The Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics Discussion Thread

A cursory search of the forums hasn't shown any similar threads and the search feature appears to be broken at the moment so i hope this isn't a duplicate.

So, Winter Olympics... discuss! Any subject really, share some great moments from some local athletes you're particularly proud of or maybe some predictions.

I'll start by saying that Canada is pretty good at Moguls. Like pretty fucking amazing!

I'm sure lots here have already seen this picture, they've been all over the world now but big congratulations to Justine and Chloe Dufour-Lapointe for the gold and silver medals and their sister Maxime who also made the final.

And just now Alexandre Bilodeau and Mikaël Kingsbury did the same! Alex won gold for the second Olympics in a row and i believe he is the first athlete to defend his title in the discipline. And i don't want to forget Marc-Antoine Gagnon who just missed the podium with a 4th place.

Now for the Hockey tournament to start... this gonna be good.

Every 4 years I remember I need to watch more biathlon and curling.

Especially since the Canadian men lost their first curling match today, so maybe they just won't crush everyone

It would be easier if NBC wasn't awful at airing the Olympics, refusing to air basically anything live on any of their 5 channels and their "full screen video player" online

@gorillamopena: Yeah, NBC is a shit show every single time. Like conveniently editing out the only somewhat political segment of the opening ceremony...

And speaking of curling. I saw a short report about how the Canadian team is all made of big brawny and ripped dudes screaming in what is normally perceived as a "gentleman" game and how some teams don't like it too much.

I don't watch the Olympics because I've always found them boring, but regardless of that, I heard that Sochi 2014 has been quite the disaster so far?

Only thing that's been a Disaster has been NBC's coverage of it, I love the Olympics, but I can't stand NBC coverage! worst of all there is a blackout for all other streams due to region blocks..... So I'm forced to watch the games on mute.

Yeah, their coverage is terrible. Every 2 minutes they take a jab at Russia. We Americans need to learn how to be better guests.

The actual Olympics have been incredible as always. Can't wait to see what happens in the half pipe. Sean White will destroy.

Did you miss Sochi Problems entirely? Sochi is basically the Battlefield 4 of Olympic Cities.

Most of the hotels are unfinished and still being built, there are ridiculously gross errors in construction, there are stray dogs everywhere, the water is brown, people are getting trapped when doorknobs fall off or elevators stop working (one athlete had both happen to him), less rooms are available than initially indicated with companies like CNN only getting 1 of the 11 rooms they arranged (and this is the room), there are cases where rooms and mistakenly assigned to multiple people and someone enters your room at 3 in the morning, if you lose a key the hotel doesn't have a copy of it so they just have to take off the door, ongoing construction, non functional Olympics ring thing during their opening ceremony, courses that are too steep and causing injuries, things that are not complete, homophobia, amazing pictures, massive embezzling, workers being deported without being payed, the most expensive Olympics in history, everyone's phone/devices being hacked, I could go on if I really wanted to.

i dont have TV so i can't watch it. I would though.

I saw some of the Super G the other night and I have some notes to share

• Super G is still the best name for any sport/competition/game ever thought of.
• It's so fucking fast, I mean holy shit you guys, it's terrifying.
• Hm, another sport where .14 seconds ends a decade of dreams..
• The sound is amazing. Pure silence except for the razor sharp cutting sound that comes from the skis on that icy snow.

@themasterds: I don't mean to turn this thread into a politics thing, but I have to call out that post as being very one sided. Yes, there are tons of culturally fucked up/unfriendly things in Russia and other problems with the Sochi Olympics.

But.

Let's keep something in mind. Pretty much 99.9% of the time the Olympics are bad news for wherever they are held. It only takes a second to google this so I will spare you a list of snarky sounding examples. Ultimately the Olympics are a fantastic theory about pride but in reality the entire organization should probably be gutted and rebuilt. There has never been an Olympics where we could prove something didn't happen with the judges in some sport, and this year will be no different.

One example: CNN not getting rooms. During the Vancouver and London Olympics real people who lived in those areas were forcefully evicted to make room for athletes and not given any help in relocating. Sweet huh? Even sweeter when you realized "those areas" were low income housing where people need the most help in the first place.

I agree so much about NBC's coverage, it makes me not want to bother watching the damn thing.

Not really interested but the wife really wants to watch...she heard about this russian figure skater kid who put on some incredible performance but the pvr failed to record so I figured it would be pretty simple to find footage online...pffft, everything blacked out. What a joke, even more disinterested now. A celebration of sport and the world....if you want to watch NBC, i guess? :/ No thanks.

Since when does hotel commendations ruin the games? I care about the sports, not the coldwar rhetoric that has been besieging Russia since 1994.

^ Yeah guys let's try to keep this more about the sports and the athletes and less about NBC's crap coverage or Russia's politics.

More curling tonight at midnight (eastern times) live on the...internet?

As a Norwegian I really should care about the Olympics, you could argue that no nation punches above its weight in the world of sports like we do in the Winter Olympics historically, but I just don't.

Read up on Mexico's ski jumped. He has no chance but he is a 55 year old prince pop star

http://deadspin.com/mexicos-olympic-skier-is-absolutely-fascinating-1509807517

There always seems to be too much 'Ski/Snowboard down a mountain, jump, get judged on it at the end' and unless someone faceplants or something I can barely tell the difference between each run. So it's just not very exciting to watch. Sports that come down to subjective judges scores are usually inaccessible to me, I like to know who is winning and why as it happens.

I'm a hockey fan so I'll watch that, but that's about the beginning and the end of my interest in the Winter Games.

Another Olympics, another round of shit, tape-delayed, edited, footage delivered in prepackaged saccharine by the people at NBC.

@royce_mccutcheon: The problem is as television and the internet grow they also want the Olympics to grow.

The problem in winter is simply the lack of sports to actually add. Which is why you get things like "Team Figure Skating" that is basically the same but needs to occupy more space.

They might add Bandy next go around which is like hockey but 11 on 11 on a giant rink

@royce_mccutcheon: @gorillamopena: I actually find it hard to imagine how small the Olympics must have been prior to the 1998 Olympics. Since then they added Womens Hockey, Mens and Womens Curling, Skeleton, Skicross, Ski Slopestyle and all the snowboard sports. And NHL players didn't participate before that either.

I find the problem with judged sports is the commentators explaining how the sport is judged. If you have shitty commentators you won't know what the fuck is going on. If they can explain the difference between switch and goofy to a mainstream audience then they can probably explain why the sport is scored the way it is.

Whilst yo, Canada are fucking on fire, I am really surprised how the Netherlands is 2nd in the medal table...

@dudeglove: Wait, in what universe did Russia not want to host the Olympics?

People critical or mocking toward some aspects of the games so far is because of Putin and the corruption involved, not because Russia is bad. Average Russians are the ones being screwed by this kind of thing on a regular basis outside of just these Olympics, and the incompetence on display is a reflection of the idiots in charge, not the average folks trying to make this great event happen.

I'm sure it will all turn out alright, but people have reason to criticize and even mock some things about how this has come together. Ultimately, though, the sports will take over the spotlight. :)

@alexw00d: speedskating YO! though those clean 2 clean sweeps on the 5 km and 500 metres might nog actually be good for the sport in the longrun. RIght now I'm really enjoying it.

@mosespippy Yeah we (the dutch) have got an amazing gymnastics commentator. He is an ex-gymnast coach himself and recognizes almost every flip and trick they do. But although he is very aware of the way the judging works. He won't ever call a score.

I've been watching the hell out of the curling, it's surprisingly thrilling!

Also the BBC coverage is fantastic.

The BBC Commentators are really good at this. During the Summer Olympics I remember finding the people doing the Taekwondo/Judo and Canoe events really good, but the best have to be the guys who do the snowboard stuff. Not only are they really informative, they're really laid back and fund to listen to. I think they did the BMX stuff during the summer olympics as well.

Basically I feel sorry for America and the BBC has awesome sports coverage.

CBC's coverage here in Canada has been excellent this year. Particularly their website. Makes it really easy to watch as much or as little of an event as I like. Just want to give kudos to them as it is richly deserved. :)

And extra kudos to Canadian athletes. It's great to see them making finals and even winning medals in events where our country has traditionally been weak in past years.

I don't understand why US coverage is so mediocre year after olympic year. They seem to always get huge quantity of complaints but don't change? The basic idea behind good coverage is simple: for TV, make sure you show the events LIVE. For website, have the entirety of every single event available for viewing even if you didn't record any commentary for it. Openness and transparency. Did I just read they editedout a section of the opening ceremonies? What?

Go go Canada! Woo! Win those medals!

Absolutely, i didn't pay attention to the website until today but it's pretty fantastic. Everything live plus the VODs that even show icons on the progress bar for when canadian athletes are on and such. Plus the video player itself is great. They even have the streams of other channels they've partnered with.

I really wanted Shaun White for the Gold, but the nerves got to him.

CBC has always had the best coverage up here. This year has been the best year for streaming, though usually we've been able to see a stream of whatever's on TV. Now we've got the TV broadcast, whatever TSN is showing, and 3-4 other events that are online only. (the TV broadcast usually focuses on events that Canada is expected to win medals in)

Crazy how in 2010 I was such a huge fan of the Winter Games over the Summer game, that completely changed with 2012, not that it was amazing or anything but found a lot of the weirder events in the summer more entertaining. So far these games have been boring and just haven't engaged me too much, Biathlon the exception. Hopefully week two has better events or at least better coverage. I'm sick of all the Ice dancing and skating, that team stuff was stupid. Give me more Luge, Skeleton and Bobsled, I've seen little to nothing of those events.

I will watch the Canadian men's hockey team.

For what it's worth, I think a lot of the Internet is interested in dogging on Sochi less because of ethnocentrism (though I'll admit it's probably true of some examples), and more due to the colossal difference between what was intended and what was executing. Sochi is no different than a fails compilation; the extent of their failure is so exaggerated that it's comic absurd.

The Olympics are an inherently fascist idea. The reason people watch the Olympics is due to nationalism, they want to see "their country" do well for no reason other than the fact that the patch of dirt they live on happened to be conquered by the government rather than some different government. Patriotism is truly nothing more than slaves celebrating their slavery, but that is another matter entirely. The Olympics trace their origin to the nationalistic ideologies of the late 1800s to Nazi Germany. The focus on athletics has it's origins in eugenics. In fact, the Running of the Torch ceremony was created by Carl Diem, the leader of Hitler's Youth, for the '36 Olympics as a display of pageantry to show off the "greatness" of National Socialism.

@corvak said:

The CBC streaming this year is garbage compared to how good the CTV streaming was in 2010. Back then you had every Canadian TV broadcast in French and English as well as every feed of every event without commentary, all listed below the video player and the medal table and highlights were in the side bar. Also it was ad free.

With the CBC streaming it's all scattered on different pages. If you go to the Watch Online tab you get a schedule not a video player. That schedule doesn't link to video of the events in question. As far as I can tell you can't actually watch anything from the Watch Online tab. If you go to the schedule and results tab it's not organized chronologically, but at least it links to live videos. They have midroll ads interrupting at bad times. Also, sometimes the video quality goes to shit. It's not been a great user experience. It makes me think it was made by engineers instead of designers. I would say the CBC have been adequate this year but just because it's better than what the US has doesn't mean we should praise it as being good. It's just not bad.

I find it weird that people keep saying that he was "beaten" by Iouri Podlatchikov when the two Chinese riders were also ahead of him. It would have been cool to see him break that record (first person to win gold three times in a row), and it was a shame that he choked, but really, Podlatchikov was gonna take it, he was clearly attacking it with purpose, you know? It's hard not to see it as a statement when he busts out the trick Shaun White debuted in Vancouver and than goes straight into his own new trick on the next jump. Incredible run.

I think they ought to change the way the half pipe is scored though, to be honest. Because they put so much importance on height, most of the riders just go for big airs and spins, which gets a bit boring after a while, you need someone like Shawn White or Podlatchikov to make it exciting. I think maybe it should be more like gymnastics, where you have to include certain types of tricks, because maybe you'd see more handplants and stuff, which look awesome but aren't worth many points.

Steady on there, much as I love being told why I like something, I think I can safely say that I'm not nationalistic in my interest in Olympic sports, and nor are most people I know. I like watching people who are good at stuff being good at it. Although I do find it irritating how much coverage focuses on national medal tallies and whatever. As for the origins of the running of the torch in Nazi Germany, it might seem like a real gotcha moment, but it doesn't support anything you say about the nationalist origins of the games - to do that you'd have to spend some time showing how the games - either functionally (probably more important) or semiotically promotes fascism. It might have a wrapper of national pride, which is silly and unnecessary (to me, some people need to be rooting for something to be interested in it) but I'd say that when everything else is stripped away the olympics is just about people who are good at something doing it well.

@sephirm87: I don't think you understand what "fascist" means. Cheering on your country in a sporting event is no more fascist than supporting your local team.

@thomasnash: I wholeheartedly agree on the scoring of the halfpipe. Inserting a hand plant would be crazy, that would scrub so much speed in the middle of a run, it would truly make the gifted people shine. Be careful 2nd and 3rd where Japanese... I'm happy for the guys that won, they had incredible runs and deserved it.

On the nationalism stuff, Of course I want the US to win, because I love my country and it's been good to me. At the same time it's meaningless because so many people are competing for countries they don't live in which I don't get. Also, I don't really care how US athelets place. I mean I was watching figure skating "forcefully" the other day and they Russian pair were absolutely flawless, and it's like of course they should win this round.

I like watching people who are great at their sport. It's fascinating. However, if they are jerk about it like "of course I was going to win" that makes me not like someone.

How embarrassing! They were all great runs. Podlatchikovs second run in the final was just jaw-dropping.

I think probably because of how much the speed would drop you might end up seeing a lot of runs with a plant at the end, which you do see a lot when riders stack in the middle of the run, unless you specifically made a rule about it. Maybe it wouldn't matter because height would be less of an important factor in the scoring?

Did you watch the women's half pipe at all? It's really noticeable how they don't go nearly as high as the men, but you get a greater variety of trick because of it.

@thomasnash: I caught the qualifying runs, It's interesting to watch because there timings are tighter. Like they are still finishing twists as they land, not already straightened out 3 feet above the pipe lip.

Wooo Hockey tournament is finally underway!

Not the most impressive start for Canada but still. 3-1 doesn't necessarily reflect how things were on the ice though. After a very average first period this was very one-sided but major props to Norway's goaltender Lars Haugen. He received 38 shots from the world's best team and only allowed 3 goals. Solid work right there.

The US also got a strong start with a 7-1 win over Slovakia. This is impressive because Slovakia aren't exactly pushovers normally.

It's promising for the rest of the tournament i think, none of the North American teams ever won anything in Olympics outside North America since NHL players joined so lets see if this can change this time.

@thomasnash: I honestly think Shaun White would have won have the conditions been better. It was also his fault for continuing to go big when obviously the pipe wasn't up to snuff. With soft, mushy snow, doing incredibly large airs with a lot of rotation is a recipe for disaster. Had the snow been better I think there is a very large chance he would have landed those tricks, and a lot of what he was attempting seemed to be way ahead of the competition. The guy who won gold obviously deserves it for the fact that he played it smart - but I can't help but feel this year it was a lot more about luck than it usually is. I've never seen so many experienced riders wipe out in such strange ways.

I think it's fair to say that if he'd landed all his tricks he would have had a damn good chance. He was hitting some huge heights, but I think you're crazy if you think that Podlachikov wasn't going hard as fuck. His winning run had Shaun White's double mctwist (two flips and three and a half spins) as well as his own YOLO Flip which has 4 rotations. I think Shaun White needed to go hard to have a chance of topping his score.

I'm no expert but it just didn't seem like "playing it smart" so much as being really good.

Your right though, the conditions did look awful, a lot of really unfortunate bumps causing crashes.

@sephirm87: Nationalism and Fascism aren't the same thing, though they can be quite similar in other contexts; and certainly the way certain people support their team in other sports is a little "indoctrinated." The Olympics are pretty chill for most people/countries though, granted Usain Bolt could run (get it?) for President in Jamaica and probably win.

Very excite :D

Canada will definitely be fine though. They are famous for having slow starts in these things. Canada is a team that will keep getting better and better as the tournament goes on. Has a lot to do with Babcock's style of coaching.

@thomasnash: I agree he was really good, but personally I think Shaun was going in hard, but we never saw him get to the nitty gritty of his runs because he kept falling. At this point it's semantics whether being really good means you're able to put up with bad conditions or not, but as I said before - had the pipe been up to snuff I think we would have seen an entirely different event.

Actually, aside from the hotels not being finished, the food being odd, and the travel to Sochi being difficult the game seem to be going off well enough. The event spaces look nice..at least from a distance, athletes are competing, and some of the stuff I have seen has been cool. I everything might falls apart after the games, which woudl be sad, but what cna you do? Once the events are done for Olympic and Paralympic the athletes can go home and Russia has to deal with the screw up with its own people. I hope they DO MAKE improvements after the fact...Sochi and that area look beautiful.

I like what I have seen so far. I just want everyone to compete, form all athletes to come back safe, and heck I hope the people of Sochi benefit in some way.

I am saving up top go to the 2018Winter Olympic Games to be held in Pyeongchang South Korea. I have always wanted to go to Asia, and Korea seems cool. I'm still trying to figure out when travel plans and tickets can be purchased, but I think it would be awesome to go. Maybe there can be a Giant Bomb club that will go and meet up...we better not call ourselves that however.

For the short to medium term their installations won't fall apart and likely will be completed since starting next year they have a Formula 1 grand prix and also the 2018 fifa world cup hosted there.

Canada 2 - Finland 1!

First real test for Canada and now the proper tournament starts next game. Eventually our offense is bound to start producing and i wouldn't like to be the opposing team when that happens because right now we are winning games with the defense doing all the work, even offensively.

We already knew Tuukka Rask was good and he didn't disappoint. Props to him.

So that makes Sweden, the US, Canada and Finland straight through to the quarterfinals.

I wonder how things will be for the qualifier between Czech Republic and Slovakia. There has to be a pretty intense rivalry between those two.