Olympic Tidbits

We're past the halfway point in Sochi and there haven't been any apparent disasters, no terrorist attacks, no collapsing ski jumps, etc. My Olympic musings:

Did everyone get shower curtains? Before the competitions actually started it was the unfinished/slightly icky stuff that was getting the press coverage, at least here in the West, but I haven't seen any updates. Does everyone have shower curtains? Can toilet paper be flushed down the toilets or are they still putting it in buckets? (I know, ick.) Did anyone else have to kick their way out of a bathroom?

What was the IOC thinking? Although nothing's been blown up or burned down by terrorists, at least so far, there have been issues that would lead a sensible person to scratch their head and ask, Why, exactly, are the Olympics being held in a remote, inaccessible, tropical place at all? The short answer is because Vlad made it his personal mission in life to make it happen, but that still begs the question. Why did the IOC go along with this folly? Did you know that the second-place city was Salzburg, Austria? (Yes, the hills would have been alive...) Can you imaging how charming and delightful the Salzburg Olympics would have been?

The irony. Here in the states we're slogging our way through one of the coldest, snowiest winters ever. At the Winter Olympics people are walking around in T-shirts and jumping into the Black Sea for a swim. The Today Show anchors were doing their show in shirt sleeves over the week-end, although things are colder there this morning and the hats and gloves came out. In fact, the weather issue today is fog, so much so that a couple of events in the mountains had to be cancelled, which not only screws up the meticulously planned schedule but also leaves a hole in NBC's broadcast coverage.

The time zones. Sochi is 10 hours ahead of Chicagoland, which means that at 2.00 in the afternoon here it's midnight there. The daily competitions are over, but NBC's primetime broadcast is still five hours away. How far off the grid do you have to go to avoid hearing/seeing results in advance? Really, really far. Like hiding-in-a-cave far. More than once while watching the TV news I've heard anchors tell viewers to turn away if you don't want to hear the results, several moments after the results went crawling across the bottom of the screen. You pretty much need to stay off the web, too, and especially stay off Twitter.

The skating. Team USA's best chance for a gold medal in figure skating comes tonight, with Americans Charlie White and Meryl Davis favored to win in Ice Dancing and leading after the short program. I'm trying to decide if I want to know the results in real time or watch it play out tonight. As I've watched other skating events at the "Iceberg" venue, I've been struck by all the empty seats. At most Olympics the skating events are the hottest ticket in town. Why can't Sochi fill the seats? Still, after watching the short program last night I now know what "twizzles" are.

Bob Costas will be back in the anchor chair for tonight's primetime show, having recovered from pink eye. Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera filled in for him for the last few days and apparently Meredith was the first woman to anchor a primetime Olympic broadcast. I like Meredith and I'm always happy to see a woman break another barrier, but she didn't look particularly comfortable in the role, and it was pretty obvious she was reading from the prompter.

And finally, if you watched Al Michaels in the anchor chair on Saturday and Sunday and his voice seemed familiar, yes, it's the same Al Michaels from 34 years ago:  Do you believe in miracles? Yes!