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6452. wabbit - 2/13/2010 5:04:49 PM  The Winter Games have begun. Sadly, they got off to a sad start. On Friday, 21-year-old Nodar Kumaritashvili had one turn left in his final Olympic training run when he lost control of the sled. His body went airborne and his upper body smashed into an unpadded steel pole as his sled continued skidding down the track. The IOC said Kumaritashvili was pronounced dead at a trauma center in Whistler.
The danger of the Whistler track has been talked about for months -- particularly after several countries, including the U.S., were upset with restrictions over access to the facility by nations other than Canada, some noting it could lead to a safety issue. Some sliders, especially those from small luge federations, saw the world's fastest track this week for the first time.
"When you are going that fast it just takes one slip and you can have that big mistake," U.S. doubles luger Christian Niccum said Thursday, when asked about track safety. "All of us are very calm going down, but it you start jerking at 90 mph or making quick reactions, that sled will steer. That's the difference between luge and bobsled and skeleton, we're riding on a very sharp edge and that sled will go exactly where we tell it to so you better be telling it the right things on the way down."
Technical officials of the International Luge Federation were able to retrace the path of the athlete and concluded there was no indication that the accident was caused by deficiencies in the track. Based on these findings the race director, in consultation with the FIL, made the decision to reopen the track following a raising of the walls at the exit of curve 16 and a change in the ice profile. This was done as a preventative measure, in order to avoid that such an extremely exceptional accident could occur again. The FIL will resume men's training Saturday morning with two full training runs prior to the competition taking place as scheduled at 5pm.
Along with luge, today's schedule includes womens' ice hockey, ladies' freestyle moguls (yes, I noticed), ski jumping, short track and speed skating.
Vancouver Olympics
6453. alistairconnor - 2/13/2010 5:10:25 PM Winter games.
Having foolishly parked the car at home last night, I couldn't make it back up the hill this morning to take the girls back to their mother's. So they bravely set out on foot : three miles or so through the heavy snow.
I kept them company for the first stage, and dropped in on some friends. We watched the opening of the winter Olympics : parade of nations, always fun. And we saw their friend Marie, French biathlete, housemate of their niece, who is also a biathlete, but who didn't make the Olympic team.
I'll be looking out for her. It's nice to feel connected. 6454. alistairconnor - 2/13/2010 11:26:56 PM ... and she's in competition right now, women's biathlon, I love this event. A sprint on cross country skis, and target shooting. Five shots lying down, then a few km further, five shots standing. Marie Dorin scored a perfect ten, now she just has to be the fastest among the perfect...
She's not rated, a complete outsider. 6455. alistairconnor - 2/13/2010 11:55:43 PM Wow! She's provisionally third, the event's not over, but a lot of favourites have finished slower than her.
The best explanation I can think of is the snow conditions; it's warm and wet in Vancouver, which is the sort of conditions French skiers are used to (this year is an exception). She's from Les Sept Laux, a small station near Grenoble at a fairly low altitude; one of those stations that are slowly dying due to lack of snow (I would have said "due to global warming", but that's so passé) 6456. alistairconnor - 2/14/2010 12:38:52 AM 
And here she is, a damn sight cuter than a cross-country skier has any right to be. Marie Dorin, bronze medal in the 7.5 km biathlon, behind the unexpected Anastasia Kuzmina (Slovakian, but Russian born), and the German Magdalena Neuner (both of whom scored only 9 out of 10 in the shooting, so they had to do some extra distance)
6457. arkymalarky - 2/14/2010 7:30:46 AM Cool! 6458. alistairconnor - 2/14/2010 1:19:02 PM 
6459. wabbit - 2/14/2010 2:57:06 PM That's great AC, congrats to her! I've always liked biathlon. It seems a sport that attracts a different kind of competitor than most sports. It isn't flashy, no big endorsements to win, and the rumor going around Lake Placid years ago was that these were the brainiacs of the Olympics, the people who sat around playing chess in their downtime.
Speaking of endorsements, Apolo Ohno got silver in the 1500 short track after two Korean skaters fell. Korea's Lee Jung-su got the gold and the bronze went to 19-year-old bronze medalist J.R. Celski, skating in his first meet since a bloody, gruesome crash at the U.S. trials in September.
 23-year-old American Hannah Kearney slashed through the rain and down the moguls Saturday night -- a remarkable run that gave America its first gold medal of these Olympics and denied Jenn Heil the honor of becoming the first Canadian to win gold on home turf. Heil won silver and Shannon Bahrke took bronze to add to her silver from 2002 and push America's medal total to four after the first full day of competition.
Simon Ammann became the first gold medalist of the Vancouver Games on Saturday by winning the normal hill ski jump to return to the top of the Olympic podium eight years after his first triumph. Ammann again bested Polish veteran Adam Malysz, who also won silver in the large hill in 2002, while his closest World Cup rival Gregor Schlierenzauer of Austria took bronze.
With an Olympic record over 5,000 meters, Dutch speedskater Sven Kramer ended four years of frustration and claimed the only major title that had eluded him -- Olympic gold. The 23-year-old favorite won in 6 minutes, 14.60, shaving six hundredths of a second off Jochem Uytdehaage's Olympic mark set at altitude in Salt Lake City in 2002. In a major surprise, Lee Seung-hoon of South Korea was second in 6:16.95, and Ivan Skobrev of Russia was third in 6:18.05.
2010 Vancouver Olympics, schedule and results
6460. alistairConnor - 2/14/2010 8:57:16 PM I almost blinked and missed it...
The America's Cup. Back in the USA after fifteen years in New Zealand and Europe.
OK, it was a boat race today. I'd hesitate to call it a yacht race. What can you call these multi-hulled carbon-winged monsters?
After a couple of years of court cases to determine who is the challenger and what boats would race... I deliberately did not follow this ... we have the Cup itself.
Instead of the challenger series, which for me is almost better than the Cup itself, we have this absurd truncated best-of-three thing in the middle of winter.
So it's 2-0 to BMW Oracle, over defender Alinghi.
Or if you prefer, Larry Ellison beat Ernesto Bertarelli. Which goes to show that if you throw enough money at something, some of it will stick.
I prefer to see it as the revenge of Russel Coutts over Brad Butterworth. They were the heart of Team New Zealand which won the Cup in 1995 and defended it in 2000. They then both went over to Bertarelli's Alinghi team, and won it in Auckland in 2003, to howls of indignation from patriotic New Zealanders.
Coutts then had an acrimonious split with Bertarelli, and took no part in the 2007 Cup, won by Alinghi under Butterworth's direction. Making him the all-time record holder, having won the Cup four times.
So Coutts went to work for Oracle, and now it's four to him too. 6461. alistairConnor - 2/15/2010 1:28:25 AM Gosh. Great day for French cross country.
Gold medal in the men's biathlon sprint, gold again in the combiné nordique - whatever that is in English, ski jump and cross country race. 6462. alistairConnor - 2/16/2010 11:11:32 PM Final of the men's biathlon pursuit now on.
It's odd, in that the starting order is determined by positions in the biathlon sprint of a couple of days ago. So Vincent Jay, the (French) gold medallist in that event, gets to start first, with fifty-nine guys on skis chasing him down.
With guns. 6463. wabbit - 2/19/2010 9:49:31 PM "I am deeply sorry" (that I got caught)...
At least Elin didn't stand-by-her-man like so many other women have done. This was Tiger's doing and he should take the heat alone. 6464. wabbit - 2/19/2010 9:50:02 PM  Evan Lysacek, without a quadruple jump, became the first American man to take home Olympic gold in figure skating since Brian Boitano in 1988, laying down a passionate, difficult, nearly perfect program to pass Russia's Evgeni Plushenko, he of the quad-triple jump.
It wasn't that Plushenko, the defending Olympic champion, imploded. Far from it. In addition to his quad, he landed all seven of his triple jumps, completed all his spins, stayed on his feet, mugged and preened for the judges, and showed the supreme confidence that borders on arrogance -- which is his trademark. "I was positive that I won," he said afterward. "It's always difficult to skate last, but it was not a bad skate." Nor was it that the judges docked Plushenko for his lack of artistry, a subject that had been roundly debated the first week of the Games. The fact is, both Lysacek and the Russian scored exactly 82.80 in program component scores -- the five marks that reflect a skater's artistic merit.
No, Plushenko lost in his bid to become the first man since Dick Button ('48, '52) to repeat as Olympic champion, because Lysacek, who had skated confidently all week, wrested the gold away from him...
6465. wabbit - 2/19/2010 9:50:58 PM  Australia's Torah Bright won the gold medal in the Olympic women's halfpipe Thursday, defeating American Hannah Teter during a pressure-packed second run. American Kelly Clark, the 2002 champion, won bronze.
Bright fell during her first run of the finals, meaning there was no room for error the second time. She stuck all five of her jumps for a score of 45 points, 2.6 better than Teter, the defending Olympic champion.
"It's never what you're looking to do, fall on your first run," Clark said. "But a lot of us had ourselves in that position tonight."
Bright, the 23-year-old from Cooma, Australia, won without trying the "double cork," a double-flipping jump she had been practicing all year. The jump is increasingly popular among men but has not yet been tried by a woman in competition...
Snowboarding superstar and defending champion Shaun White won the Olympic men's halfpipe gold Wednesday, dazzling the judges with his tricks - including the gravity-defying Double McTwist 1260. White scored 48.4 out of 50 in his second run after 46.8 in his first, which was in itself enough to seal the title. Finland's Peetu Piiroinen took silver with a score of 45.0 and Scott Lago of the United States won bronze with 42.8.
Maria Riesch of Germany won the women's super-combined gold at the Vancouver Olympic Winter Games on Thursday. American Julia Mancuso took the silver and Anja Paerson of Sweden the bronze after race leader Lindsey Vonn crashed in the slalom. Maria Riesch of Germany took advantage of a mid-course crash by American Lindsey Vonn and an "easy" slalom run to win the super-combined and her first Olympic title on Thursday. American Julia Mancuso claimed her second silver in as many days finishing at 0.94sec with brave Anja Paerson of Sweden claiming the bronze at 1.05 only a day after a spectacular crash in the women's downhill.
US star Shani Davis became the first man to win back-to-back Olympic 1,000-metre speedskating titles with a sizzling last lap Wednesday and then showed his long feud with US rival Chad Hedrick is over. Davis, who became the first black Olympic champion in an individual event when he took 2006 gold in Torino, won in 1min 08.94secs, defeating 500m champion Mo Tae-Bum of South Korea by .18 of a second, with Hedrick third in 1:09.32. [...] Davis and Hedrick jointly held the American flag for a celebration skate four years after a bitter spat when Hedrick accused Davis of being selfish and unpatriotic for not racing with him on the US team pursuit squad at Turin.
more Vancouver Olympic news
6466. wabbit - 2/22/2010 2:05:27 AM IOC athlete equipment endorsement prohibition FAIL 6467. vonKreedon - 2/23/2010 5:01:59 PM In personal sports news, my 16 year old tennis playing son is on fire. In the last two weeks he's defeated the number 1, 2, and 4 players in the Pacific Northwest. His mental game has become rock solid allowing him to win grinding three set matches that he would have lost just a month ago. Now we are starting to look at national tournaments! 6468. PsychProf - 2/23/2010 6:32:14 PM Congrats VK... 6469. wabbit - 2/24/2010 1:17:22 AM Wow, congrats indeed! You go, VonK-son!
And how nice to see your shining moniker in these here parts, PP!! 6470. PsychProf - 2/25/2010 4:17:18 PM Hey Wabs...I will try to lurk here more often. Wasn't our Fray Party in Brooklyn a hoot? 6471. marjoribanks - 3/29/2010 7:22:48 AM Good show with your son, Kreedon.
You should read Agassi's bio. It's slightly overwrought, but also brilliantly insightful about pro tennis. Anyway, read it before your son does!
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