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2002-02-25 Entry: "Olympic Snippets"

Another slow weekend - I did manage to read the transfer policy document, so I have an idea of what questions to ask as far as Dallas is concerned. Otherwise, I managed to finish copying another tape to CD, but there's still far too many to go.

The Winter Olympics are now over - we got three medals, one gold and two bronze. This, apparently, is the best we've done since about 1930! The gold was for curling, which we invented (well, the Scottish did), so I'd have expected us to be rubbish at it. However, we managed to snatch victory with the last stone.

Meanwhile, bronzes for skiing (how we managed to pull this off is beyond me), and skeleton (where the world champion only managed a third...). Now, skiing is a vaguely sensible sport, but skeleton is a stupid sport - lets ride down a bob-sled track headfirst on a tin tray (reaching speeds of 40+ miles per hour). Are they mad?!

This winter olympics has been marred by controversy - first the Americans try to hijack the international spirit with random patriotism; the impact of September 11th for the rest of the world was that our military had to go and fight in some desert halfway around the world, and our citizens get to be locked up in Cuba. Then, the Canadians complain about the ice skating, claiming they were robbed of gold. But, if you look at the scores, they did better on the technical side than the Russians (who made a mistake), and lost it on the artistic marks (where the minor fault by the Russian pair shouldn't have affected the marks). Of course, the olympic commission caved and issued a second gold medal. This caused the Russians to get all het up and threaten to withdraw. Apparently this would have been a bad thing! We might have got more medals if they'd dropped out!

Anyway, three medals is more than at least one of the Scandinavian countries got, and they're supposed to be good at these sports!