PyeongChang 2018 - Winter Olympics

What else were they going to do at 3:00 in the morning?

It’s NBC and the Olympics. It’s always a safe assumption that if they can screw something obvious up, they’re likely to give that a shot.

A large part of whether you like the coverage or not is personal preference, of course. The CBC coverage says nice things about the Canadians, obviously, but it’s much less focused on Canadian athletes than NBC is on US athletes. There are so many fewer commercial breaks, and none if you’re watching online replays. And I’ve had no complaints with the job the commentators have done in explaining the sports and providing analysis.

Also, I don’t have cable, so I’d have had to subscribe to some kind of service to get NBC’s non-broadcast coverage. Instead, I put the money I’d have spent on that into a donation to Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, an advocacy group for the CBC (since we non-Canadians don’t have a way to donate directly). I might have done it differently if I could have paid NBC for their streaming-only coverage, but as far as I can tell I’d have had to pay for a cable bundle or something like Playstation Vue. (Which is what I did last time around. It was OK, but the DVR options are awful and I make heavy use of time-shifting for this sort of event.)

Back to the actual sports - congratulations to Team Canada on the men’s hockey bronze. It wasn’t particularly pretty, but they got it done against the Czechs.

When I lived in Ann Arbor I always preferred CBC olympics coverage vs. U.S. coverage. But then I just generally liked their programming overall. Quirky programs and stuff.

Maybe they are worried the helicopter could wander off into NK by accident?

Cheaper and easier to use a relatively short range drone. But I figure some sort of airspace restrictions are in place.

Who’d have thunk it, two ties for medals in bobsled at the same Winter games? They’ve got to be ecstatic in South Korea, first ever bobsled medal for them. Germans should be pretty happy too, considering they swept the golds (though they had to share with Canada in the two-man).

Damn, that was one crazy gold medal hockey game. With two minutes left in regulation, it looked like we might be talking about a new miracle on ice…beating both Canada and Russia would have qualified as one heck of a miracle for Germany! The Russians came back the hard way, though, short-handed and then winning in OT. I was pulling for the Russians largely because I wanted to see Pavel Datsyuk finally get his gold medal, so I’m happy they won, but an epic upset would have been something to see too.

They got a little metal in the closing ceremony…I approve.

I just finished watching yesterday afternoon’s broadcast. They showed the 5th end onwards of the Men’s Curling final, and then a brilliant film called Calgary '88 about the figure staking championships at the 88 Olympics, narrated by Rob Lowe. The Battle of the Brians on the men’s side, and Katarina Witt vs Debi Thomas on the women’s side. The fashions of the time, the different hair, the different Olympic rules.

For example, did you know that figure skating actually included a third event before the Short Program and Free Skate? That’s right, it was the compulsory figure skate! The event that the sport was named after. The contestants had to go out on the ice and skate certain figures into the ice itself. And then the judges walked onto the ice and looked at the figures left behind in the ice by the skaters and judged them.

Great movie all around. I’d recommend it to anyone who missed it. I’m sure it’ll be available somewhere online.

That almost never got any coverage because it was dull as can be to watch. I remember seeing some brief coverage of the compulsory figures once. The skaters carefully and slowly skated a figure 8 (or some such). And then judges stared closely at the ice for deviations from the perfect figure. Exciting? Nope.

Advanced at-home figure skating kit.

https://store.metmuseum.org/content/ebiz/themetstore/invt/80033623/80033623_01_l.jpg

On Star Trek they once visited a planet where everyone is nice and peaceful except every now and then they have their “festival” and go crazy, raping and murdering. Sometimes I feel like Earth is the opposite. Most of the time people are cheating and stealing from each other. It’s only every 2 years that we briefly get together and demonstrate what’s possible when humans actually compete with each other in good faith. The winners are those who did the best, not those who were first to stab someone in the back. The losers are honored for competing, not kicked while they’re down. Except in short track. Everyone is always cheating in short track. But you know what I mean.

I’ll have good memories of 2018. Mirai Nagasu landed her triple axel. I got to see incredible feats performed by athletes I’ve been watching for years as well as ones I’ve only just learned of. Russia didn’t win very many medals, so the 2VP goes to the Free World. And I’ll never forget the Korean women’s curling team skip yelling at her sweeper Yeong Mi.

I loved the music in those closing ceremonies so much. Especially the music after that kid came out on the guitar, and then they switched to this really sweet mix of traditional instruments mixed with drums and modern guitars.

Is there anywhere I can buy that music? I need to have that in my life.

Well you know, except a good % of the competitors are doping or cheating by some other method. I’m sure there are plenty of feel good moments but people are people.

For the non-feel good moments, here’s the list of grievances that the Koreans have built up against foreigners over the course of the games:

http://news.joins.com/pyeongchang2018/Daily/Article/22401939

Some highlights:

  • A guy working for NBC failed to express properly how much Koreans hate Japan.
  • NBC decided to pronounce Pyeongchang wrong. (I do find this puzzling since it’s not hard to say it the right way and they bent over backwards to say Torino instead of Turin.)
  • The Times of London said it was controversial that an island is part of Korea.
  • Various foreigners committed crimes and lied about them. Team USA managed to avoid a repeat of what those swimmers did in Brazil. Woohoo!

Best of all is the short track skating drama. No other sport can bring out this level of rage.

“You shameless people don’t have any class,” wrote one Chinese user on Naver Sports. “Having this year’s Winter Olympics in your place is such an insult to the Games.” Another said, “We will show your [country] what is the real country at [Beijing Olympics]. Your father is always your father.”

On the Korean users’ end, one comment read, “As I thought, we are on different levels,” while another said, “The only good Chinese are dead Chinese.”

I work for a Korean based company and the most surprising thing about their culture is just how much Koreans hate all their neighbors. I realize the war and occupational history, but still, I found it surprising.

I’m guessing it is also a bit of competitive culture?

On the second last day of coverage, NBC had a great movie about the Calgary '88 Olympics and the figure skating competition. On the final day of the Olympics coverage, they had a documentary on the 1968 Olympics, and I was pretty disappointed that the topic was the Summer games in Mexico. I really wish they’d gone back in the past and told us about another Winter Olympics. The Winter games used to get almost no coverage in comparison to the Summer games anyway.

Do you guys remember when you found out about the Winter games? For me it was the 1992 movie “The Cutting Edge”, followed by the 1993 movie Cool Runnings. When Cutting Edge came out, the 1992 Winter games were already over, so after these two movies, my first chance to actually see Winter games were the 1994 games in Lillehammer. So the 94 Winter games were the first time I watched them on TV.

So let’s pretend for a second that instead of the summer games, they had told us a tale of the 1968 Winter games instead. Where were they held? Grenoble, France. It’s in Southeast France at the foot of the French Alps. I’ve never heard of this city before. Maybe one day they can do a little documentary about it instead.

I saw part of that Calgary '88 documentary and now I get why we should be asking ourselves “What Would Brian Boitano Do?” At least Brian Orser has had the chance to coach so many skaters who’ve gotten gold since then. This year he was hanging around the rink watching his people so often that I could recognize him in the background.

The 1968 games do sound interesting. I have a hard time imagining what it would have been like before everything was on live TV. Like, how could you even try this?

Austrian superstar Karl Schranz claimed that a mysterious man in black crossed his path during the slalom race, causing him to skid to a halt.