Ten Events to Watch in Vancouver

Women’s Alpine Combined
SUN Feb 14 – NBC – 7pm
Lindsey Vonn was supposed to be the clear star of the Vancouver Olympics. She’s won 31 separate races on Alpine Skiing’s World Cup circuit, as well as the much-coveted Overall title for the past two seasons, and was considered a possible medal contender in all five Women’s alpine events. She’s already a media star, serving as one of the centerpieces of 2010’s Olympic marketing campaigns, blessed with an outgoing personality and much remarked-upon good looks. She not only featured as the cover athlete for the Sports Illustrated Olympic preview issue (which took the opportunity to declare her “America’s Best Woman Skier Ever”), she also appeared in the magazine’s recent swimsuit edition.
Then in the final week before the Olympics Vonn revealed an apparently serious shin injury that she calls the worst of her career (and she has had her fair share of injuries). Now there’s a question whether she’ll compete at all, though all indications Thursday were she was at least going to try to gut it out. Her effectiveness if she does compete is an entirely different matter.
The first Women’s Alpine event of the games is the Women’s Combined, in which competitors race first the Downhill, then the Slalom. It’s intended to find the best overall racer in the sport, a title that normally would seem to fit Vonn to a T. The course in Whistler is apparently scary enough as is… a formal training run was cut short Thursday when the second competitor on the course, American Stacey Cook, took a bad crash in the fog and had to be flown to the hospital in a helicopter.
Vonn’s biggest competitor is generally considered to be Maria Riesch of Germany, who should be a major contender in this race as well as the more “technical” alpine events. (i.e. slalom, etc.) Sweden’s Anja Paerson is another all-arounder who won the last Combined event on the World Cup circuit coming in. Austria is always the class of the Alpine world for both the Men and the Women, so it would not be a surprise if multiple Austrians make the podium.

Women’s Snowboard Cross
TUE Feb 16 – NBC 8pm
Perhaps the defining moment of the 2006 games, for me anyway, was the Final of the Women’s Snowboard Cross competition, the inaugural version of the event. The world number one, Maelle Ricker of Canada, crashed badly partway down, leaving the reigning World Champion, a pretty, curly-haired American girl named Lindsay Jacobellis, well ahead of a Swiss girl in second place. In heedless celebration, Jacobellis did a little trick grab of her snowboard… and fell inexorably sideways, slowing just enough for the Swiss girl to catch her. She proceeded to caper around the finish area with a Swiss flag, thrilled, while Jacobellis stood and sat stunned for what felt like half an hour, staring into space.
As we come to the 2006 competition, Jacobellis is once again the reigning World Champion, and Maelle Ricker is once again holds the number one ranking. They will not, of course, be without competitors. As we saw in 2006, this is an event where anything can happen, and no one would bat eye to see a victory from Helene Olafson of Norway, or Alexandra Jekova of Bulgaria, or a half dozen others. I have this feeling, though, that there will be some event surrounding one Lindsay Jacobellis that will either serve as a redemptive climax or a continuation of the crushing cautionary tale. Or maybe something new and unexpected.

Half-Pipe
Men WED Feb 17 – NBC 3pm & 8:30pm - Women THU Feb 18 – NBC 3:30pm & 8pm
Perhaps the single biggest story of the past decade of the Winter Olympics is the meteoric rise of the sport of Snowboarding. From the moment it burst on the scene in 1998 (and then the first Gold Medalist was temporarily stripped of his Gold after testing positive for Marijuana), it created its own banner headlines, and now there is speculation that for NBC the Snowboarding competition might receive higher ratings than those for Figure Skating. Half-Pipe is the signature snowboarding event, in which a great run from a top competitor seems to transcend our earthly reality, completely effortless, totally cool.
The highest paid athlete at these games will not be an NHL pro, or a superstar figure skater, but Shaun White, he of the flying red curly hair, the defending Gold Medalist in this event. Many believe that if he hits in Vancouver there is no one in the world that can beat him. He plans to throw a “1260”, which is crazy because I remember in 1998 a “720” was a huge deal. The U.S. could easily sweep the medals, as it did in 2006. In addition to White, the team includes Columbus native Louie Vito, who learned to board at Mad River Mountain in Bellefontaine. However, I will be rooting for the team’s third member, Graham Watanabe, who, when recently asked how it felt to be a member of the U.S. Olympic team, replied thusly: "Try to imagine Pegasus mating with a unicorn and the creature that they birth. I somehow tame it and ride it into the sky in the clouds and sunshine and rainbows. That's what it feels like." Exactly.
The women’s competition should be harder fought. The American team is stacked with the sport’s superstars, including defending champ Hannah Teter, 2006 Silver Medalist Gretchen Bleiler, and 2002 Gold Medalist Kelly Clark, who seems to be the hot hand of late and has been tabbed as the favorite. Just as big a star, however, is Torah Bright, an Australian Mormon with oft-noted movie star looks and her own video game. And some think the entire party might be crashed by a young Chinese girl named Liu Jiayu, who, those who have seen her say, can do things no one else can.

Men’s Figure Skating
Free Program THU Feb 18 – 8pm
Ladies’ Figure Skating is usually the single marquee event of a Winter Olympics. This year, however, there doesn’t seem to be the same buzz, at least partially because Kim Yu-Na of South Korea is event’s first prohibitive favorite since at least Kristi Yamaguchi in 1992. She’s won 11 of the last 13 major competitions in which she’s competed, most of those by huge margins. Most feel that the only skater who has a hope of challenging her is Japan’s Mao Asada, who might have been the best in the world four years ago but was at that time too young to compete (the “Tara Lipinski Rule”).
So eyes turn to the Men’s event, where the field is wide open. Defending champ Yevgeny Plushenko has come out of three years of retirement to win the European Championship, and is considered by some to be the favorite. He would be the first man to win back-to-back Golds since Dick Button. The U.S. has a deep team, any one of whom could medal. Evan Lysacek is the defending World Champ, but was beaten by Jeremy Abbott at the last two U.S. Championships. Abbott’s recent performance to make the team in Spokane was considered by some aficionados to be worthy of a possible Gold if he could just repeat it in Vancouver. And then of course there’s Johnny Weir, who may be the gayest star ever in the world’s gayest sport, and has his own reality show.
It’s entirely possible that none of these men will even make the podium. Switzerland’s Stephane Lambiel will try to overcome the superior athleticism of some of the other skaters with his spectacular spins. France’s Brian Joubert is a world-class talent, left out of the medals at the last two Olympics despite winning several European championships in the interim. And the biggest story of all may be a Vancouver native, Patrick Chan, who comes in riding a hot streak after winning several big events this year. Chan, who won a silver medal at the most recent Worlds, is being picked by many to win Gold. If that happens, Hockey may have to take a back seat, if just for a day or two.

Men’s 1500m Long Track Speed Skating
SAT Feb 20 – NBC 8pm
This should be, by rights, a golden age for American Speed Skating. And yet the team struggles for media attention, racking up victories but little glory in its own country. In Torino, both Chad Hedrick and Shani Davis won Gold, Davis the first African-American man to ever do so in the Winter Games, and yet it did not seem enough. An off-hand remark by Hedrick was fanned by the media into a feud between the two, and the Olympics ended with a sour taste.
Davis has lost this race only once in the last two years (to Hedrick), but he is a strange figure. He comes from a single-parent home on the South Side of Chicago. His mother is seen as domineering by some, a hero by others. She has publicly and repeatedly made statements like “Shani would be dealing drugs right now on a street corner if it wasn’t for me.” He has refused to train or take coaching from the national team, or with anyone else. He’s refused almost all interview requests. When asked about Stephen Colbert’s involvement with the National team, he responded simply “Stephen Colbert is a jackass, and you can put that in the paper.” A few months later he ended up on Colbert’s show to make peace, but the scrutiny had reappeared.
The 1500m will feature all three major figures of the U.S. team, in addition to Davis there is Hedrick, a Texan inliner originally, who in Torino was known as cocky and a serial partier. In four years he has married and had a kid, and is now talking to anyone who will listen about how he’s found Jesus. There is also Trevor Marsicano, only twenty, who finished second to Davis in this event at the last World Championships. In addition to that trio there are the ever-present Dutch (Sven Kramer is the heavy favorite in the two distance events) and the Canadians, especially Denny Morrison, who have not been letting anyone else train on the Richmond Oval in hopes of gaining an advantage. Speed Skating is a strange universe, and it should have many subplots.

Men’s 1000m Short Track Speed Skating
SAT Feb 20 – NBC 8pm
The “other” big story of the games, the one not involving hockey, snowboards, or Lindsey Vonn, is that of Apolo Anton Ohno, who feels like he has been around forever now (I was reading about him in Sports Illustrated for Kids when I was 10). He was always a very heart-on-his-sleeve kind of guy from Seattle, with a publicly complex relationship with everyone from his father to his greatest rival, South Korea’s Ahn Hyun-Soo. He’s put his sport on the map and since the last Olympics won a season of Dancing With the Stars, something which NBC never seems to tire of mentioning despite it not even being their show.
He has five medals from the last two Olympics. The all-time career record for an American winter Olympian is Six, by Bonnie Blair. If Ohno can win medals in two of the four events, something that does not seem out of the question but isn’t a given this time around in this unpredictable sport, he will break the record. There seems to be a bit of anti-climax to the whole thing… Michael Phelps is just off winning eight Golds in just one summer games, which makes Ohno’s feats seem less impressive. And even if he breaks Blair’s record, she will still seem more impressive… five of her six were Golds, while Ohno has only two, and the opportunity to win medals in the relay, something Blair lacked.
Still, Short Track is a fun sport, full of crashes, speed, and mayhem, yet easy to follow. Its main drawback is that most of its biggest winners tend to be Koreans or Chinese who, to American eyes in any case, often seem to lack personality. Ohno has changed that, and now he has paved the way for his possible successor, one J.R. Celski, another Seattleite. In this race, if Ohno has medaled in the 1500, he might break the record, or we might see a changing of the guard. Or the Koreans might dominate, as they sometimes do, or a victory for a member of the home team might set the crowd to rocking. You never know.

Ski Cross
Men SUN Feb 21 – NBC – noon and 7pm – Women TUE Feb 23 – NBC – 3pm and 8pm
There will be only one new Olympic event in 2010, and it appears to be a pretty cool one. Ski Cross sounds pretty obvious when you think about it. Four skiers race down a curvy, bumpy course, first to cross the finish line wins. It’s more of straight-up “race” than the traditional one-at-a-time approach of Alpine Skiing, and it’s less objective than the other Freestyle Skiing events with which the Olympics have chosen to lump it in. It’s similar to Snowboard Cross, which was such a hit at the 2006 games.
On the Women’s side, the huge favorite is Ophelie David of France, who grew up on the island of Corsica and has a long, colorful history that includes a 1994 Olympic appearance as an Alpine Skier representing Hungary. She has been ranked number one in the world since 2004 and won the last six world championships. Still, this is the sort of sport where anything can happen, especially considering that several of the other most prominent contenders are Canadian.
The Men’s race seems less certain. Many are picking a local guy, Christopher Del Bosco. However, the current world number one is Michael Schmid of Switzerland. The event will even feature one Errol Kerr, representing Jamaica, who not only will be the nation’s first Olympic skier ever, but apparently has an actual chance of finishing in the top ten or so. The U.S. has produced a couple of major contenders who switched over from Alpine, Daron Rahlves and Casey Puckett. I have vivid memories of how much NBC insisted on talking about Rahlves in 2002, despite the fact that we all knew he wasn’t really going to win the Downhill. However, they both injured themselves spectacularly during the run-up to the games, with Rahlves wiping out during the Winter X Games and ending up essentially bouncing down the course on his side, so their participation seems in doubt. Still, whatever happens, it should be fun to watch.

Team Nordic Combined
TUE Feb 23 – NBC – 8pm
Nordic Combined, a combination of ski jumping and cross-country skiing dreamed up by Norwegians to prove… I’m not sure what, exactly, has been in every Winter Olympics in one form or another, and in all that time no American has ever won a medal. At the most recent World Championships, however, Americans somehow won all three events (Normal Hill, Large Hill, and Team). Nobody thinks they’ll repeat this performance, but they have a deep squad that includes names I’ve heard for years like Bill Demong, Jonny Spillane, and Todd Lodwick, and it would be a major surprise if they didn’t break that medal drought somehow.
The best chance is probably the team event. Like the rest of the sports’ events, this became much more watchable circa 1990 when they realized that they could stagger the start of the skiing portion based on the results of the ski jump, so that the winner actually crossed the finish line first and fans could tell what was happening just by looking at it. In the old days, the cross-country actually happened first.
Anyway, the U.S. won’t be able to walk to a Gold, and probably isn’t even really the favorites. Germany and Austria are at least as deep, while France’s Jason Lamy-Chappuis (who was actually born in the U.S.) has emerged as probably the best individual Nordic Combined athlete in the world this year, though France doesn’t really have the team to back him up. It’s hard for a lot of people to “get” this sport, but once we’re down to the end and Bill Demong is out there on the anchor leg trying to do the one thing these guys have been talking about for decades it should be pretty cool.

Curling
Men’s Final SAT Feb 27 – CNBC 6pm – Women’s Final FRI Feb 26 – CNBC 6pm
There is another sport besides Hockey on its home ground in these games. 90-something percent of the world’s curlers are Canadian, they say. In America, and much of the world, the sport enters our consciousness every four years. We come home from work and school to find an afternoon match on the TV, and find ourselves debating the strategies and groaning when the skip misses with his last rock. Curling is the closest the Olympics get to Chess, and to a certain group of us the sport has become a strange quadrennial tradition. The curling venue should have a different feel this time around. The arena in downtown Vancouver seats 7,000, and yet many locals have complained it is not large enough to satisfy demand.
And yet there is another seat of the sport, where the game was invented and all stones are required by rule to originate, in Scotland. Great Britain won the women’s competition four years ago, and this time around, it is the Men’s team that many think might take the Gold. If the all-Scottish team does not meet the wildly-supported hosts in the Final of the tournament, it will be a surprise to many.
Meanwhile, Canada faces its biggest challenge from an unlikely source on the Women’s side. China had never competed in any Olympics in Curling, then showed up at last year’s World Championships in South Korea with a team of highly-trained former gymnasts from Harbin and won the whole thing. Everyone was and is still very confused. Yet it is hard not to give them a chance in Vancouver.

Men’s Ice Hockey
Final SUN Feb 28 – NBC – 3pm
There are noises out there that the NHL and the Players Association are going to fight over participating in the Olympics 2014 (the league wants to back out, the players don’t), so this could end up as the last Olympic tournament with NHL stars for a while. If so, what a way to go out. Canada can hardly contain itself, it is so excited about this tournament, held on home ice, with a home team led by Sidney Crosby. Some say that many Canadians will consider the entire Olympics a failure if they don’t win Hockey Gold.
But they are far from the only contenders… Russia’s Alexander Ovechkin is Crosby’s main rival for Best Player in the World honors and the two REALLY don’t like each other. Russia defeated Canada in the 2006 Quarterfinals (Sweden eventually won the Gold) and then again in the final of the most recent World Championship. Sweden, the only nation to win two hockey golds in the past two decades, will be back with a team of NHL stars, as will the 1998 champs from the Czech Republic and 2006 silver medalists Finland. The U.S. will also send a team of NHL players, though interestingly few seem to give them much of a shot at a medal. (they’ve been placed in the same preliminary group with Canada) When the NHL first returned to the Olympics in 1998, many referred to these nations as the “Big Six”, but since then the field has caught up, with Slovakia. Belarus finished fourth four years ago, and Slovakia are also considered major contenders for a medal this time around.
The biggest event, however, will be the event itself… compared to the past three Olympics (two of which were held in the usually hockey-free zones of Japan and Italy), the atmosphere for hockey in Vancouver should be absolutely crazy. If you think Canadians are a little weird about hockey now, just wait for their team to open against Norway (the lowest-ranked team in the tournament) on Tuesday night. And if the home team isn’t up to the task, the rest of the Olympics could be pretty depressing.