February 16, 2006
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Well, here's a cool event, and one I've never heard of before! Snowboard cross, which is a group of four snowboarders simultaneously racing down a course. No timer-clock in the right hand corner measuring the competitors' speed, because it's simply whoever crosses the finish line first wins. Lots of fun, though it gets a bit rambunctious!
Only thing objectionable is how the finals have four competitors, meaning one poor schnook gets nothing, while the other three receive medals. Talk about making someone feel like a L.O.S.E.R.
And I'm excited to hear the 2010 Winter games will be held in Vancouver. By jingo, I'm hoping to be there, so I am. I'd love to just once be in the stands for the opening ceremonies, and see the figure skating and the luge and the ski jump.
Probably skip the curling, however. Too much excitement, and I'll be 58 years old then.
Comments (8)
Faron has always wanted to go to an Olympics. He'd thought Calgary would be one we could get to, but it just didn't work. Vancouver, though - that's on my short-list of places I'd like to visit anyway...
Hmmm...
me<><
Hmmmm, indeed!
Isn't that close to Badger territory, too? And Alicia? And Heidi?
Close enough to think it over anyway. AAAAAaaaaaaaaaand, Hazel will likely be up for makin' the trip. It's definitely close to her Tim and Maya!
me<><
But I like curling!!!!
I sure hope ya'll get to go!
The snowboard cross was exciting, but the announcers were *awful*. Did you know that we'll see contact during the snowboard cross? Or that the first two racers will advance to the next round? Or that they don't want to jump very high ("get a lot of air" when did snowboard slang become a sport commonality?)? They pretty much said some combination of those three items on each and every race. Bleah.
I certainly don't mind the skating announcers nearly as much. They're at least using different words and phrases and give me a true idea of what the judges are looking for. And they've done this for a very long time. Dick Button gets a little annoying after a while, but Scott Hamilton and Peggy Fleming generally are listen-to-able.
You're right about the snowboard cross commentators being irritatingly repetitive, but that appears to be a problem no matter which sport one is watching. It'd be refreshing if somehow they could be made to understand that silence on their part is not the equivalent of "dead air" on a radio station.
I still think Fleming got annoyingly negative, though.
The thing about "getting air" they didn't say for every race -- they said for EVERY JUMP IN EVERY RACE!!!!!!
I thought Dick Button was much better this time around than in some previous years. He's tempered his loquaciousness considerably -- he used to not be able to keep his mouth shut for five seconds at a time.
So, penta, did you know that they don't want to get a lot of air like the half-pipe snowboarders do?
[ducking]
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