What I Like About The Winter Olympics
The winter olympics is about to begin and it will have special importance for me this year as my kids have started to develop an interest in winter sports.
Winter sports are big here in the Czech Republic. Whether it is the winter olympics, or some world championship thingie, or the NHL, Czechs are always contenders in Hockey. They took gold in 1998, and they feel it’s about time for another one.
Sam is on a hockey team. They haven’t played any games yet and some of the players are just learning how to skate but, overall, I am pretty impressed when I watch their practices. I’m impressed that 7 year olds can take falls like that and get up not crying (usually – there’s often one or two tearful episodes per practice. I’m impressed that 7 year olds can skate that fast, can handle a stick and pass and shoot, can defend the goal fearlessly and with an understanding of angles and geometry that they probably won’t be able to explain, verbally, even when they’re in high school.
I suspect that one of the reasons for the Czech Republics success in hockey is their junior program. I doubt that Sam will grow up to be an NHL player – that’s just not in the genes – but I think it’s possible that some of the kids he’s playing with now just might.
We took Sam and Isabel skiing this weekend. Well, I didn’t ski, have never mastered the art. We took Isabel to a class and, after a bit of initial sullenness and shyness with the instructor (a scruffy hippie type but since that describes half of daddy’s friends, she’s used to it) she was slaloming down the hill on her own. I was quite amazed, as she’s only 3. Sam is 7, and he was right up there on the slopes with the real skiiers.
So, I’m sure we’ll be watching all of the downhill events with special interest.
My favorite sport in the winter olympics is the acrobatic skiing. With football, or basketball, or hockey, it’s a competition between two teams and one of them will win, even if both of them suck. As an idle amateur, I often don’t know the difference between a well played game and a comedy of errors. With curling and the biathlon it’s fun to watch just because they are so weird and you wonder “How did this ever become a sport in the 1st place?,” but still, the best person on the day will win and I don’t know if it was the best of a bad lot or a world beating performance until the announcer tells me. With many sports it’s just about who went fastest or jumped farthest and, even though they are doing something I couldn’t do, it’s not new and amazing.
Acrobat skiing, however, and I put gymnastics, platform diving and figure skating into this same category, you get to watch human beings doing things that human beings normally cannot do. The people in these sports are not only great athletes, I see them as almost superhuman.
That, for me, is something worth watching.
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I am watching Sports on Demand on cable and the feature on the Physics of the sports in the Olympics. It is listed under the Olympics 2010 and they have it on the NBC Olympics website, NBCOlympics.com/science. It makes all the sports understandable. I also love the aerial and acrobatic skiing, as well as the downhill races. I didn’t really care for the speed skating until Apolo Ohno came on the scene. I love watching snowboarder Shaun White. You should learn downhill skiing so you can enjoy the runs with your kids. We went to Vail so our kids could learn to ski…they loved it. Obie and I skied all the major slopes on the west coast. Enjoy Europe..Jean PS..hippie friends are the nicest friends to have…
Yes, I saw something on the Discovery channel the other day and they were showing slo-mo film of skateboarders and so you could see how they did it, but the amazing part is that this all happens in a fraction of a second, so there’s no way these people have time to analyze the physics, it’s all instinctive. Really impressive.