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Salt Lake City, Utah
I cried five rivers on the way here, which one will you skate away on
Short Track is a great, spectator friendly sport to start off with, plus I was lucky enough to see probably the single best session. This is star American Apollo Anton Ohno's first medal, a silver, and the one where everyone fell down and Australia received its first ever Winter Olympics Gold Medal. The start finish line is dead center between the A and K in Salt Lake 2002, athletes were headed from the right to the left, the race had just finished. Ohno is the one on all fours, the silver medallist Canadian is on his stomach as the gold medallist Australian is off circling the arena somewhere to a scattering of shocked boos from the partisan, local crowd.
To the winners go medals, yellow flowers and a visit from a small girl wearing an especially furry (and most likely very difficult to maintain) jacket.
If Short Track is confusing and well, short, then the relay is truly its penultimate event. Here skaters quickly circle the ice and then somehow get behind teammates whom they then push- hard- from behind. They seem to understand the rules, still I'm not anyone else really does. And if that wasn't confusing enough, China fielded two world class short track women named Yang, and not just Yang but actually Yang Yang (meaning that in some races there were Yang Yang and Yang Yang). They actually called them Yang Yang A and Yang Yang S (based on their birth months). One of the Yangs won a gold medal in the 500m race I saw, but I guess if you look at the overall field, the odds were with at least one of the Yangs winning.
In a residential suburb in the sprawling West Valley, the Utah Olympic Oval was setting the world (or, at least parts of the Netherlands) on fire by shattering world records virtually every session. I did not see a world record race but did see an Olympic record and at least that's something. I saw plucky Canadian Catriona LeMay Doan (I looked that up at www.olympics.com, I can only remember so much), eventual gold medalist, smoke the other women as they circled one and an eighth time around the big bad oval.
My view of the track, the start finish line was on the mid right as they circled counter clockwise really, really fast.
I unwittingly received a seat (and a bad one at that) for the Men's Figure Skating as part of my "Olympic Experience Package," a function of the initial Salt Lake ticket distribution program, a program that did contain at least some advantages. I am not a big figure skating fan but did my best to enjoy all four hours (yes, four hours) of what could best be described as questionable men in questionable outfits skating to bad movie soundtracks. Still, medals were actually awarded and the American kid got a bronze medal. U-S-A! U-S-A!
In a related story, early in the games and through an extremely unlikely series of coincidences and events, I ended up in a relatively long conversation with a woman and her extraordinarily entertaining thirteen year daughter, a figure skater from Denver. She knew many (not all) of the US skaters and had interesting, personal stories regarding the few skaters whose names I recognized. She also said that she hoped Michelle Kwan did not win the gold medal for specific reasons she did not want to share, other than general statements that Michelle was nothing at all like her well crafted image. I watched the live coverage of the women's short program on a large screen on Park City's Main Street as I waited in a terribly long line at the Roots store to buy my mom one of those damn hats with this girl's words still in my mind, sad that Kwan was ahead. Two days and a time zone later I was in Las Vegas, arriving as late as expected, I managed to still catch the end of the long program, watching justice and two other women pull ahead of the great Michelle Kwan. Ha-ha.
Underneath the unforgiving stare of a giant, twelve story short track speedskater, a shading device temporarily helps to preserve an ice sculpture from abandoning glory and slowly, painfully returning to its inevitable, liquid self.
The runner up to the omnipresent "Light the Fire Within" slogan, Bud World's "Please Do Not Touch the Globe" was closely judged to be not quite as inspirational as Olympic organizers had hoped.
