Rio 2016 - Day 1 (August 6)

Our first day at the Olympics has us off to see women's team handball in the Future Arena in the Barra de Tijuca Olympic Park. This is the Olympic park that desperately needed the Metro 4 line to open in order to get spectators from the downtown area to this arena in the affluent SW suburbs. The game starts at 9:30 am so we are awake, showered, dressed and ready to eat breakfast when the dining area opens at 6 am. We are greeted by a elderly black man who is apparently in charge of the breakfast area. He says "Bom Dia" (sounds to me like bom geeah). When we look at him quizzically, he smiles and says "good morning, bom dia".

There is a unsweetened yogurt, juice, lots of fruit (mangoes, bananas, pineapple, guava, melon) and breads as well as what looks like some sort of pancake and quite thick slabs of bacon. We try to take anything that we can't get at home. It's all good, but it is time to go.

Rather than going to the Metro station where we bought the 7 day passes, we walk in the opposite direction toward what Beth thinks will be slightly closer 2nd stop on the Metro 4 line. She is right! During the Olympics, only people with event tickets and Metro passes are allowed to ride so we are greeted at the entrance to the station by two Olympic volunteers and two security people. We show our tickets and then let us in. We really like the design of the area where you swipe your cards:

There are a couple families on the train when we get on the train. The young kids all look at me covered with Olympic pins. This is the signal I'm waiting for and get a bunch of big smiles when I hand them a pin. Their parents all speak at least some English and they want to know about where we're from and about other Olympics.

At the end of the Metro 4 line, we walk to one end of the station, swipe our cards and almost immediately are loaded onto a waiting bus to take us to the Olympic Bus Station outside the Olympic park. I'm standing next to a very friendly guy who turns out to be an actor that worked for a number of years in New York City, but had trouble getting a lot of work because he speaks English with a heavy accent. He returned to Brazil a couple of years ago and is very happy. He wants to tell us all about Brazil - that it would be the same size as the US if we left out Alaska, that it has a very diverse population, that the housing in Barra de Tijuca is more expensive than in New York City. He says that although he is an actor, for the Olympics, he's working as a cook because, as he says, "they pay very, very well".

After about a 20 minute drive, the bus drops us at the Olympic Bus Station. One of our first criteria for whether an Olympics will be a success is transportation so this trip was one strong vote in Rio's favor. In front of us, we see what looks like a very temporary overhead walkway that passes over the highway next door and down to the Olympic park. When we finally get to the queues for security, we found that the Brazilians have an unusual way of doing them. Instead of a series of perhaps 3 or 4 very long parallel walkways with 180 degree turns at each end, the Brazilians have filled the same space with a whole bunch of very short perpendicular segments. Walking through them feels a lot like skiing - one two three steps, turn, one two three steps, turn... The only problem is that the feet holding up the railings stick far enough into the very narrow rows that the chance of tripping is high. Sure enough, a couple minutes later, a woman in front of us trips and falls. She's banged up, but seems to be okay. I am very careful with where I put my feet after that.

Security is relatively uneventful. It takes us a little bit of time to figure out which is the bag line because all of the Olympic volunteers are giving directions in Portuguese, but we finally make it into the right line. They hardly give my vest and hat a second thought as we pass through. Another short walk to where we show the volunteers our event tickets and we are into the Olympic Park. Both Beijing and London had similar parks with a lot of nearby arenas. I think that this area was originally built to be a large convention center similar to Moscone Center in San Francisco. So these venues are permanent. However, they've added a bunch more, many of which look like they will be taken down right after the Paralympics ends.

It takes us about 15 minutes to walk over to the Future arena near the far side of the Park. We have A level seats for this one and after getting wrong directions from several Olympic volunteers (no worries - it is their first day too!), we find our seats in the 3rd row at the equivalent of the 25 yard line.

Today we are going to see two matches: Brazil versus Norway and Netherlands versus France in women's team handball. For those of you that are new to this sport (that includes nearly everyone in the US!), handball is played on a slightly longer than basketball court length court. At each end are what looks like small soccer goals. The game is played with what looks like a small soccer ball. Players can dribble the ball or can run up to 3 steps after a dribble, but they can only stand still for 3 seconds before passing or dribbling. Surrounding each net is a 6 meter diameter circle. Players are trying to throw the ball into the net without stepping into the 6 meter circle.

Sometimes, players will reach the 6 meter line without any one defending them and will launch themselves into the air before trying to throw the ball past the goal keeper like this:

But more often, there is a lot of defense to the shot:

Norway is in the red and Brazil is in the yellow. Both of these teams are recent world champions and the quality of play is very high. As you can see in this picture, the Brazilians are much bigger and they have decided to play a very physical style of play against the Norwegians. We come to appreciate the play of the Norwegian pivot, 33 year old Heidi Løke. First, we just like the name because Loki is the Scandinavian mythological trickster. But we also appreciate her work. The pivot plays at the top of the 6 meter circle, directly in front of the goal keeper. Her job is to create holes in the defense that the center can use to get off a shot or to be available to take a shot if the center drops of the ball during a drive to the net. She is also responsible for guarding the opposing pivot. Here is a picture of her on offense:

She spent nearly the first half with a tissue stuffed up her nose after getting an elbow to the face early in the game, but she hung in there and was very effective.

The game was tight throughout with the lead rarely being more than 1 or 2 goals. But in the end, the Brazilians pulled away to win 31-28. In the handshake line, a lot of the Brazilians hugged Heidi making me think that they all play professional team handball together in Europe.

The second match is much less exciting. The French team, which seems to have a big influx of transplanted African athletes were more talented than the Dutch, but the Dutch played tenacious defense and were carried for most of the match by the strong play of their goal keeper Tess Wester. Team handball is very popular in Europe so both of these teams have a bunch of fans in the stands. Here are the french fans:

And of course, the dutch fans are legendary for their love of sport and for having a great time wherever they go:

But despite their efforts on defense, the French are just too strong and end up winning 18-14.

It is now 1 pm and time to get something to eat. We head over to the food area and discover that the Olympic organizers, in their desire to speed up the food lines, have created a separate line where you pay for the food, get a voucher and then go to the food lines to pick up your purchases. Unfortunately, there are not enough payment lines so there are practically no people in the food lines and humongous lines to pay. We decide to head over to the Olympic superstore to pick up some Olympic swag and hope that the lines will be better latter.

Of course, the superstore also has a huge line, but at least it seems to be moving pretty fast and after about 15 minutes, we make it into the store. Sean, who was the only one of us not wearing a hat in the midday sun, decides to get a mascot hat. The Rio 2016 mascot is named Vinicius and is supposed to be a blend of Brazilian animals. Sean likes the hat because it has ears on it and a long green tail. Beth and I get t-shirts with the sports pictograms and I head over to the pin area and showing great restraint, only buy about 12.

We head back outside and discover that the lines are still huge, but we are pretty hungry and thirsty by this time in the hot sun (about 88 degrees F) so we go through the lines and get a light meal. Unlike most of the previous Olympics, the food court does not appear to have much of anything that looks like Brazilian cuisine. There are hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, pizza and a couple forms of pasta. Disappointing!

We think about exploring the rest of the Park (there are a number of Olympic sponsor display areas in addition to the other arenas), but we are pretty cooked and decide to head for the hotel. The trip back is almost as smooth as the ride to the Park. I manage to give away a bunch more pins on the bus and train. We're still a little jet lagged so we take an afternoon nap before heading out for dinner.

Since we ate lunch late, we're not very hungry. We finally happen upon a middle eastern themed place selling falafel and shwarma wraps. Tasty and not too heavy. On our way back to the hotel, we discover a gelato place that was excellent. We'll be back here again before our time in Rio ends.

Feeling happy with our first day, we go back to our room to watch the evening's Olympic events. Unfortunately, the TV only shows low resolution video so it is a lot like watching circa 1980 TV. But there are something like 20 channels of coverage so there is no problem finding something that we want to watch. It is a little early to tell, but it appears that the Brazilians do not use NBC's formula of covering only the sports that the home team is good at. They also show the event all the way through rather than showing only the top 3-4 performances.

Tomorrow, we're off to table tennis. I apologize for the time that it is taking to get these blogs out, but our schedule has been pretty loaded so far. I hope to do better during the next week. In the meantime, stay tuned!

Steps for the day - 11,591

Rio 2016 - Day 0 (August 5)

Note: Since the Olympic Schedule begins with Day 1 the day after the Opening Ceremonies so we have two Day 0. Sorry for the confusion.

When we arrived at the gate for our flight to Rio de Janeiro, we discover that the Team USA Gymnastics team is traveling with us. We see Simone Biles, who is very likely to win at least one gold medal, Madison Kocian and mens' team member Sam Mikulak, but it is likely that there were others that we didn't see or recognize. That they are all on our flight makes a certain amount of sense because women's team director Martha Karolyi's ranch is located in Huntsville, TX - about 30 miles north of Houston. All of the people waiting to board broke into applause when they, and their families were allowed to board before anyone else. But they were only a small fraction of the number of athletes on this flight. We saw other people wearing the team uniforms of Canada, Germany and Egypt to name only a few. Additionally there were countless other support people. For example, the guy sitting directly in front of me was a french guy who is the synchronized swimming choreographer for the Czech Republic team.

Once on the plane, we noticed that everyone got a little Team USA swag since United Airlines is a longtime Team USA sponsor. We got Olympic eyeshades and red, white and blue socks to wear on the flight. Pretty cool, but I would have traded it in a second for a couple extra inches of legroom. I amused Beth and Sean by managing to take off my shoes and put on the socks without leaving my seat - a lot like trying to change clothes in a phonebook (note to our younger readers - a phone booth was a small room with a pay telephone!  The flight itself was pretty long, about 10 hours 15 minutes. We flew more or less easterly passing over the end of Florida and the Dominican Republic before entering South American airspace over Venezuela. I can't say that we saw much out the window because we were trying hard to look at the insides of our eyelids. I was fairly successful in getting some sleep despite the lack of legroom, but Beth and Sean ended up spending a lot of the evening playing games on the seatbacks in front of them.

Everything was going smoothly as we got off the plane and started the long walk to passport control until we ran into this:

It took us quite a long time to figure out what was going on. We discovered that there were three guys at the end of the line who were collecting fingerprints for everyone coming from planes. Once we finally got to that point, we passed through passport control with no problem -  I even managed to give away my first pin to one of the supervisors. Once we picked up our bags from the carosel, we had to put them through X-ray machines before going through customs. The operator backed up and re-scanned my suitcase and backpack which combined had at least 1,000 Olympic pins. She let us go without a bag search, but at least she was paying attention. 

We walked out of customs and expected to see someone from Kingdom Sports Group holding a sign with our name on it. Unfortunately, there was no one there. One of the Olympic volunteers was able to find us a taxi, or a guy who was willing to take us to Ipanema. It was not clear to us that he was a taxi because there was no meter or sign on the roof of his car. Our driver was probably around 70 years old and was quite friendly. Unfortunately, he spoke no English and the only Portuguese words we currently know are Ola (hello) and Obrigado (thank you). But based on the road signs, he took us in a pretty direct route to the hotel.

Along the way, we see a car that has been pulled over by a military truck and there were at least 4 soldiers pointing assault rifles at the car. They are certainly serious about security. From what we can see from the car, the coastline around Rio is the only flat ground. There are serious looking hills and mountains quite close by. The area near the airport looks a lot like a third world business area - lots of factories and apartment blocks packed in next to each other. Up ahead, we see a tall mountain and on the top is the Cristo Redentor (Christ the Redeemer) - an huge art deco statue and voted one of the new 7 wonders of the world. We hope to get up to the top later in our stay.

We enter a huge tunnel under the Cristo statue's mountain. About halfway through the tunnel, we are passed by four motorcycle police who are going really fast somewhere. More indication that Brazil is really taking Olympic security seriously. When we come out on the other side of the tunnel, it was like stepping into a new world. Here there are parks and lots of people walking around. We see what has to be the rowing venue off to the right and signs to other Olympic venues ahead.

After a few more turns, we arrive at the Hotel Vermont in Ipanema. I'll try to figure out whether the hotel is named after the US state in New England or green mountain in French. Kingdom Sports Group provides hotels and Olympic tickets for a lot of African countries so we are not surprised to see a bunch of African looking people in the lobby when we arrive. Maybe they have pins, but for now, I'm only interested in washing my face and brushing my teeth. We head to the elevator for a ride to our room on the 6th floor. The elevator says that it can hold 5 people, but only if they are very friendly. Just the 3 of us feels a little claustrophobic. We are on the 6th floor (out of 10). This is a very skinny hotel - perhaps two rooms wide and much deeper. There are only 6 rooms on each floor with two elevators and a spiral shaped staircase.

Although we all would like to take a nap, we convince each other that it would be better for us to acclimate to the time zone by getting exposed to the sun and staying up as long as possible. We find a fast food place that has English menus, but no English speaking waiters. Fortunately, a friendly diner helps us to make sure that they take credit cards and we sit down to lunch. Beth had a tapioca pancake with butter, Sean is looking pretty wrecked and decides to have only an açai smoothie (açai is a dark purple berry from the Amazon that Sean says tastes a little like a boisonberry with a different aftertaste). I have a salmon, cream cheese and arrugula sandwich. It is all great!

Next stop is to buy tickets for the Metro subway that will take us to the main Olympic Park in Barra da Tijuca tomorrow morning. Beth has figured out that there is a Metro station nearby so we head off. We find the station and stand in line to get three 7 day passes. While we are standing, we are helped by a volunteer who speaks quite good English. He tells us that the vending machines only take debit cards and we left those at home so we have to stand in another line to pay cash. From what we've seen so far, it does not appear that the Brazilians mind standing in line. Mission accomplished, we head out of the station. Overhead, we can see the frigate birds (huge tropical birds that keep themselves fed by stealing food from other birds) circling. This convinces me that we should take a quick 3 block detour and check out Ipanema beach before heading back to the hotel. Even though it is winter here, the beach is busy. Here is a view:

It doesn't look very busy, but that is because this beach is miles and miles long. As you can tell from the woman just to left of center, the Brazilian people are not body-conscious. In fact, in a few minutes, we see people of all shapes, colors, ages and sizes wearing skimpy bathing suits. But we are pretty pale body-conscious people so we decide to head back to the hotel and get out of the sun.

We take a quick nap and I work on my illegal pin project for a while before heading out for dinner. We decide to dine at what is called a kilo restaurant. It is a buffet where you pay based on the amount of food you take. When Sean has gone to soft-serve ice cream places like this, he has usually found that his cost is higher than he would like. But we are all fairly conservative, even though there are a wide variety of foods we've never tried and the total cost worked out to less than $20/person including desert.

By this time, we are all seriously fading, but we want to watch at least part of the Opening Ceremonies. My favorite part is at the beginning. This is where the host country gets to tell the world what the host country things they should know about them. It is always interesting to see what they choose. We really liked the parts with the Amazonian people living with nature and their spin on Portuguese colonization in helping to build the modern Brazil. I also liked the emphasis on global warming and the need to save the world. I will be interested to see how this plays in the US, but it should have been a clear message to the US that the rest of the world considers this a major problem. I thought that having each of the athletes plant a seed to produce an Olympian forest was a nice touch.

We did not make it through the parade of nations, but I stayed up long enough to see a friend of mine, Chris Spalding, march into the arena with the team from Guam. Chris is a physiotherapist who has been donating his services to mostly Pacific island nations for the last 20 years or so.

As I write this, I'm already at the end of Day 1 (Aug 6th) and falling behind as usual. I'll do my best to keep up with the action, but I hope that you'll enjoy it even if the information is a little dated. Stay tuned!

Steps for the day - 7,302

Rio 2016 - Day 0 (August 4)

Travel day! All of the stress of getting stuff done at work for the past several days blends into the need to pack and try to forget as few items as possible. Since Rio is 4 time zones east of us, I get up at 3am local time. Sean, who has had a completely bizarre sleep schedule all summer is already awake when I go down stairs. Beth has decided to get up at our usual 5:30am. This gives me a couple hours to work on my pin project. For those that are new to these blogs, I have to explain about Olympic pins. Pin collecting and pin trading are the Olympic sport for the spectators. While I long ago decided to only collect team pins that are given to athletes of each of the 206 or so National Olympic Committees (NOCs), that does not mean that I don't trade for or buy other types of Olympic pins. While I now give away many more pins that I buy or trade for, I still have well more than 10,000 of these little metal buggers lying around.

Much more about pins later. But this obsession with NOC pins has led to an unusual spinoff. The board of directors of the Olympic memorabilia club that I belong to, called Olympin, figured out that I was both very anal (duh) and tech savvy. This made me the perfect candidate to keep track of all of the NOC pins that are produced for a particular Olympics. So after every Olympics, I produce a list for the members of all of the pins produced by each NOC. With no access to the Olympic Village and the athletes, I usually saw these pins on auction sites like eBay or was told about them by Olympin members who did have access to the Olympic Village. My conversations often seemed to go like this: "I just saw this pin on eBay that was not on my list." "Don't worry about that one, it is a fake". In fact, I came to see that there were certain Olympic fanatics who produced bunches of bogus Olympic pins and traded them for legitimate pins. Some of these pins went into their collection. The rest were sold off to pay for their Olympic trips. This really began to bug me and one day I uttered the fateful words "Someone should do something about this!" Olympin leadership are no fools and they were quick to thank me for volunteering and put me in charge of the project to try to reduce the number of phony NOC pins.

So here I am at 3am madly copying pictures from eBay of Rio NOC pins that I haven't seen previously. Once I have the raw pictures, I have to Photoshop them into the appropriate size. The final step is to contact the various NOCs and ask them if a particular pin was authorized by them. Then I load them onto the website in the hope that this will help collectors avoid being scammed. Head over to www.olympinclub.org/comnocpins_search.php to see what it looks like. As of this morning, I know of almost 430 pins and the numbers of new pins are still going up very fast. On top of this project, I also volunteered to do the image collection, Photoshop and data entry for another group that is trying to do the same with media pins. They have about 130 images as of this morning. The worst part is that the fraudsters will drop all of their fake pins in the next 2+ weeks so if we are going to stop them, it has to be soon. Add in actually attending Olympic events and seeing some of the city, I'm hoping that I'll get some time to sleep!

The flight from San Jose to Houston was uneventful,, except that I broke the watchband on my watch. I had this watch for a long time and would have thrown it out when Beth bought me an iWatch except that the battery had the audacity to keep going. I thought that this would make a perfect watch for my "who me, no, no way that I'm an American" look that I'm cultivating in Rio. I was all set to go the watchless Millennial route when we happened upon a Swatch store in Houston airport. This was our first trip through Houston and the airport looks a lot like a shopping mall disguised as an airport. Anyway, I knew that Swatch has been an Olympic sponsor for a long time and were sure to have an appropriate model. I bypassed the official Team USA watches and went with this one:

We have a three hour layover so I'm working on the blog. While I'm sitting here, a woman with a eastern European accent comes over and asks to look at the pins on my hat. This is, after all, why I started collecting pins in the first place. They are only little pieces of metal, but by wearing them, all sorts of people will come up and talk to me when I am far too shy to go up and talk to them. We have a nice conversation and she apologizes for not being able to trade because her pins are packed in her luggage. Sean looks at me, rolls his eyes and says "and so it begins".

Steps for the day - 3,563

Rio 2016 - Day -1 (August 3)

Welcome to the blog of our trip to the Games of the XXXI Olympiad in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - the first Olympics to be held in South America and our 12th trip to the Olympics!

Zika and Pollution and Crime oh my (sung to the "Wizard of Oz" song Lions and Tigers and Bears oh my!)! It has become a tradition for the press to pile up negative articles about an upcoming Olympic Games and Rio 2016 is certainly no exception. And to be honest, Rio does have more than it's fair share of problems, including government instability, economic collapse, crime, enormous income inequality, infectious diseases, threatened ISIS terror attacks and rampant corruption. But it also has tremendous natural beauty and a population that loves to party and is passionate about sports. It is my hope that by the end of the next three weeks, the later will far outweigh the former. Mark Purdy, the sports columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, in his last column before leaving for Rio (his 14th Olympics) said: "The Olympic Games generally succeed because, despite all the other stuff going on in the world as well as the issues that can plague the games themselves, the vast majority of humanity wants it all to succeed." I completely agree.

But we are not going into this adventure wearing rose-colored glasses. Despite a drop in the number of cases of Zika in Rio state from 3,000-3,500 cases/week early this year to 30 cases/week in June and Beth and I being well past reproductive age, we'll be wearing long pants and long sleeve shirts every day as well as applying DEET to all exposed skin. Sean, at the time of this writing, is still weighing the cost of the discomfort of wearing long clothes when he would rather wear shorts and a t-shirt versus the estimated 15 in 6+ million chance of contracting Zika. We're also going to keep our pockets empty and put our valuables (money, tickets, passports, etc.) in pouches hung around our necks with cut-proof wires. We are also going to leave our jewelry and iWatches at home and try to appear as anonymous as possible - or at least as anonymous as anyone can be when standing 6 foot 4 and wearing a vest and hat covered with hundreds of Olympic pins. Can we still find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time? Sure, but we know that we've done what we could to minimize our risks.

As in previous blogs, we are not sure about the availability or quality of Wi-Fi in Rio so I'll try to give you an overview of our first couple of days there. We've got a flight at around noon tomorrow (August 4th) from San Jose to Houston. There, we have about a 3-hour layover before getting on a red-eye to Rio de Janeiro. We arrive in Rio around 9am on Friday, August 5th - the morning before the Opening Ceremonies and will be staying at the hotel Vermont (http://www.hotelvermont.com.br/) a couple blocks from Ipanema beach (as in the song "The Girl from Ipanema"). There is a quite long story explaining how we ended up in this hotel, but I'll save that for another day.

Until tomorrow (or whenever I get internet access), stay tuned!

Sochi Olympics Day 14 - Bowed, but not beaten

Note: The Olympic Cauldron in Sochi has been extinguished, waiting to be re-lit two years from now in Rio de Janiero, Brazil. But I am still trying to catch up on my writing. I hope to have another couple of blogs up in the next few days.

The last few days have not been kind to the US Olympic team in their battles with the mostly friendly rival to the north, Canada. On Wednesday, the Canadian women's 2-man bobsleigh team of Kaillie Humphries and Heather Moyse overcame the 0.23 second lead held by the US team of Elana Meyers and Lauryn Williams after two runs to win the gold medal. On Thursday, the Canadian women's ice hockey team scored two goals in the final 4 minutes of regulation to tie the score against the Americans. They scored again in overtime to take the gold medal for the 4th consecutive Olympics. Finally, on Friday, Jamie Benn scored on a deflection in the second period and the Canadian team held on for a 1-0 victory to move them into the gold medal game against Sweden. But the Canadians weren't done yet. The Canadian men's team pursuit speed skating team of Mathieu Giroux, Lucas Makowsky and Denny Morrison (the same team that took the gold medal in Vancouver against the Americans) blew the American team of Shani Davis, Brian Hansen and Jonathan Kuck off the oval in the preliminary round, winning by a margin of 3.52 seconds over the 3,000 meter distance.

There is a tendency in the media to read too much into events like these. No, this is not evidence that the nation of Canada is superior to the United States. The team of Meyers and Williams and the women's hockey team both claimed silver medals. While some look at the silver medal as a sort of consolation prize, I, for one, would be thrilled to be the second best in the world at anything. 

I think that these discussions miss the point. If you are, or even if you aspire to be, a world-class athlete, you want to be measured against the best in the world. How else do you learn what is required to progress to your goal? In 1992, the National Basketball Association assembled the Dream Team to go to the Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona. That team, with 11 future Hall-of-Fame members, was easily the best basketball team ever assembled. Beth and I saw them play at the Tournament of the Americas in Portland when they had just put the team together. They were awesome! Despite still learning how to play together, their average margin of victory was 51.5 points, including beating Venezuela for the Championship by 47 points. Then they went on to Barcelona. In eight games, their average margin of victory was 43.75 points including a 68 point victory over Angola and a 32 point victory over Croatia in the gold medal game. There were a lot of comments in the press that the US had made a mockery of the Olympics by sending such a strong team. This was ironic because when the idea of sending professionals to the Olympics was brought up in 1989, the US voted against the idea. In reality, it was the nations like Angola which voted for the proposal. Their reasoning: How are we ever going to improve unless we play against the very best? The wisdom of this approach is clear; the rest of the world has caught up and the US is no longer the dominant basketball power. Playing the best has made them stronger.

So it will be for these Americans. After a while, the sting of defeat will go away. If they are the kind of people that I think they are, they will take the lessons learned home with them, work hard and come back in four years better than ever. With the possible exception of Shani Davis, who is reaching the end of his athletic career, I fully expect to see all of these teams in PeongChang, Korea in 2018!

Sochi Olympics Day 11 - The Orange Wave

When we first attended speed skating in 1988, the stands in Calgary looked a lot like this:

We asked someone near us what was up with all of these orange-clad people. He said, "Oh, those are the Dutch fans" as if this explained why some of them looked like this:

 

  

Since then, we have fully enjoyed watching the Dutch fans. The closest analogy I have is that they are the Brazilians of the Winter Olympics - a walking party wherever they happen to be. But at the Winter Olympics, where they happen to be is always at Speed Skating. They even have their own band called Kleintje Pils (Little Beers):

The Kleintje Pils are so entertaining that they have been invited to attend Olympic Speed Skating at essentially no cost for at least the last five Olympics in exchange for providing entertainment during ice resurfacing breaks. I vividly remember the members of the band valiantly trying to teach the very stoic Japanese fans in Nagano how to do the Wave! 

While they fiercely cheer for their own athletes and really hate to lose, the Dutch are nevertheless very supportive of all of the athletes. We have often heard them burst into applause when some skater far back in the overall standings skates a personal best time. I have never heard them boo a rival to one of their own skaters.

So perhaps it is some sort of karmic reward for their good sportsmanship that the Dutch are absolutely destroying the competition at the Adler Speed Skating Arena. After 10 events, the Dutch have an astounding 21 medals out of a possible 30. This currently puts just their Speed Skating team ahead of all but two nations: the US and Russia. No other team in Olympic history has dominated their sport like the Dutch are doing this year. They have swept the podium in four of ten events and set three Olympic records. All of the prior Olympic Speed Skating records were set in the high altitude of Salt Lake City, so setting even one Olympic record at sea level is amazing. Setting three is, like my 15 year old son Sean would say, sick!

I read an interview with a Dutch journalist who traced the rise of Dutch Speed Skating to the 9 Olympic medals that Americans Chad Hedricks and Shani Davis picked up at the 2006 Torino and 2010 Vancouver games. This was a real smack in the face to a nation that, in a recent survey, had 12 million people who consider themselves recreational skaters. Note that the Netherlands has a total population of only about 16 million people so the only people who don't skate are the very old and the very young (and I'm not so sure about the very old). Any decent sized town in the Netherlands has more competitive Speed Skaters than there are in the entire US. How could the US get so much out of so little? This motivated an entire generation of Dutch skaters with the result that it is now much more difficult to make the Dutch Olympic Speed Skating team than it is to win an Olympic medal.

The rest of the world can only be thankful that the Dutch are not guaranteed to win all the remaining medals in the last two Speed Skating events. This is because both are Team Pursuit events with only one team per country! I have to be honest. After decades of enjoying the Dutch fans and their team, I'm rooting for them to smash another two Olympic records and maybe a World record or two.

Sochi Olympics Day 10 - The Streak Breaker

It is Day 10 and we have finally progressed to my favorite Olympic sport: Bobsleigh. Yesterday and today are the Men's 2-man followed by Women's 2-man (oxymoron alert!), with Men's 4-man toward the end of the week. 

American Bobsledder and Salt Lake City native Steven Holcomb does not look like a world-class athlete. In fact, at 1.78 m (5'10"), 100 kg (220 lb), he is kind of bowling ball-shaped. Looks are deceiving. In 2-Man, Steven and his brakeman Steve Langton manage to propel a 170 kg (384 lb) 2-Man sled from 0 to 50 km/hr (30 mph) in just under 5 seconds! Now he stands ready to break a 62 year drought since the last US 2-man bobsled to win an Olympic medal. But Holcomb's path to this point was not straightforward.

It is hard to picture, but Holcomb began his athletic career as a competitive ski racer. But the selection of Salt Lake City as the host of the 2002 Winter Olympics provided additional opportunities. Holcomb saw someone with a bobsled in the back of his truck and decided to attend a bobsled tryout. He took an eight part test of strength and sprinting speed and scored 675 points - exactly the minimum number to make the Men's national B team. But he was told that since he was only 18, they were going to take the next lowest athlete because he was older. Holcomb eventually made it back onto the team when another athlete was injured and was selected to be a pusher on US pilot, and now national team coach, Brian Shimer's 4-man team for the Salt Lake City Olympics. He hurt his hamstring and was not able to compete, but Holcomb wanted to take part in the Olympics in some way and was selected as one of the forerunners who drive sleds down the track prior to the official start of competition. He obviously "caught the bobsledding bug" because by the 2004-5 season, he was consistently ranked in the top two or three bobsled pilots in the US. He qualified for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy; finishing 6th in 4-man and 14th in 2-man.

This first Olympic success resulted in Holcomb joining the World Cup circuit for the 2006-7 season. His 2-man team won the World Cup championship while his 4-man team was second. But as his bobsled career was taking off, his eyesight began to fail. Holcomb had been diagnosed with degenerative eye disease called keratoconus in 2002. This is a thinning of the cornea that causes distorted vision. For a long time, he was able to get by with contact lenses and glasses. As his vision degraded, he became more and more dependent on driving by feel. Finally, he reached the point where he often could not recognize the person sitting across from him at a table. Imaging going down a bobsled run at 130 km (80 mpg) when you can't even see the front of the sled clearly! He was afraid that he would kill someone besides himself if he kept going this way. He became depressed and attempted to kill himself with a drug overdose. That didn't work, but did bring him to the point of confessing to his coaches that he was going blind. They convinced him to find a specialist who could help him.

Normally, the only cure is corneal implant surgery and that is what the first twelve specialists Holcomb saw recommended. But that would mean missing an entire Olympic Cycle. Enter specialist #13, Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler, who convinced him that there was another option: injecting B vitamin riboflavin into Steven's cornea followed by treatment with a specific wavelength of light. The idea was that when exposed to the light, the riboflavin would cross-link with the cornea, increasing its thickness and stabilizing his condition. This radical new treatment was a success, but it still left Holcomb with 20/1000 eyesight. Three months later, he had special contact lenses implanted and in 20 minutes, Holcomb's eyesight went from 20/1000 to 20/20. I remember what an amazing experience it was going from 20/200 to 20/20 when I put on my first pair of glasses, so I can imaging how he felt.

In the short-term, his new-found eyesight actually created more problems with his driving - before he was going completely by feel, but now he had all of these visual distractions to deal with. He had some successes, however. He won the first 4-man World championship for the US since 1959 in 2009 and followed it up with a Gold medal in Vancouver. This second victory broke a 62 year drought since the US last won a Gold medal in 4-man bobsled in 1948. But despite these successes, finding the right balance between sight and feel was a work in progress. Finally, success in Sochi was looking good when Holcomb's 2-man and 4-man teams both won the 2012 World Championship. But first, he was going to need a new ride.

Since 1994, all US bobsleds had been produced by the Bo-Dyn Bobsled Project funded by NASCAR driver Geoff Bodine. These sleds reached their peak with the "Night Train" 4-man sled that Holcomb used to win the Gold in Vancouver. But the momentum had gone out of this project so US Bobsled approached sponsor BMW/USA with the idea of designing the next generation of US bobsleds. This was a little complicated because BMW headquarters in Munich was designing new sleds for the German team. But a deal was signed and designer Michael Scully went to work. His idea was to replace a lot of the steel in the old sleds with high strength, light weight carbon fiber. The rules state that a 2-man bobsled must weigh 170 kg (384 lb) empty. The use of lighter materials meant that the designers would have to add weight back, but they could choose where to put it. After 68 "failures", Scully found design #69 where the weight was moved from the front to the center of the sled to make it more maneuverable and that would help it maintain momentum in the high-speed portions of the trace. Now, the trick was to build and refine this prototype in less than 18 months - a ridiculously short time to design and perfect a design.

USA Bobsled received the first prototype in 2012 and then received six brand-new 2-man sleds (three for the men, three for the women) in time for the US Olympic trials in October 2013. Then it was onto the World Cup where Holcomb promptly won four of the seven World Cup races and claimed the 2-Man World championship. Things were really looking good for Sochi!

However, breaking the 62-year drought since the US last won an Olympic 2-man title was not going to be easy. Perhaps no other sport has such a strong "home court" advantage. Getting down the track in one piece is one thing. Getting down the fastest is another thing entirely. It is estimated that Russian driver Alexander Zubkov has been down the track at the Sanki Sliding Center perhaps 300-400 times. Holcomb has been down it perhaps 40 times. Zubkov showed what he had learned in the first run; setting a track record of 56.25. Steven was comfortably in second with a time of 56.34. Zubkov again had the fastest run in run two with a 56.57, but Steven Holcomb had on the 8th fastest time of 56.84. This put him in 3rd place, but more importantly, he injured his calf during the push. The injury was bad enough that US team coach Shimer asked Holcomb if he wanted to withdraw from the 2-man to save himself for the 4-man. Holcomb told him that it took 4 years of work since Vancouver to get to this point and he was not going to let a "boo boo" stop him. 

There is a reason why the US has not won a medal in 2-man since 1952. While the US has many world-class push athletes, it rarely produces world-class drivers. The three push athletes in a 4-man sled can sometimes propel an inferior driver to a medal. But when there is only one push athlete, the driver not only has to be able to push the sled, he also has to be able to feel the track and quickly find the fastest line. Now Steven's ability to push the sled was reduced. Could he compensate?

The 3rd run begins with the fastest sleds first. 39 year old Zubkov showed that he has learned how to drive the Sanki track by getting only the 8th fastest start, but gradually got faster and faster and ended up with the fastest run; in fact, it was another track record of 56.08. Switzerland's Beat Hefti, who had moved passed Steven in the second run, unleashed the fastest start of the round and finished in 56.26; faster than either of Holcomb's first two runs. Then it was Holcomb's turn. With brakeman Steve Langton doing most of the work, Holcomb's start was only 12th best. At the first checkpoint, he had the 9th fastest time. He was 7th fastest at the second checkpoint and 6th fastest at the third checkpoint. He continued to find speed on the lower half of the course; posting the fifth fastest time at the fourth checkpoint and ended up with the third best time at the finish; 56.41. The highest-ranked Canada-3 sled had a somewhat disappointing 3rd run so Holcomb's margin after three runs was 0.09 seconds. But Canada-3, Latvia-1 and Russia-2 were all within 0.14 seconds.

Only the top 20 teams compete in the 4th run and they go in reverse order, so Holcomb had a long wait. Russia-2 pilot Alexander Kasjanov, taking advantage of his experience on the Sanki track and the huge cheers from the Russian fans, had a run much like Zubkov's in the previous run. He had the 13th fastest start but ended up with the second fastest run in the 4th run; 56.57 for a 4 run total of 3:46.30. Going next, Latvia-1, despite the fastest start time, could only manage a 56.75 and moved into second place. Justin Kripps, driving Canada-3 made a serious mistake before one of the three uphill sections and ended up with only a 56.94. This dropped him behind both Russia-2 and Latvia-1. Now it was Holcomb's turn. 18 years of hard work had brought him to this point. Could he kill another 62 year drought and earn his second Olympic medal? Maybe it was adrenaline, maybe it was Langton's extra efforts to push the sled, but their start was 4.88 seconds, 0.04 seconds faster than the previous run. Now it was all up to Holcomb. He was driving well, but the Russia-1 time was very good so his original 0.14 margin was down to 0.05 seconds at the next to last checkpoint. I was holding my breathe, but at the end, Holcomb held on to the Bronze medal by 0.03 seconds - and Holcomb had ended a second 62-year drought for Team USA!

I hope that you don't mind the extra long story, but I wanted to make the point that Olympic athletes don't just appear at the Games. Each of them has decades of hard work behind them, and maybe more than a few challenges overcome, to get to this point. I hope that you've enjoyed the long version of Steven Holcomb's journey.