Winter Olympics Day One

I was hiking most of the day today, but I did watch a little Women’s Hockey during breakfast (Sweden x Russia, the fifteen minutes I saw looked like late-night intramurals at Cornell…). Came home and saw a little more while fixing supper. Beautiful pair skating. I turned on just in time to see the first ever Olympic thrown triple axel by Rena Inoue and John Baldwin, which put a little lump in my throat. I would turn down the volume for figure skating except that I wouldn’t hear the music. There is no sport commentating that so detracts from my enjoyment of the sport as in figure skating, no matter who is doing it. I thought that under the famously new rules for scoring, I would never have to hear “uh-oh, there’ll be a deduction for that!”. Right. Now it’s, “uh-oh, under the old rules there would have been a deduction for that. Under the new rules they won’t get as many points for….” I watched a nice program by Chinese Zhang and Zhang duo set to Led Zeppelin (!) that Dick Button nickeled and dimed throughout only to see them take the lead.
Moguls. I hate to ski them, hate to watch people ski them. In an ideal winter world they wouldn’t exist. Not even the breathless medal-race hype can make this event interesting. Ok, well, Kari Traa can. (Have you seen those photos? Did I say I really hope to visit Norway some day?) Great name. Kari Traa. Ok, ’nuff said ’bout that. She got silver.
Some of the NBC announcers are saying “Torino” as opposed to “Turin” and the website does too.