Stephen Holcomb is the driver for the US 4-man bobsled team that starts racing today and also a bit of a nerd, more or less. Check out his “Where in the World Is Matt-like” video that he created over the last World Cup season.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The crazy pants for the Norwegian curling team are turning heads throughout Vancouver.  Red, white and blue plaid would look more appropriate on the golf course than the curling ice, which helps explain how the Norway team was able to get the pants.  The captain of the team went online to LoudMouthGolf.com to order these pants just before the Olympics.  Only $99 if you can still find a pair (and I should note their website is getting pounded).

Unfortunately for Norway the pants were no help yesterday as Canada beat Norway 7-6.

loud mouth golf

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Screw the environment, we want ice.

Follow a disasterous resurfacing yesterday, the Vancouver Olympic Committee has launched an emergency airlift of a Zamboni machine to the Winter Olympics.

While often thought of as synonymous with ice resurfacing, Zamboni is actually a trademark of a specific machine.  The Olympic committee, in an effort to ‘go green’ decided not to use the tried and tested Zamboni but an electronic Olympia machine.  

The first one belched up a bunch of snow on the long track speed skating oval.

Then the backup did the same thing.

Then the emergency backup shredded the ice to the point some teams wanted a postponment of the race.

That was it.  Back to the standby and an airlift mission was tasked to fly a true Zamboni out to Vancouver so that the ice resurfacing can go ahead without fail.

Sometimes going green is not ready for primetime.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I’ve spoken about this before during the medal debate in Beijing.  There are two ways of counting medals by country at the Olympics.  By the number of golds, then silvers, then bronze, or by the overall number of medals.  The United States media generally reports on the overall number of medals, whereas most of the rest of the world reports on who has the highest number of gold medals.  Thus a country with 1 gold would appear higher than a country with 6 silvers and 10 bronze medals in some tables.  This has led to some countries like Russia criticizing the Gold First standard saying ‘how can a country with 12 medalists be said to have a ‘poorer’ Olympics than a country with just one medal?’  Some commentators have suggested a ‘points system‘ whereby a bronze is worth 1/5 of a Gold or something like that.  Sounds very silly (it’s a British idea so yeah, it is very silly).

Officially–there is no ranking.  The Olympic charter forbids it:

The IOC and the OCOG shall not draw up any global ranking per country. A roll of honour bearing the names of medal winners and those awarded diplomas in each event shall be established by the OCOG and the names of the medal winners shall be featured prominently and be on permanent display in the main stadium.

However, there is an unofficial ‘media alert’ that the IOC puts out that has the medal table in the order of Golds first.  This started back around the 2000 Olympics and the IOC won’t comment on the debate because “officially, we don’t publish a table”.  How bureaucratically convenient.  UPDATE:  It appears that the Vancouver 2010 committee has decided to publish their list in a ‘total medals’ format, but the European media continues to follow a Gold first standard.

Which is better?  Who really cares.  In the end it is about athletes and their own personal quests and sacrifices to become the best in the world. Some of them have help from nations, some do not.  If you see someone arguing the point that one counting system is inherently better or worse than the other, than you have found someone worth ignoring for the rest of the Olympics.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Slow Down

Following the death of Olympic competitor Nodar Kumaritashvili, Olympic luge competitors will now be starting at a lower ramp in an effort to reduce speeds on the Whistler Luge track, this despite an ‘investigation’ earlier which ruled out track design as an issue in the death.

Men are now starting from what was the women’s start ramp, and women are now racing further down the track from the ‘juniors’ starting gate.  This move should slow down speeds along the course.  The course will now be 575 feet shorter and speeds should be reduced about 6 mph.

However, many are acknowledging that the technical changes are not really the issue right now, but that mental changes are in order.

“You have an emotional component and you have a technical component,” Romstad said, his voice cracking as he tried to explain why what seems a fairly superficial fix is being instituted. “None of our athletes . . . They lost a friend yesterday. It’s an emotional experience, something they haven’t been through before.”

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Things are a bit more advanced than the first televised Olympics in 1936

“NBC sucks” is a constant drone you hear each and every Olympics.  ”They didn’t show enough of the Tajikistan entrance, ergo they are biased against Tajikstan” and other silliness often is heard on the messageboards and other sites (and no, I’m not kidding about the Tajik reference–it happens).

So now that we’re done with that, let’s talk about some real live numbers behind this year’s Olympics.

NBC is going to have 835 hours of coverage across multiple platforms (and I believe that includes online coverage as well).  This is way up from the 419 hours of Torino coverage in 2006, and 375.5 hours in 2002 Salt Lake City.  It will also be the first Olympics produced entirely in HD (though my local WRC coverage got messed up last night due to a glitch with Comcast that I had, so I watched most of the Opening Ceremony in Standard Definition.  How 2003 was that?)

NBC is doing all this coverage with a significantly lower staff this year.  2168 employees which is down from the 2,768 they sent to Torino and 3,260 in Salt Lake.  You would figure more advanced technology might require more personnel, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

But if you really want to get into the technical bits of the coverage, you need to read this amazing piece in BroadcastingCable magazine that goes into some massive details, such as What type of Cameras are they using for Vancouver?

NBCU will use more than 100 cameras, all equipped with Canon lenses, to supplement OBS’ coverage. They include Sony HDC-1400, -1500 and -3300 units, and for ENG applications, Sony’s new PDW-F800 XDCAM HD optical-disc camcorders.

Um, ok.  It also goes into some details about how the streams are being processed directly in Vancouver instead of backhauled to their HQ and redone there (as they had to do with the China Olympics).

Anyway, it’s a pretty interesting article if you like technical details of television sports broadcasting.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The track was closed for an investigation by the coroners office in Canada.  Once they had the evidence they needed for their investigation, they turned it over to the FIL (International Luge Federation).  The luge federation and the Vancouver Olympics determined ‘human error‘ was to blame for the crash, not the track design itself.

It appears after a routine run, the athlete came late out of curve 15 and did not compensate properly to make correct entrance into curve 16. This resulted in a late entrance into curve 16 and although the athlete worked to correct the problem he eventually lost control of the sled resulting in the tragic accident.  The technical officials of the FIL 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.

There have been several other accidents on this track, in both luge and bobsled.  One corner is now known as “50-50 corner” as you have a 50% chance you’ll crash coming through it.  There are others who still blame the track, even in light of the official report from the Olympic committee.

From a layman’s perspective, it looks kind of silly to have large metal poles located on the ‘downwind-inertia’ side of the track, i.e. the place where the body would naturally go in a crash.  But watching the horrific luge crash video you see his body did sort of go back and forth and I’m not certain the ‘flow’ of the track led to him going in that direction any more than it would have resulted in him jumping the wall in the other direction had he crashed a bit earlier.

Vancouver residents have set up a makeshift memorial to luger Nodar Kumaritashvili in the city center.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The Opening Ceremony to the 2010 Winter Olympics set a record as the most expensive Winter Olympics Ceremony ever, chalking in at about $38 million.  While this was dwarfed by the Beijing Olympics, it certainly is upsetting some who feel the money should have been spent on <insert cause of the day here>.

Even at $1,100 a ticket (for the opening ceremonies) it is unlikely that ticket revenue alone is going to pay for this event. (UPDATE.  60,000 * 1,100 = $66,000,000, so that’s not bad). Other top event tickets are going up in price on the fan ticket exchanges for the Olympics, but the biathalon is still a bargain at $70.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.