Shut the Pie Hole

The Sochi Games are now over and, quite frankly, they were pretty dull for me. There was perhaps two break-out stars of the event for the USA, Mikaela Schiffrin, the 18-year old skier and TJ Oshie from the St. Louis Blues and the US Hockey team.

At least Schiffrin won a gold, but it wasn’t Oshie’s fault that his team didn’t win any particularly with his inspiring effort in the shootout against the Russians.

I suppose if we take some of the newer X-Games type events there was more to celebrate. We did sweep the podium in one event, but the French even did that in one of them too, so that took a bit of the excitement away from that. 

 

We stunk in speed skating, short track, figure skating, curling, hockey and basically anything that had ice involved with it. We couldn’t jump, run or shoot on skis either (Biathlon, Cross Country.)

But for some odd reason we found enough people to sit on, or in, a sled and go downhill pretty fast. Gee…what an athletic set of accomplishments there.

Our ski team did do rather well with Schiffrin and Ted Ligety taking home gold medals. In an event where competitors only get two chances to head down a hill for about a total of two minutes, that is quite notable.

But how did we end up in 4^th place overall in the medal count? I think, given the fact that we really only placed that high because of the newer events that were contested were included, this was an overall performance similar to the days when it was an upset any time one of our athletes took home a medal. Our team clearly took a step back this time around with the most disturbing performances coming at speed skating.

We didn’t even hit the podium ONE time in speed skating. Twelve events overall and not even one bronze. 

However, we weren’t the only nation with problems on the speed skating oval. The Netherlands brought in a team that dominated in a way never seen before. They took home 23 medals in that event with 8 golds of the 12 awarded. The next closest teams were Russian and Poland with three and only 4 other teams even picked up at least one medal. Even Canada only had 2 medals in that event. 

The Dutch had 7 medals total in 2010 and we had 4. 

So kudos to the Dutch for that performance. Now we need to send some spy drones over there to see what they did and figure out how to do that for our country in South Korea in 4 years.

How the hell, by the way, did South Korea, that well-known winter wonderland, get an Olympic Games winter bid? I still can’t figure out how Sochi did. It’s not even close to a place where anyone would think of to go for winter fun besides the fact that there are the Caucus Mountains in the background. 

Sochi is one of the warmest places in Russia.
Naturally a place for Winter Games

I watched a bit of the Costas interview with Nancy Kerrigan last night. Overall the subject didn’t interest me but during the parts that I watched I was impressed with Kerrigan’s take on the whole matter of how she was attacked 20 years ago by Tonya Harding’s boyfriend, Jeff Galooley, or whatever his name was.
Kerrigan was graceful, thoughtful and forgiving and much more so than anyone would have given her a right to have been. There was no lingering animosity or resentment and I thought it quite admirable. 

That Costas though…again this week he launched into a political rant about Russia and their past. I think that given the fact he opened up that can of worms he was in a no-win situation. He was vilified for not talking about the violent communist “past” (ahem, ahem) so he went ahead and did it.

But as I mentioned here earlier, he never should have started talking about politics at all. It’s a sports production where athletes from all over the world come to compete in games not debate politics.

Regardless of where someone stands on present or past-day Russia and Vladimir Putin, it was just RUDE to go into Russia and bash it. I don’t care if Putin hates gays or anything else of the sort; for two weeks that has to get put aside because the world was the guests in that country. 

That’s like getting invited to a holiday party and bad mouthing anything that your host has done in the past or is doing in the future; if you accept the invitation, you go and keep your pie hole shut and be as gracious of a guest as you can be in the circumstances. 

That’s it for now.