Winter olympics Turin, Italy

I am quite a sports freak and the current big event that is happening is the winter olympics at Torino(Turin), Italy. I have been following quite a bit of it in the last two weeks and I should say it varies from boring to dangerous to exciting to scandals to personalities and so on.

First of all, it is not such a big event as the summer olympics with only countries in Europe and USA/Canada being the major competitors. There are few participants from Asia, Australia and Africa with China and Korea putting up a good show. For the record, India had a 4 member team that went to Turin. Shiva Keshavan is the lone Indian who has participated in the previous olympic games at Salt Lake City.

There are only seven sports in the winter olympics.They are Biathlon, Bobsleigh, Curling, Ice Hockey, Luge, Skating, Skiing, but they have 84 gold medals on offer. So each event has 10 to 12 subevents on an average and it is common to see a single person participating in multiple events and winning multiple medals. This is not the case for the summer olympics where winning multiple medals is a rarity(except for swimming and a few other events).

Now, getting onto the various events, curling is the most boring sport i have ever seen. It involves sliding a grinding stone into a ring, and two people trying to clean the ice in front to speed it up. You have to see it to believe it. The two favorite events for me are the speed skating and the downhill skiing. Speed skating involves two people going head to head on two lanes and the best time wins. It is the favourite sport of the Dutch and they have a huge fan following (good part of the stadium is covered in orange) and the Dutch olympic comittee sponsors a band to travel with the fans. The blue riband event of the winter olympics is the downhill skiing (similar to 100m in the summer olympics). Here each skier makes a run down the hill and the best time wins. The speeds reached here are upto 80 miles/hr with an average speed of 50 miles/hr and it is quite exciting. Figure skating is the most graceful sport in the games and usually involves a lot of scandals and drama. The pairs skating had the man and the woman fighting over a fall in the earlier event and not speaking to each other till the next race.

The US team has a huge contingent in the olympics and it has been a case of more hype rather than performance for them. There have been numerous cases of over confidence and avoidable mistakes that have led to US athletes losing medals. The best being in the snowboarding event for women, the US athlete was leading comfortably towards the end and she tried to do a bit of showmanship, fell down and lost the gold. US athletes have created more controversy than winning medals. There is a detailed coverage of the event by NBC.

Overall, in my opinion, it has been an average olympics with sparks of brilliance and a few olympic stories to tell.

Some winter olympics trivia can be found at http://www.infoplease.com/spot/winter-olympics-trivia.html