What is your favorite Winter Olympic sport?

[Moontanman]

I really like watching biathlon, largely because I’ve never been able to come close to doing it well. As a youth, I could x-country ski pretty fast and far, and have, like many sons and daughters of southern West Virginia, been a decent shot since I was elementary school age. Combine the two, however, and the arm exertion leaves me so shaky I’d be lucky to even hit the backstop, let alone the iron bullseye biathletes are 100% on. Their stillness after exertion awes me.

 

Like Turtle, though, if I could design the games, I’d make some radical change/additions to martial skiing sports. Like the modern pentathlon, the biathlon has been stylized from it’s martial roots almost beyond recognition. The biathlon’s roots are cold, rugged war – moving fast over difficult terrain, then killing people with guns. To get back to those grim roots, I’d make it a team sport played over a few thousand acres spanning the timber lines of both sides a mountain, with a military training-grade laser tag system so that the teams were actually, though non-lethally, shooting and “killing” each other.

 

Another realism element that could be added would be dragging heavy equipment/cargo over mountainous terrain - in short, a world-class adult version of one of my favorite boyhood activities, the BSA’s Klondike derby. (for those who’ve never seen or been in one of these, it’s essentially like dogsled racing, but with humans instead of dogs, and heavier sleds with crappier runners)

 

Only a real Mountaineer would have come up with the whole shooting each other thing dude, lol what part of the mountain state you from again?

 

If you could hammer WVa out flat it would be bigger than Texas, you'd have a lot of flat pissed off hillbillys too :hihi:

[Buffy]

go lindsay vonn!

...and Julia Mancuso! Woot! ;)

 

Congrats to the Norwegian Curling team on beating the US in that really exciting game yesterday as well as having that fabulous sense of fashion!

 

 

Hey T! Do you have a pair of those? Would Yvonne let you out of the house in them? :hihi:

 

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months,

Buffy

[Turtle]

roger all that craigenator. i have been thinking maybe the shooter oughta be up front in my schema.

 

your klondike run sounds like a perfect fit for my survival wagon race proposals. just add runners & gunners. (double pun and alliteration!. :) ) ;)

 

so tormod, i think i better knock off rootin' for you guys 'cause it aint helpin. :hihi: your guy the other day in biathalon was doin' fine 'til he got dumped on at the range by a nasty wet snowy rainy gunk that the rest only had to ski through. :eek: rats!

 

just takin' a break after watching lyndsay vonne bomb downhill for a gold. you go girl!! :hihi: gotta get back to da tube. :hihi:

[freeztar]

I've got two words: Shaun White

 

Watching him, I'm now convinced that snowboard half-pipe is my favorite winter olympic sport.

 

[Turtle]

Bjoergen wins!!! you got her number T? :eek: Svindal wins!! it's ok for Miller to go #2 as i been wondering for years if he was just famous for being famous. on we go then; the ice-turtle racing is tonight after hours. . . . . . ;)

[Tormod]

her er det bye-bye-athalon Slik jeg ser det. :singer:

 

 

Oooh I missed your artwork. :singer:

 

We call it "skiskyting", literally ski shooting.

[Tormod]

 

Hey T! Do you have a pair of those? Would Yvonne let you out of the house in them? :singer:

 

I think she'd love to see me wear them. :singer:

 

Did you know they have 200,000 fans on Facebook from all the media attention these last days. And they keep winning, too!

[Tormod]

so tormod, i think i better knock off rootin' for you guys 'cause it aint helpin. :D your guy the other day in biathalon was doin' fine 'til he got dumped on at the range by a nasty wet snowy rainy gunk that the rest only had to ski through. :singer: rats!

 

It's working, slowly...Norway took 5 golds in less than 48 hours! :singer:

 

Women's Classic Ski sprint

Women's 2x7,5 with ski change

Men's Super G

Men's Biathlon 20K

Womens Biathlon 15K

 

A pretty decent couple of days.

[Turtle]

It's working, slowly...Norway took 5 golds in less than 48 hours!

 

Women's Classic Ski sprint

Women's 2x7,5 with ski change

Men's Super G

Men's Biathlon 20K

Womens Biathlon 15K

 

A pretty decent couple of days.

 

:singer:

 

i got a question for you T; how do you Nordmenn refer to your flag and flag colors? we say "red, white, & blue" in US, but i see the frenchies say "blue, white, & red". :shrug: we say "old glory", they say "tricolour". what do you guys say?

 

i will be not-rooting again for you guys today since it's wortking so well. :hyper: :)

 

ps i bet yvonne & the girls are secretly making a pair of those pants for you. :eek2:

[stereologist]

I really like Olympic ice hockey because its fast. The short track skating is fun to watch. I have to say that the x-c skiing is great. It is a tough and grueling sport. You don't see those athletes wearing lacy costumes. It's too bad the television crews have been unable to figure out how to film that sport well. That's the fault of lazy network executives, not the sport. It's an amazing competition that gets dismissed by television because it requires creativity to show that the networks appear to not have.

[Tormod]

i got a question for you T; how do you Nordmenn refer to your flag and flag colors? we say "red, white, & blue" in US, but i see the frenchies say "blue, white, & red". :shrug: we say "old glory", they say "tricolour". what do you guys say?

 

Same..."red, white and blue". But mostly we refer to it as "the Norwegian flag". I know. Boring norsemen.

[CraigD]

Only a real Mountaineer would have come up with the whole shooting each other thing dude, lol what part of the mountain state you from again?

I grew up in Mercer County, the southmost county in the state. I’ve a daughter and 3 grandkids who lives in the Tug river valley, along the western border with Kentucky, so have a bit of acquaintance with real hillbillies. :)

 

Despite having a few decent ski resorts and lot of kids who are pretty decent skiers, AFAIK West Virginia hasn’t produced any world-class alpine or cross-country skiers. It has sent quite a few markspeople to the Summer Olympics, I pretty sure some medaled.

 

WV lacks, I fear, the couching and training people and facilities needed to produce world-class skiers, or enough rich people – or arguably, with less than 2 million, about the same as Manhattan island, New York – enough people period – to afford them.

[Jway]

I've been watching a great deal of curling (men and women's). I think I'm up to 60% of understanding it.

 

But I voted for: Snowboarding and Hockey

 

Shaun White showed me things that I didn't know were humanly possible until watching his gold medal run(s). Dude got the highest score in first run, final round, among all competitors and then beat that score in his 2nd run. Utterly amazing.

 

Team USA's men's hockey win over Canada was an amazing victory. Really fun to watch. It seemed (still does) like Canada is the better team, but the defense in that game won it for USA, and I do think US's goalie (Miller) is better than what Canada is putting up.

 

Btw, outside of the Olympics I barely care about Snowboarding and Hockey. Watched either one a collective of 4 times in past 3 years.

[Buffy]

Shaun White showed me things that I didn't know were humanly possible until watching his gold medal run(s)....

 

They're still not humanly possible. They can only be performed by Flying Tomatoes... :cheer:

 

Aserejé, ja de je de jebe tu de jebere sebiunouva majavi an a bugui an a buididipí, ;)

Buffy

[freeztar]

I absolutely love Shaun's second run. He has already won Gold, and he tentatively asks his team mates for support. He even asks if he should just skate down the middle. ;)

 

And then, he rocks his first score, which rocked all others. 900 & 1280...hmmm...

[Tormod]

A cool article in the WSJ about Norway's performance in the Winter Olympics.

 

Norway's Olympic Medal Haul Earns It Little Respect - WSJ.com

 

But they are wrong about Norway being a "young country"...we celebrated 1000 years recently. ;)

[freeztar]

"The only problem is that nobody outside Norway seems to take them seriously."

 

Um, if they keep taking medals it is inevitable that people take them serious. ;)

The Norweigan ski jumping team seems to be very serious, judged solely from the Olympians' faces on the ski jumping team. ;) I only mention this because it was obvious. :cheer:

 

It's already a brilliant win for the US. We've already broke our all-time medal amount for the Winter Olympics, with over a week to go!!

 

Nonetheless, I'm with that major advertiser, Go World! :)

 

(can't believe the fluke Korean win in skating...crazy...)