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Check out each day's coverage and hot jock in our Olympics
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Feb. 22
action
 Shopping with Weir: Read this
hilarious Washington Post article by Libby Copeland
about a shopping trip with Johnny Weir in Torino. Some
choice bits in italics:
"He has:
nearly 40 pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage. A Louis Vuitton
hatbox and a Louis Vuitton mini steamer trunk, and a Louis
Vuitton doggy carrying case, which his dog did not like ("he
peed in it"), so Johnny returned it and got another bag for
himself. He has all the beautiful things a young man who
believes in beauty could want. Someday, he says, he wants to
go to college, become a fashion designer. There is so much
he wants to do, he says, he doesn't know how to get it all
done."
This
boy has balls: Returning the Louis Vuitton doggie case after
his dog peed in it.
For breakfast, he "orders a biscuit, which is all -- aside
from an orange -- that he will eat today, at least until 6
p.m."
He just
eats a biscuit and an orange before 6 p.m.? Our
concentration on eating disorders among the ski jumpers has
been all misplaced!
He heads into an eyewear store and tries on a pair of Dior
sunglasses encrusted with rhinestones that, at nearly
$1,200, he decides are too expensive. Besides, he already
has this pair without the rhinestones, he says. Besides, he
already has 45 pairs of Dior sunglasses.
He has 45
pairs of Dior sunglasses, which must rival the pope's Prada
collection.
He
believes in buying real designer stuff; when he sees someone
with a knockoff handbag, "it hurts my feelings," he says.
It hurts
his feelings when people wear knockoff handbags -- so how
horrible he must he feel when he goes to China?
In truth the Olympics are not how someone like Johnny Weir
pays for his expensive children. He says he makes six
figures a year through exhibition skates. He's promised to
pay his 17-year-old brother's college tuition. He buys his
mother handbags. He grew up somewhere between working and
middle class in rural Pennsylvania, the son of a secretary
and a nuclear power plant technician, and sometimes he
wonders if he buys so much because he grew up with not so
much. Even when he goes to the supermarket, he says, he buys
more yogurt than he needs, "just in case it goes away."
Like Joan
Rivers doubling up on shoe purchases, he buys more than he
needs "just in case it goes away."
Sitting down to arrange the laces on his new sneakers (whose
laces he refuses to tie but instead carefully wraps and
tucks in elaborate fashion), Johnny spots a pair of $320
Roberto Cavalli shades. He gives them to the saleslady to
ring up. This, he says, will bring his sunglasses collection
to 103 pairs, which he keeps arranged in drawers according
to designer.
Shoelaces
are elaborately wrapped and tucked but not tied? How long
does it take him to get out the door in the morning?
Oh Johnny,
we need office pools to determine how GAY you can be before
you actually Say It! He's not just any ordinary diva: He's
J-Diva, the Divine. (Brent
Mullins)
Weir
loves the Russians: The New York Times
has a piece today about how the Russia hospitality
house is the place to go to in Torino, and who else should
show up by our man Weir:
Weir, who finished fifth last week in the men's figure
skating competition, showed up at the Russia House after
midnight Tuesday, for his second consecutive night of
partying with his favorite comrades.
This time, he wore a beaver-and-python jacket and True
Religion jeans, blending in with the other men and women in
fur and designer duds. In minutes, he had a leggy Russian
woman in stilettos on each of his arms. The trio giggled as
they skipped past the hors d'oeuvres.
"These are friends of the lawyer of the richest man in
Moscow," Weir said in passing, as the women tossed their
long hair. "These Russians know how to have a good time."
The
women interrupt him: "C'mon, Johnny," one brunette said, in
a heavy Russian accent. "We want to dance."
"Dve
minuti!" he yelled out in Russian, telling them to wait
two minutes before running off.
 Art
of speed skating: If you haven't already, check out a
tremendous
gallery of 16 images of world-class speed skaters,
including Cees Juffermans of the Netherlands, by Dutch
photographer Ewoud Broeksma. It is amazing that Broeksma
gets these athletes to show their beauty and strength
naturally.
The tabloid Games: NBC's effort to tabloidize the Games and win the
ratings war may finally be paying off. Other media are
noticing it, including USA Today and wire services.
USA Today said this morning: "With fresh stars and dramatic story
lines emerging, NBC's coverage finally caught fire the last
few nights. Women's figure skating is usually the
highest-rated event. .... The star power puts NBC in
stronger shape for Thursday, when parts of the women's
finale will compete for viewers with Fox's American Idol,
CBS' Survivor and ABC's Dancing with the Stars. NBC also
capitalized Tuesday on the tension between bitter U.S. speed
skating rivals Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick."
Translation: NBC has successfully stoked the fires of
controversy and a National Enquirer kind of hype.
Since a growing number of Americans appear bored with the
actual competition, NBC is desperate to lure more viewers,
so the advertising will be seen. Olympics ads are cheaper
than Super Bowl ads, but advertisers did spend millions for
the privilege of being showcased at Torino. If Torino's
ratings continue to be soft, and advertisers wind up
feeling unhappy, we may see a narrowed broadcast format at
Beijing and Vancouver, with advertisers and networks
minimizing their risk.
So NBC is turning to tabloid type news coverage in hopes of
bridging the gap. Many of these tabloid stories have
been nursed into high flammability by the media.
Example: the drug scandal around
Austrian cross-country/biathlon coach Walter Mayer, which
has reached the top of the network news. This story
conveniently has all the plot points of an Hollywood action
flick, complete with cops, car chase and suicide
attempt. For obvious reasons, the U.S. media paid way
less attention to the festering scandal around our
own bobsled/skeleton team. After lots of
litigation, skeleton competitor Zach Lund was finally banned
from Torino for doping. Skeleton coach Tim Nardiello
was suspended for alleged sexual harassment, but -- like
Mayer -- he ignored orders to stay away from the team when
they got to Europe. So Nardiello was fired and sent home.
Another
example: the ongoing Davis/Hedrick spat. Far from
"capitalizing" on the story, the media have done everything
possible to keep things stirred up. This includes numerous
instances of deliberate misreporting on the team pursuit
situation, making it look like Davis had welched on
something he was obligated to do. Media have also tried to
make it look like the two men alone are responsible for the
uproar. Clearly Davis and Hedrick do feel hostile towards,
each other. Clearly Hedrick feels aided and abetted by
all the media carping about medals. But he and Davis should
have been smart enough to avoid playing into the hands of
the media. At the now-famous press conference Tuesday, you
could see the reporters skillfully egging Davis and
Hedrick on with inflammatory questions. These are reporters
who can manipulate heads of state, so the two athletes were
putty in their hands.
Meanwhile, to keep the Shani Davis thread going, the media
discovered that back in 2003 Davis filed a racial-profiling
lawsuit against Chicago police. But today's headlines were
in the present tense, implying that the filing is just
happening now and is somehow connected with the Hedrick
spat.
Speaking of
the medal count: I'm baffled by all the weeping and wailing
about our alleged "poor showing." Today the U.S.
total stands at 18 medals. This is way more than we've won
in the past. We have to discount the 34 won in Salt Lake,
because we won them on our home court. Olympic teams always
do better on their home courts. It's a given in Olympic
competition. What colossal hubris made us think that the
U.S. was a shoo-in for more than 34 medals in Italy?
In 1998, we won 13. In 1994, we also won 13. In 1992, we
won 11. In 1988 we won a dismal total of 6, and were very
far down the list of totals by nation. So we are actually
are improving our performance in Torino. We ought to stop
whining, and give our athletes some credit for doing so
well.
Will NBC whomp up its ratings enough to win its own "game"
with network competitors? Stay tuned.
(Patricia
Nell Warren)
"Idol" Wins Again: "American Idol" beat the Olympics head to
head Tuesday night, 30 millions viewers to 22 million, but
it was a better showing for NBC than a week earlier. After
"Idol" ended, 25 million tuned to NBC to watch Sasha Cohen
skate, the most viewers for any night of the Olympics.
(Jim
Buzinski)
 Hot
jock of the day: Bjorn Lind is a 27-year-old, 6-3, 185-pound
cross-country skier from Sweden who won the men's sprint on
Wednesday. It is his second gold of the Games. Click
here for a full-size pic of the stud Swede.
I heard somewhere that cross-country skiers are the most fit
athletes as measured by oxygen intake etc. I don't doubt it.
That's why I have newfound respect for biathletes (even if
the shooting thing is pretty anachronistic). You have this
grueling ski part, then you need to calm down and focus on
shooting at a target much smaller than Harry Whittington.
(Jim
Buzinski)
Let's
curl:
I love curling. It's my favorite sport in the Winter
Olympics besides luge. I've been recording the men's
curling competition on my DVR and fast forwarding through it
(it's great that 3 hours of coverage takes 15 minutes to
watch).
I like
curling because it reminds me of playing marbles when I was
a kid. It helps too that a lot of the participants are
pale, geeky guys that look like they work in banks when not
curling.
On
Wednesday, it was two interesting semifinals: the United
States against world curling power Canada and Great Britain
versus Finland. First off, this "Great Britain" stuff is
silly, because the entire British curling team is Scottish
and, as I was politely told in Edinburgh years ago "We're
British on paper, but we're NOT like the English".
In any
case, Canada beat the United States 11-6, with hottie Brad
Gushue of Canada sliding an amazing shot that knocked out
the U.S. stone, while not touching the other four Canadian
stones in the scoring circles. Bingo, 5 points for Canada
and the win. Great Britain lost as only the Brits can in
sporting events: in heartbreaking fashion.
Scotland is
the birthplace of curling and the British team was expected
to make the finals. However, plucky Finland (see: more pale
geeky guys) used a truly clutch shot by the wonderfully
named Markku Uusipaavalniemi to stun Scotland, er, Great
Britain. The match looked like it was going to a
tie-breaker, but Markku placed a shot that had about a 3
inch margin of error right in the center circle to send the
upstart Finns to the final.
Canada has
to be heavily favored, but hey, that's why they throw the
stones and brush the ice, because anything can happen. Set
your DVR's for Friday afternoon (2-5 pm, Pacific) for the
final. (Jim Allen)
Time
to get serious about curling:
There
hasn’t been much said about curling because we’ve just had a
full week and a half of round robin games and it’s really,
really hard to care about curling in that format. Every time
I turn on the TV there’s another curling match going on with
a commentator explaining how if this team beats that team
and this other team on a different day doesn’t lose to that
other team, then the team we’re watching right now might
advance to the medal round. That’s usually when I check to
see if The Cutting Edge is showing again on WGN.
But now
I’m psyched about curling. Now we’ve weeded out the wannabes
and separated the men from the boys, the players from the
posers, the contenders from the pretenders, or, as they
probably say in curling, the sweepers from the weepers. Now
it’s do-or-die tournament time.
First
the ladies, who saw semifinal action Wednesday. In an
all-Scandinavian showdown, Sweden beat Norway to advance to
Thursday’s gold medal game. The Swedes will knock rocks with
Switzerland, who got the better of Canada. The Americans
(2-7) did not make the medal round. They ended their
Olympics tied for 8th in the rankings with
Denmark and better than only the Italians.
On the
men’s side a semifinal match was set between Team Canada and
Team Minnesota (aka Team USA; all of them are from Minnesota
and near as I can tell the sport doesn’t exist much in the
US outside of that state). For perspective, there are about
15,000 curlers in the US compared to 1 million curlers in
Canada.
Before I
get to the results, a word or two about Team Minnesota. A
quick look at their bios at the NBC Olympics web site
reveals that they are an eclectic group. Pete Fenson owns a
pizzeria (called Dave’s Pizza); Shawn Rojeski says he’s
single (um, we need more info than that. What are you
looking for? In the meantime, to improve your chances get
out of a. Minnesota, and b. curling); Scott Baird, at 54, is
the oldest athlete in Olympic history; and then there are
the two 23 year olds, Joe Polo and John Schuster. Both list
their favorite activities as hunting and fishing (half of
Polo’s 24 NBC photos show him posing with a dead animal).
Schuster says he wants to try freestyle aerials and Polo
says he wants to try skelton. Not enough thrills in curling,
eh?
Anyway,
Team Minnesota got spanked by Canada today 5-11. They will
play Friday for bronze, which would be the first ever men’s
or women’s curling medal for the USA.
In the
other semifinal it was Finland eeking out Great Britain 4-3
in a low scoring game. Despite the loss, the chance to play
for bronze is immensely exciting for Great Britain, whose
only medal so far in Torino has been the gold medal awarded
posthumously to the 1924 British curling team. After all
these years, the IOC finally decided to end the debate over
whether the 1924 curling competition was an official Olympic
event. It was! The medals were awarded to Great Britain in
Torino just before the 2006 Games got underway.
(Ryan
Quinn)
Sweet
curling play of the day (in case you missed it):
We’re in the 5th end, Canada leading 4-2 with 2 stones
resting on the button. Canada just needs to play defense and
get out of this end ahead. They call a time out to talk it
over (there are time outs in curling!). Hoping to take
advantage of Team Minnesota’s poor shooting today, Canada
leaves 3 consecutive stones short, to guard the house. The
strategy works twice, but Team Minnesota has the hammer and
Pete Fenson takes an aggressive line right at the button
with his final shot. It’s perfectly placed and gives just
enough of a tap to Canada’s stones to displace them and
steel the point. USA! USA! USA!
(Ryan
Quinn)
Freestyle
Aerials:
Congratulations to all 12 finalists in the women’s freestyle
aerials competition, who launched themselves off a 14 foot
jump that they couldn’t even see until they were on it due
to the thick fog. I question the safety, legality, and
sanity of even holding the competition in those conditions,
but no one seemed to be complaining. A triple-twisting
triple back flip 40 feet in the air? No thanks, not even on
a clear sunny day. But I’ll watch.
(Ryan
Quinn)
XC
Skiing:
The
North American women had one of their best days of
cross-country ski racing ever in Wednesday’s individual
sprint. The sprint event takes place on a 1.3K course,
beginning with a qualification round in which skiers start
one at a time and race the clock—the top 30 times advance to
head-to-head elimination heats.
The
USA’s Kikkan Randall qualified for the heats along with 3
Canadian women, including Beckie Scott and Sara Renner, who
had teamed up to win a silver medal for Canada in the sprint
relay last week. But in sprint races, where positioning and
tactics are important and unpredictable, anything can
happen. Renner was bumped out in her quarterfinal heat and
Randall was eliminated in the semis. But Scott and Crawford
survived to the final. I would have picked Scott to take
gold, but she fell to 4th and it was the dark
horse Canadian Crawford who came away with the biggest win
of her life.
In the
men’s race, American speedster Andy Newell had an impressive
2nd place finish in the qualification run, but
was eliminated prematurely in the quarterfinals. Meanwhile,
Swedes Bjorn Lind and Thobias Fredriksson won gold and
bronze, respectively. Sweden, a skiing powerhouse over the
last century, had not won an Olympic gold medal in 18 years
until coming to Torino. Lind’s gold was Sweden’s third at
these Games; Sweden swept the men’s and women’s sprint
relays last week. Again, as has become a subplot of these
Games, Norwegian skiers were nowhere to be seen when it came
time to hand out the medals.
(Ryan
Quinn) |
