2022 Beijing Winter Olympics

[FrostyWinnipeg]

Time for Jennifer Jones to call it quits.

[JCon]

6 hours ago, FrostyWinnipeg said:

Time for Jennifer Jones to call it quits.

Why? She just beat out the toughest competition in the world to win the Olympic qualifier. 

[SpeedFlex27]

6 hours ago, FrostyWinnipeg said:

Time for Jennifer Jones to call it quits.

[Noeller]

Ehhhhhh.... Here's the thing. Jen fluked her way through the Trials. Fleury and Einar are the two best teams right now, and both Elina Paetz and the British girl who just won Gold are also right there. The truth is, Jen is just about done. It should be Kait's team now. I'm sort of hoping that Jen calls er quits after this season and Kait takes over the team for the next quadrennial. 

[FrostyWinnipeg]

2 hours ago, JCon said:

Why? She just beat out the toughest competition in the world to win the Olympic qualifier. 

Beating the toughest competition in the world WINS YOU OLYMPIC GOLD!

Edited February 20, 2022 by FrostyWinnipeg

[Tracker]

After Beijing Bubble Bursts, Can The IOC Save The Olympics?

BEIJING (AP) — Before he got out of town, the great Canadian snowboarder Mark McMorris called the Beijing Games a version of “sports prison.” He was joking — sort of — but his vision wasn’t that far off.

The cordoned-off Olympic bubble that folds up when the closing ceremony ends Sunday has produced its usual collage of amazing athletes doing great things. This 17-day journey, however, has been witnessed through a sealed-off looking glass — a lens warped and sterilized by Beijing’s organizing committee with underwriting from the Chinese government.

The ultimate sponsor: the International Olympic Committee, which has been under fire for producing Games that, to many, have felt soulless while also being tainted by scandal and political posturing.

“I think that sometimes it doesn’t seem like their heart is in the right place,” the outspoken freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy said. “It feels like it’s a greed game. I mean, the Olympics are so incredible. But it’s a TV show.”
As the IOC pulls up stakes from Beijing, it has 29 months to hit the reset button and hope for a different, COVID-free and much better vibe when the Summer Games go to Paris.

The lingering question is whether, even in a more-welcoming, democratic locale, the Olympic overseers can repair their reputations to the point that people — most notably, the dwindling TV audience and the increasingly alienated throng of athletes — start to enjoy this enterprise again.

Some images they’ll have to work to forget:

—Tennis player Peng Shuai and IOC President Thomas Bach hanging out together to watch freeskier Eileen Gu’s first gold medal.

—The thousands of testers, cloaked head to toe in personal protective gear, shoving swabs down athletes’ throats day after day for their mandatory COVID-19 screenings.

—A sobbing Belgian skeleton racer, Kim Meylemans, going to social media to beg for release from quarantine.

—And, of course, the Russian doping scandal, all perturbingly encapsulated by the image of 15-year-old figure skater Kamila Valieva crying after her disastrous long program while her coach asked: “Why did you stop fighting?”

“For all the wrong reasons,” said Syracuse pop culture professor Robert Thompson, Valieva’s performance last Thursday made for riveting television.

“Surprising, weird and hyper-dramatic,” Thompson said. “Yet today, I searched the hallways in vain to find anyone who had seen it, or even heard tell of it. I’ve been paying close attention to the Olympics for 40 years, and never have I seen one surrounded by so much silence, so little buzz.”

Through last Tuesday, the Nielsen Company said prime-time viewership on NBC ( which pays the lion’s share of the bills for these Games ) and its streaming service, Peacock, was down 42 percent from a 2018 Games that didn’t do all that well, either.

Edited February 20, 2022 by Tracker

[iHeart]

well at least Paris and Milan don't have any serious scandals we need to be concerned about

[Tracker]

34 minutes ago, iHeart said:

well at least Paris and Milan don't have any serious scandals we need to be concerned about

Or that you will hear about. When Ben Johnson was caught using PEDs, there were reliable reports that at least two other gold medal athletes also tested positive for PEDS- one was Lynfors Christie of the UK and Carl Whatisname from the US, but due to politics neither was publicly named. The masking agents have become very sophisticated and effective and will beat the testing regimens far more often than not. 

[iHeart]

3 minutes ago, Tracker said:

Or that you will hear about. When Ben Johnson was caught using PEDs, there were reliable reports that at least two other gold medal athletes also tested positive for PEDS- one was Lynfors Christie of the UK and Carl Whatisname from the US, but due to politics neither was publicly named. The masking agents have become very sophisticated and effective and will beat the testing regimens far more often than not. 

Carl Lewis? 

[Tracker]

15 minutes ago, iHeart said:

Carl Lewis? 

Yup