The Winter Olympics

I love the Winter Olympics. Love it. I watch almost everything. I watch the hockey, I watch the alpine skiing events, I watch the sliding events, I watch the cross country skiing and the biathlon - it’s skiing AND shooting! I watch the speed skating (note to Sven Kramer: “What are you stupid?”). I even watch some of the curling. “The USA has a curling team? Awesome, TiVo it I’ll watch it while I’m running on the treadmill!” (Side note: Why is men’s and women’s curling segregated? Can women curlers not hold their own with the men? Keep it segregated I say, all the more curling events for me to watch). I watch the snowboard cross and the ski cross, I watch the aerials, the moguls, the ski jumping, and the halfpipe. It’s all very good. I do draw the line at the ice dancing though. When the ice dancing comes on that’s when I catch up on the other shows I’ve been neglecting in order to watch the Olympics.

The other night I was watching... I don’t even remember what event I was watching but I had a thought. You know what the Winter Olympics needs? A marathon. The marathon is the pinnacle of the Summer Olympics, you can argue that the 100m is watched by more people or that the swimming gets more coverage, but none of the other events have their medal ceremony incorporated into the closing ceremony. Only the marathon winners get to receive their medals during the closing ceremony of the Olympics. It’s like a tip o’ the hat to the marathon as the original Olympic event, so why not have a Winter Olympic Marathon too?

Now the Winter Olympics likes to have a bit of an X Games feel to it and we’d have to make some changes to the Winter Olympics Marathon course to keep with that theme. The race would be held in and around the host city so it would be a cold weather marathon. Perhaps the race would actually be an ultra marathon, what’s more X-treme than that? The course could traverse deep snow fields and treacherous frozen lakes, maybe it would even have transition areas so the runners could change into snow shoes or spiked shoes for the different sections. The runners could run up one side of a mountain and down the other side, it would make Heartbreak Hill look like a pimple. I think it would be a great event, but unfortunately we will have to wait for the next Winter Olympics to incorporate this idea because the Canadians would have tried to make the down hill portion of the race faster and more dangerous, eh.

Delicious Sesame Chicken to Blame for Dropped Batons

Drop it like it’s hot.
As you have probably heard by now both the men’s and women’s US 4x100m relay teams dropped the batons in the semi-finals at the Olympics. Many of the pundits have looked at the tapes and tried to figure out where the mistakes were made and what was to blame for the Americans raging case of the dropsies. What has gone unreported until now is the underhanded tactics that were employed by the seedy underbelly of the Chinese Olympic committee.

The shocking truth that I am about to expose was relayed to me by confidential sources (like a friend of a friend and anonymous e-mailers so you know it’s totally true), and could cost me life imprisonment or even death should I ever go to China.

As the US men’s relay team tried to focus on their upcoming semi-final in a locker room under the Bird’s Nest stadium, they were startled by a knock on the door. A young Chinese girl, no more than 13 years of age entered with a special delivery, a large bowl of sesame chicken and 4 pairs of chopsticks. The athletes, suspicious at first decided to leave it alone, but the smell was too tempting. Unable to operate the chopsticks provided, the men dug in with their fingers unsuspecting that the cunning and Machiavellian Chinese Olympic committee had turned off the water in the US locker room, leaving them unable to wash their hands.

The rest, as they say, is history. It’s hard enough to pass a baton with clean hands. When your hands are slick with sesame chicken residue it’s all but impossible. The devious scheming didn’t stop with the men’s relay team either, as the slippery, sesame chicken baton was then given to the US women to use in their heat too. Two birds taken out with one stone, actually three birds if you count the chicken, or believe that it was really chicken.

When reached for comment Tyson Gay was upbeat. “The joke’s on them,” Gay said, “because that was the best sesame chicken that I’ve ever had. You get to compete for Olympic medals every 4 years. You only get sesame chicken like that once in a lifetime. It was that good.” Gay went on to add that it didn't really matter because he “didn’t think we were going to beat Usain Bolt and the Jamaican team in the finals.” When asked whether he was worried about a similar situation cropping up in London 2012 Gay told reporters that he didn’t see it as a problem because “British cuisine sucks.”