LIKE IT IS

Olympics good, and it’s good they are done

With the realization that Sunday night was the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, there was an overwhelming emotion - relief.

It isn’t that I don’t appreciate the hard work, dedication and discipline of people who skate and ski, and it wasn’t that I didn’t watch because I did, but mostly as a favor to someone who absolutely loves the winter games.

Russia won the most medals. Big surprise, the games were in Russia.

One night last week while watching figure skating, I saw a Russian skater stumble. It was an obvious mistake and one that drew a groan from the crowd.

The next skater was from South Korea, and she was flawless. She got the silver medal, the stumbler got the gold.

The South Korean lady looked like she was just glad they didn’t offer her a blindfold and cigarette.

Then, there was the sport they call curling.

In two separate conversations, one with former Razorback and sometimes basketball analyst Blake Eddins and the other with Brad Homan, my son-in-law, it’s obvious young people like the sport that debuted in 1924 but wasn’t an Olympic sport again until 1998.

If you didn’t see it, it is hard to explain but teams of men or women slide a large disc toward a circle and two of the team members use brooms to try and make it curl one way or the other.

It was peachy keen, and since Canada dominates the sport that is a lot like shuffleboard on ice, one might think lots of beverages are part of the practice sessions.

It is a sport anyone can play - not for the beverages - but because of the lack of conditioning it would take to participate.

Security was tight with more than 40,000 policemen deployed to Sochi, which is known as a summer resort, but one big-mouthed Dutch coach managed to slip through and make an idiot of himself.

In one interview, he managed to insult every American who follows either football or basketball.

Jillert Anema - he was probably called Jill a lot as a kid - said football is a sport meant to kill or injure, and, “I think that the gold medal in speedskating is just as valuable as the gold medal in basketball, and we won 22. You’ll never win 22 in basketball.”

The Netherlands won eight gold medals in speedskating and 23 medalsoverall in that sport. It won one other medal.

If they played 50 gold-medal basketball games, the USA would win 49 of them.

The USA won a total of 28 medals, second only to the mother country.

Viewers got a one-week reprieve from Bob Costas, who suffered an infected eye, and it should be noted that, all things considered, NBC did a nice job, although I missed seeing the gold-medal ceremonies.

This year’s gold medals, by the way, were 92 percent silver and were plated with six grams of gold.

One irritating thing NBC did was to hold its own opening and closing ceremonies, rehashing the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan saga that happened in 1994.

Don’t think it was NBC’s intention, but Harding came off looking better than she ever had. Young folks found it interesting she trained at an ice rink in a shopping mall and Kerrigan had a private rink.

Just before the closing ceremonies, we got another 45-minute story about the 20-year-old incident and NBC promoted an exclusive interview with Kerrigan, who was working as an analyst for them. She, too, was boring.

Sports, Pages 15 on 02/25/2014

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