I was interested to see how the unified Korean team would get over issues like not even agreeing on what the name of the country is. In the south the call it “Hanguk” and in the north they still call it by the old name “Joseon”. If I heard right, in the Olympics they’re the “Korea team”. So they compromised with what foreigners call them.
Anyway, the opening ceremony had Arirang and Kim Yu Na, so it checked all the boxes for me.
What exactly was the deal with this? Was it meant as a slight against North Korea?
I saw it and thought it weird that Pence and his wife were the only ones sitting then.
Most likely Pence had a boner from watching the athletes walk in and couldn’t stand. Did that oily guy show up?
He did. Tonga’s only athlete, apparently, for summer and winter games, and commentators can’t get enough of him.
Everyone should take a few minutes to listen to the Only a Game piece on the Tongan dude, Pita Taufatofua.
Ideally listen to Only a Game every week, it’s a great podcast.
Maybe somebody from the US could enlighten me, but as a watcher sharing Korea’s TZ, what is up with the schedule?
Figure skate in the morning? Biathlon and acrobatic skiing past 8PM? I tried to compute who they may be trying to schedule for, but it doesn’t make much sense.
I watched the women biathlon sprint yesterday, and it was so sad: there were less crowd than on a minor world cup event, which is something that can be expected when it takes place at 8PM with about -10C outside.
10 AM Korea time is 8 PM on the US east coast, but I have a hard time believing the Olympics are scheduled around us even in Korea. No such luck in Sochi, anyway.
In curling, sometimes one team gets a stone into the red, but not into the button, and then they just kick away the opposing team’s stone that was in the red. What’s up with that? What’s the rule around being able to just kick away the other team’s stone?
It’s like boules. you can kick it out, but you better hope you do it nice or you might end up giving a load of points to your opponent.
To be more precise, the goal is not to be in the center: it is to have the maximum number of stones near the center, up to your opponent’s first stone.
So if you got 2 stones not too far, and the opponents stone is in the center, they score 1 point. If you kick that stone out, you can score your 2 stones, or even a third one if the one you used to kick the opponent’s stone stay in there.
I mean they literally kick it with their foot out of the red… like there’s a rule that you get to kick the stone away if it’s in the red and you get one in the red.
During the game, maybe because it rebounded back in? Without the feed tough to tell.
I don’t see this happening much, unless they are scoring and remove the irrelevant stones.
I absolutely despise the NBC network coverage, so much self-promotion, so many commercials. Having said that watching the US sibling curling team on NBCSN was just great TV.
I’m loving the NBC prime time coverage this year. Usually during gymnastics or figure skating, it drives me crazy when they’re showing it 6 hour tape-delayed, and they’re making you wait for the judges. Sheesh, just cut to the results already! But this year, it’s live, so they have a good excuse to cut to commercial, come back and wait along with everyone else for the judges.
Also, that course on the Snowboard Slopestyle event? Holy shit, it’s SSX come to life, finally. They described this course as “video game”-like. That’s an understatement. It totally is SSX’s style point events come to life now. The game I was playing back in 2001 has come to life in the Olympics 17 years later! Hurray!
I can’t believe I haven’t thought of using the BBC stream before. I used to stick with my country’s (which offers horrible commentary by illiterate jerks and cut the program with “medals opportunities” or commercials at the weirdest moments).
I just tried the BBC, and it was lovely.
For some reason, the service I am using, Getflix, doesn’t get around well with CBC, which is a bit sad, as they seem to offer multiple streams.
I have a VPN subscription around for several years now that I fire up whenever the ISP has routing/interconnect issues with <youtube/twitch/etc> which happens often enough to be annoying (basically force a different path by picking a different geographical exit node)
Works out well for getting around geo-blockers too, using CBC this year. Currently there’s a break in figure skating where a Korean host is excitedly narrating kiss cams.
I haven’t watched anything yet this year, but in years past I thought the US coverage focused too much on US athletes. Would like to learn more about other teams.
There ought to be more “know your enemy” segments. I’d like to see a tabloid-style hit piece on Yevgenia Medvedeva. I’m not saying she personally pushed the button to shoot down that Dutch airliner, but we need an investigation to see what role she might have played in it.
But seriously, I think they do the best they can while covering all of the sports in the limited amount of time they have. If you want to get in depth in a certain sport, they do a lot better in the streams on their website.
I’m embarrassed already. Forget I ever said that. In 2018 they’ve got ads running every 10 minutes and they just play right over the content instead of interrupting it. For the first time in my life, I’m actually tempted to pretend that I’m Canadian, even if only through a VPN.
By knocking repeatedly on CBC’s door, the Canadians finally let me in.
Very pleasant and very calm commentary, no hiccups and perfect image. Lovely.