Olympics blog

U.S. women's hockey player Gigi Marvin plays Wii tennis at the athletes' village in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, on Tuesday. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press/AP)

Vancouver Olympics: Five events you won't see on TV

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff Writer / 02.10.10

Given NBC’s blanket coverage of the Olympic Games, you may think that you can get the full experience of Vancouver from your couch.

You'd be wrong.

Here’s a Top 5 list of things the TV cameras are probably not going to share with you:

1. Gear: When athletes arrive at the airport, they are herded through “processing” – a.k.a. an all-expenses-paid shopping spree for Olympic gear. They are handed a cart and then walk through a cavernous room filled with Olympic watches, shiny red sneakers, and leather Olympic jackets (you have to pay a little for those). Chris Mazdzer, a first-time US Olympian competing in luge, told me he got something like 100 pieces of clothing.

2. Timing: At the biathlon range, officials with Omega were fine-tuning their technology to ensure that they could deliver instantaneous displays on the scoreboard when athletes come into the shooting range. In a tiny hut, Ralph Kleinekathofer, whose title roughly translates to “Lord of the targets,” oversees the rivers of cables coming in from the little computers installed in each of the 30 targets. Omega, the official timekeeper, has 250 tons of equipment here to ensure the medals go to the right folks.

3. Announcements: Did the Brazilian women's cross-country team actually win the Olympic 4x5 km relay today – 16 days ahead of schedule? No – but they seemed like a good choice for making sure all the P.A. systems are go. Brazil isn’t exactly a contender, but check out how one Brazilian trains for skiing on sand.

4. Trail design: Long before any athletes in tights were humming around the stadium at the cross-country venue, Hermod Bjørkstøl of Norway was tromping around the forested hills with his partner-in-crime from the 2002 Olympics, John Aalberg, trying to decide where to cut the trails. A nature lover, he used a preexisting road and an old logging path to minimize the venue’s environmental impact – something the Canadians seem to have embraced in their overall design of the Olympics.

5. Ursine Olympians: The luge track, which snakes through the trees – avoiding the need for a clear cut – has proved extremely friendly to wildlife. One Canadian luge athlete described how he was set to launch himself down the track when he saw a “huge black thing." Next thing he knew, a bear had its claws in the side of the track. His teammates have also had run-ins with bears, while visiting Europeans apparently have pet local raccoons.

---

Tracking the scene in Whistler? Follow Christa on Twitter.

Read entire post | Comments

Whistler's IGA, where I met a head honcho of the Norwegian ski team, has spared no effort in decorating for the Games – everything from color-coordinated streamers to banners of Canadian speedskaters including Cindy Klassen (left). (Christa Case Bryant / The Christian Science Monitor)

Olympic dress rehearsal brings Olympic tests of patience

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff writer / 02.09.10

When the curtains open on the Olympic stage Friday night, all is likely to be in perfect order. But in these last few days of dress rehearsals, there is ample opportunity for everyone from volunteers to journalists to bus drivers to develop an Olympic capacity for patience.

At Cypress Mountain just north of Vancouver, an army of folks has been working tirelessly to create a snowboard half-pipe with hay bales and snow shipped in via helicopters and dump trucks.

With temperatures nearing 50 degrees F. in Vancouver, it feels more like a rainy British spring than the Winter Olympics. But the Vancouver organizing committee (VANOC) is confident the half-pipe, as well as the other snowboard and freestyle skiing courses, will be ready when ladies take to the hill in the moguls competition on Saturday.

Meanwhile, on the winding road between Vancouver and Whistler, where the skiing and sliding events will take place, bus drivers from all over the US and Canada are being sent off with maps marked in green highlighter to try to find destinations most of them have never been to. A few have GPS, but most just have dogged determination.

But you can meet interesting people on the bus – like the rugged character (see photo) who says he cleaned all 17,498 windows in the athlete village with his wife in preparation for the Olympians who are beginning to trickle in. It took them from May to October – and he proudly proclaimed that the examination of his work had recently come back with a report that faulted only six of the windows.

While locals have been preparing for these Games for months, much of the turquoise-suited manpower that was imported for the Olympics is still in training. Canadians are definitely some of the friendliest hosts in the Western world, but there’s not quite that sense of precision and order that distinguished Beijing’s performance as Olympic host. At least not yet.

Of course, the great thing about a little inefficiency at the Olympics is that while you’re waiting for the people in charge to figure out the plan, there’s a high probability that you’ll encounter someone interesting. For example, while waiting in the grocery store line, I discovered that the man in front of me was Hermod Bjørkestøl, a big head honcho with the Norwegian cross-country ski team – which, in Norwegian terms, is like meeting a CEO from the NFL.

Also: Why the Olympics still matter

Follow Christa on Twitter as she tweets live from the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games.

Read entire post | Comments

Olympic medals from the 2006 Torino Winter Games. (Alberto Ramella/AP)

In Whistler and Vancouver, what drives Olympic athletes?

By Christa Case Bryant, Staff Writer / 02.08.10

Here in Whistler – where the highest peak is 2,284 meters above sea level, compared with Vancouver’s 1 meter – the feeling is intimate, probably more akin to what people experienced in Lake Placid in 1980. I step off the bus that is emblazoned with five interlocked rings that represent one of my favorite phenomena: the Olympic Games.

Growing up, I was allowed to watch TV only once every four years. I stayed up past my bedtime to lie in front of our tiny black-and-white TV and watched East Germans, Soviets, and Americans battle each other for winter sport glory.

It must have been during the 1984 Sarajevo Games that I first got the idea in my five-year-old head that I wanted to be an Olympian. That become more of a reality when I was at a training camp as a college freshman and heard the coach – Nikolai Petrovich Anikin, a Soviet legend – talk about his love for cross-country skiing and competing at a high level. He won the Soviet Union’s first gold medal by skiing the anchor leg of the team relay in the 1956 Games in Cortina, Italy. It was a big deal for the nascent communist power.

One of Nikolai’s athletes, John Bauer, who was on something like his eighth year of part-time college study, followed, sharing the feeling of walking into the Opening Ceremony with the US team. About why he was willing to live like a vagabond in his late 20s and not be able to pay his bills or finish school so that he could pursue his Olympic dream.

I was sold. I called my college, told them I wouldn’t be coming back until the following spring, and started my full-time training for the 2002 Games. It was 1997.

Ready to be intimidated

I didn’t know much about Nikolai when my dad shipped me out to Duluth, Minn., where I found a short man with gold teeth who favored track suits and badly translated Russian proverbs. But I was ready to be intimidated.

Instead, he opened his porch door and invited me into his life, telling me there would be many tears, but that I could make the Olympics. I didn’t, but I learned what it meant to live the Olympic spirit – to strive every day for a higher level of discipline, devotion, and patience.

I particularly remember a story Nikolai told from his university days in Moscow.

"My friends, they go in the movies, they go in the dance, they go out with girls," he would start, with an air of feigned frivolity. "But I," he would continue, lowering his voice, "I am practice, practice, practice in the stadium. And next year, I have 1-1/2 minute advantage 15-kilometer race!

"My friends say for me, 'Nikolai, what has happened?' And I say for them, 'You go in the movies, you go in the dance, you go out with girls, but I am practice, practice, practice in the stadium.' "

But his example wasn’t just about what you did in practice or competition. Last fall, when Nikolai passed on, I tracked down people who had known him for decades. His friend Dennis Kruse, in Cable, Wisc., told me about a time when he had to tell Nikolai that a young employee of his smashed into Nikolai’s beloved Jeep – a car that he kept immaculate and rarely drove, because he planned to sell it back in Russia, where it would fetch enough money to retire on. It was the equivalent of someone taking all the money out of your IRA and flushing it down the toilet.

His response? “No problem, Dennis. It’s no problem. These things happen.”

I’m here in Vancouver because I want to tell you about the breadth of character behind Olympic endeavors. The people like Nikolai, who have gold in their heart – as well as around their neck.

Follow Christa on Twitter as she tweets live from the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games.

Read entire post | Comments