive one. We don't even have a sliding track. We'll have to send them off somewhere to train."
"That's true, we will."
"To say nothing of starting a national Bobsleigh Foundation!"
"Also, true. But tell me....what else have you found so far to even spend your budget on?"
She had me there. Only two athletes identified thus far for the High-Performance program meant a lot of leftover money. That we apparently were going to spend on bobsleigh. I paused for dramatic effect, even though we both knew the outcome of this one was already over.
"Alright, alright. Let's give the people what they want."
"Good. See to it that they do." She smiled for the first time in several minutes, and the conversation terminated shortly thereafter.
What the people apparently wanted was Bobsleigh. Well, not just bobsleigh, specifically. They were possibly more interested in the sledders themselves. The social media campaigns had been in full swing for a few weeks now, and we were turning up leads on prospective athletes all over the place. There were pushes being made for particular young athletes in Snowboarding, Speed Skating, Short Track Speed Skating, and Biathlon, and we were checking up on all of them with due diligence.
However, early in the campaign a runaway favorite emerged. Well, two of them, really. A pair of 19 year-old women, Katla Vilhjalmsdottir and Emilia Olvirsdottir, had started sharing pictures of themselves photoshopped into racing suits as the "Iceland Women's Bobsleigh Team". Judging from their social media posts, both women are outgoing, engaging, and quite attractive, and the photos took off quickly and went viral- well, viral around Iceland at least.
There's only one problem. Iceland doesn't have a Women's Bobsleigh Team. Or a Men's Bobsleigh Team. Or any Bobsleigh teams at all. No National Bobsleigh Federation. No sliding track. Just....none of it.
And THAT was what caught on the biggest from this. We thought our whole campaign was going to derail...some jokers making a mockery of our efforts. We contacted them to try to get them to take their posts down, and that's when things got REALLY weird.
See, it turns out that they were serious. They do WANT to be Iceland's Women's Bobsleigh Team. And they're both athletic. We checked carefully, and it turns out that both are capable track sprinters and willing to train full-time to be athletes. Its just that they are interested in a sport that we absolutely do not have here in this country, and they figured this was their ticket. We told them that we would love to work with them to promote Icelandic winter sports, but that we couldn't afford to fund any of their efforts in Bobsleigh. We figured that would be the end of it. Of course, it wasn't.
They posted a crowdfunding campaign. With more pictures. And videos. And it went viral, too. Before we knew it, they had each raised 20K dollars to train full-time for bobsleigh. (Which is a pittance, to be fair, but these are 19-year-olds, and they can probably live off it for a year) We had no choice but to work with them at that point. Well, that was what Ada said, at least, and I had to acknowledge that she was right, even though that was not what I had planned.
So that brings us back to now. Now we need to start a bobsleigh foundation. And hire a coach. And possibly provide even more training money for these young women in the hopes that it will pay us dividends.
Bobsleigh time, indeed.
[END Chapter 5]
Alright, let's peel back the curtain a touch. If you put in a social media campaign, you will see what the results were from that next week. However, I wanted to take this bobsleigh thing and run with it a bit.
See, I was doing some behind-the-scenes work updating my sport ratings and rankings this week, and I discovered that, indeed, Iceland does not HAVE a bobsleigh foundation in real life. That means that the game shouldn't create athletes for that sport. However, it looks to me like I had some sort of settings glitch or other problem when I ran the original files, because, well, there most certainly are bobsledders in the athlete list. There shouldn't be, but there they are.
So we're going to take it and have some fun with it!
As always, remember that you can help improve Iceland's fortunes! With any comments you make on this post, you get Dynasty Points that you can spend at a later date to increase Iceland's budget. I update this thread once each week!