Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Olympic Thursday

I just got up. It's 12:45 AM and I have been up for about an hour. I am now fully committed to Olympian hours! Wake up at midnight, sleep at supper time. It makes it tough to know when or what I should eat or drink. But I've figured out a good system: for curling I drink tea, for hockey I drink beer. And I eat between periods or after the 5th end. It's possible that by the end of these olympics I'll have a long beard, long nails and I'll be storing my urine in bottles, but these are the sacrifices a Canadian sports fan needs to make in Korea.

I'm now surfing the web trying to find a good place to watch the Canadian women's curling team go up against the Japanese. I watched the Japanese team yesterday. Because they played the Americans. It's pretty easy to find online streams of American curling. But thanks to our lame, Canada-only coverage on CTV/TSN/CBC it's pretty hard to get the Canadian stuff. They have live streams for all the people in the world who don't need them: Canadians.

I think I'm gonna have trouble finding this stream. It's gonna start at 2 so I have time to search around but it may end up being like yesterday when I watched CTV coverage of Canada vs Germany in men's curling pirated by a dude in Russia and voiced over in Russian. And of course before the end of the game they switched over to the Russia/Latvia hockey game.Luckily the game was no longer in doubt.

I'm truly loving the globalism of the internet! I watched the entire men's snowboard cross in Italian. And by the way it was awesome! I still can't figure out how our boy Robertson didn't get the gold. It was like a sudden gust of wind blew the American guy past him right at the end. Great silver though!

But before I could grieve for too long, outta nowhere Maelle Ricker jumps to gold in the women's snowboard cross. I'd have to say that this is my favourite winter olympic sport to watch besides hockey and curling. And it's so nice that Canadians are GOOD at it! That beautiful pic at the top is of her. It's a photogenic sport though isn't it? I love the shots of the four people going over the jump at the end with the Olympic rings in the background! It's just too bad I can't seem to move pictures around on my blog any more or I'd be able to put them at the appropriate places rather than all at the beginning. But like many things involving electronics, my blog is getting harder and harder to work with as it gets more and more "advanced".

But I won't complain about that. This entry was gonna be about curling. I am very happy that our men's and ladies teams, (pictured WAY above), the Martin and Bernard rinks respectively, have gone undefeated so far. I've watched some pretty good shot making from them. I would not be surprised to see them sweep the golds in curling. It'd be great to see!

It's too bad so few people like curling. I've been a fan since my high school days in Ignace, Ontario where I first slipped on a slider and grabbed a broom. And it WAS a broom back then, not a brush or one of those Swiffer-looking things they're using now. I was actually sweeping and making noise and working up a SWEAT while curling back in those days! It's such a great sport! They called it "chess on ice" a few times in the English coverage I've seen. It IS a real strategic game too. That's the part of it I'm worst at. I'd say that, like Marge Simpson, my strength is my sweeping, or brushing. I played mostly lead in my brief high school/university foray into the sport so I also throw up a mean guard. But I can't claim to be any good. Still and all, it's a sport that I really miss. I think it would be VERY popular in Korea too. I wish it would catch on. I wonder why it's not popular around the world. I have a few theories.

Could it be, like women's tennis, that the screaming and yelling turn people off? There are some good-looking women in curling, (the Japanese team I watched yesterday has a couple of REAL hotties), but when they start screaming "HURRY HAAAARD!" it's not too attractive. But then we're not supposed to be watching women's sports for the babes anyway are we? Ha ha, yeah right! I actually think I liked the cute way the Japanese team called their shots. "Ceu leeen! Ceu leeen! Niceu syot" But they are the exception. There are some real howlers and catterwhallers in the sport that admittedly don't do much for its image.

Could it be that because it's a really long game and it seems to the untrained eye like very little is going on, people are reluctant to watch? It's possible. You don't see a lot of triple take-outs or spectacular shots in a game. There is no body contact or fighting. (although there's no such thing as a curler who doesn't drink and if they showed the pub after the games I bet there'd be some contact sports going on).

Or maybe it's just not getting enough exposure. People tend to like what's put in front of them even though we no longer have to get off the couch to change the TV channel any more. Well, as I've said so many times before, thank God for the Simpsons! The most recent episode of the Simpsons was about Marge and Homer going to Vancouver to play in the mixed curling there. Marge was the star sweeper and Homer was the star drinker. Which is important! It was pretty obvious the writers and animators didn't really know a lot about curling but the attempt was valiant. For example all the stones were the same colour and people were picking them up like they were filled with air. Also there was a Zamboni on the ice at one point. But I liked it.


Anyway, I sure hope I can catch more of the curling. From what I've seen, or heard, so far it's been really good. I had to settle for the US/Japan game the other day because I couldn't find the Canadian game. But I could tell how Canada was doing by the cheers I heard. I hope I don't have to do that again this morning. Speaking of which I better go see if I can find some.

Go Canada Go!

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