Live-Blogging the Olympics: Day 5
OK! We are trying something new tonight. Let's live-blog NBC's prime-time coverage of the Olympics, shall we? Tonight: The men's figure-skating short program features fur-bearing mammal Johnny Weir. Snowboarder Cross! Downhill skiing! Let's pretend all of this didn't already happen!
9:33PM OK, guys, I'm gonna level with you: this whole "live-blog the Olympics" thing was a terrible idea. Honestly? The only reason I figured this would work is that last night I posted that tiny thing about skeleton, and it got a ton of pageviews. People were very into the Olympics, it seemed.
But the thing is? I must disagree with Richard here: THE WINTER OLYMPICS ARE SO BORING. It is way too much about physics and too little about skill. It's like all the most tedious word problems of my academic past have come back to haunt me in sport form:
If Snowboarder X's snowboard has a drag coefficient of Y how long will it take her to reach the bottom of the course? If Snowboarder X2's snowboard has a drag coefficient of Y2, how long will it take her to reach the bottom of the course? Based on your calculations, who will win the gold medal?
No amount of unique visitors will convince me to watch another person slide down an icy hill, no matter how wacky their mode of conveyance. Nothing can make me watch another ridiculous profile of some person whose status as a world-class athlete rests on their ability to point their toes harder than another person. Johnny Weir is a funny character, but I will watch his reality show on Sundance.
Plus: since NBC will not show us the events live, everything has already happened! I may as well be live-blogging the 2000 presidential elections. So, I am stopping this; feel free to talk amongst yourselves. This was a terrible idea. I'm sorry if you like the Winter Olympics.
9:24PMLindsey Jacobellis: The only reason anyone cares about women's snowboard-cross. You will remember that in the last olympics she tried to pull a fancy grab at the finish line and fell. This is the perfect setup for the Olympics-favorite redemption storyline! Will/did she do it? Ha ha. Everyone already knows, but we will pretend you don't.
9:08PM Finally! Someone fell down in the women's snowboard-cross! Ha.
8:58PM One thing about the Winter Olympics, as commenter Saxon 212 points out: Everyone is ringing cowbells. We feel bad for any cows hanging out next to the luge track right now because they must very confused. Anyway: There is a cowbell app for the iPhone, of course. It is called Cowbell2010. It costs 99 cents and is the most popular paid app in the iTunes store, according to the Wall Street Journal. Thank God.
8:45PM Women's luge... Do people actually like watching luge? Constant threat of death aside, it just seems like you could show one luge run and then say something like "And that's basically how it went, give or take a 10th of a second." Luge is highly un-live-bloggable. We want ice skating and/or Dick Button!
8:31PMNow that was some ice-skating! Or so we are told by announcers who actually know what they are talking about!
Plushenko did a quadruple toe-loop to a triple toe-loop. And it earned him a 90.85. Evgeni Plushenko: "He's back!" Although Dick Button thinks there was not the same "Chutzpah" as last time around. But then, his name is Dick Button. Dick Button! Someone needs to assemble a list of weird names from the Olympics and put that shit up on Digg.
8:20PM Holy crap, 2006 Gold Medalist Evgeni Plushenko's profile! It probably set a new standard for Olympic hyperbole. (Which puts it high in the running for most hyperbolic thing ever.) Is this a man who puts on tight pants and spins around on the ice or a Bond Villain with his finger on the trigger of a world destruction device!?
Would love to hear the director commentary on some of these profiles.
8:13PM Men's figure-skating is a boon for anyone who has a thing for men wearing blouses.
8:09PM Guys, they just talked about an upcoming Russian skater but his name was so hard to understand that I can't even Google it. FOREIGNERS.
8:05PM We are told that Florente Amodio's is the "Quintessential Olympic story." Right, because of all those other Brazilian orphans who were diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter disease at 12? ("also known as tibial tubercle apophyseal traction injury" according to Wikipedia".) FACTS.
8:01PM
So, we begin with the ice-skating. French 19 year-old Florente Amodio: could this guy's backstory get any more Dickensian? We are reminded not once, but twice, that this guy was ABANDONED IN THE STREETS OF BRAZIL. Waiting for his long-lost mother to run out on the ice in the middle of routine and beg him to come home.