Meet the four scribblers, including author John Krich and former national gymnastics champ Jennifer Sey, who'll bring you Salon's take on the games.
Reuters/Adrees Latif
A girl adjusts her sunglasses while waiting for the Beijing 2008 Olympic torch to pass by Tiananmen Square Wednesday.
Welcome to Salon’s 2008 Olympics blog. For the next two weeks, we’ll be obsessing over the games from both near and far. NBC, which has broadcast rights in the U.S., says it’ll have 1,400 hours of televised coverage and another 2,200 hours online. That works out to 211 hours, 45 minutes and 53 seconds of video per day.
Our plan is to watch as much of it as humanly possible. I pledge to handle the 53 seconds myself.
There will be four of us posting regularly, mostly during the work week but we’ll go early, late and over the weekend as events warrant. We also might let one of Salon’s other talented writers in now and again, provided they pass the initiation.
I’ve been writing Salon’s daily sports column since 2002. The bios of the three writers who haven’t been repeating the same four jokes every day for the last six years are on the left there, but just in case that’s not enough:
Gary Kamiya is a founding editor at Salon who’s now a writer at large, switching from his weekly column to revisit the Olympics. He covered the games for Salon in Nagano in 1998, Sydney in 2000 and Athens in 2004, once memorably writing, about a drunken fan of Japanese ski jumper Masahiko Harada who bit him on the chest in excitement over Kamiya having seen Harada’s gold-medal-winning jump that day: “Whoa, dude! Lighten up on the Jim Beam and general insanity!”
John Krich will be writing from Beijing. An author of many books and a writer for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Krich says he’s been writing about his love-hate relationship with Beijing and China since before the Tiananmen Square protests. He’s also a lifelong Olympics nut, having attended in Los Angeles in 1984 and Seoul in 1988 and written extensively about former Olympic heroes such as Taiwan’s great decathlete, C.K. Yang.
Jennifer Sey is a former elite gymnast and the author of “Chalked Up,” a memoir of her early life in gymnastics whose subtitle says a lot: “Inside Elite Gymnastics’ Merciless Coaching, Overzealous Parents, Eating Disorders, and Elusive Olympic Dreams.” The 1986 U.S. champion, Sey never went to the Olympics. She’s now a marketing executive with Levi’s Jeans in San Francisco, and this will be her first crack at this type of writing.
One request for all of you: The list of “Useful links” in the right column is just a starting point. We’ll be adding more as we go, and if you have suggestions — or anything else to say — we’d love to hear from you in the comments.
King Kaufman is a senior writer for Salon. You can e-mail him at king at salon dot com. Facebook / Twitter / Tumblr More King Kaufman
The South Korean city beat out Munich and Annecy, France
The South Korean city of Pyeongchang was awarded the 2018 Winter Olympics on Wednesday after failing in two previous attempts.
Pyeongchang defeated rivals Munich and Annecy, France, in the first round of a secret ballot of the International Olympic Committee.
Needing 48 votes for victory, Pyeongchang received 63 of the 95 votes cast. Munich received 25 and Annecy seven.
The Koreans had lost narrowly in previous bids for the 2010 and 2014 Olympics.
Pyeongchang will be the first city in Asia outside Japan to host the Winter Games. Japan held the games in Sapporo in 1972 and Nagano in 1998.
Korean delegates erupted in cheers in the conference hall after IOC President Jacques Rogge opened a sealed envelope and read the words: “The International Olympic Committee has the honor of announcing that the 23rd Olympic Winter Games in 2018 are awarded to the city of Pyeongchang.”
The vote totals weren’t immediately released.
A majority was required for victory, meaning Pyeongchang received at least 48 votes among the eligible 95 voters.
It was the first time an Olympic bid race with more than two finalists was decided in the first round since 1995, when Salt Lake City defeated three others to win the 2002 Winter Games.
Had no majority been reached in the opening round, the city with the fewest votes would have been eliminated and the two remaining cities gone to a second and final ballot.
Pyeongchang had been determined to win in the first round after its previous two defeats. The Koreans had led in each of the first rounds in the votes for the 2010 and 2014 Games but then lost in the final ballots to Vancouver and Sochi.
Pyeongchang, whose slogan is “New Horizons,” campaigned on the theme that it deserved to win on a third try and will spread the Olympics to a lucrative new market in Asia and become a hub for winter sports in the region.
The Korean victory followed the IOC’s trend in recent votes, having taken the Winter Games to Russia (Sochi) for the first time in 2014 and giving South America its first Olympics with the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro.
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The Olympic skier pays homage to the famous cinematic crotch shot on the cover of ESPN
Olympic gold-medalist Lindsey Vonn has recreated that scene from “Basic Instinct” on the cover of ESPN magazine. And by “that scene” I do mean the one in which Sharon Stone infamously flashed her naughty bits to the world. It’s the magazine’s movie issue — why ESPN has a movie issue, I do not know — and it boasts a bunch of athletes reproducing classic film scenes. The headline accompanying the saucy cover photo is, wait for it, “Back to Basics.” Funny, I thought the magazine’s Body Issue — which came out just a few months ago and features exquisitely athletic naked bodies — was a return to “basics.” But it doesn’t get any more basic, or base, than paying homage to the most famous crotch shot in cinematic history.
Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory
Record number of athletes to be tested prior to 2012 games
London Olympic organizers say a record 5,000 doping tests will be carried out at the 2012 Games.
The local organizing committee has signed a memorandum of understanding with Britain’s anti-doping body and will implement the testing program under the authority of the International Olympic Committee.
London 2012 director of sport Debbie Jevans says the size of the testing program will give a “strong message that drug cheats are not welcome at the London Games.”
UK Anti-Doping will train anti-doping officials and assist them during the event to carry out a 10 percent increase on the 4,500 tests conducted at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
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The gold medal winning hockey team boozes it up on the ice and sparks condemnation
Canada’s women’s hockey team has scored quite the controversy by daring to celebrate their win against the U.S. on Thursday by sipping beer, guzzling champagne and smoking cigars on the ice. After the fans filtered out of the stadium, the ladies returned to the rink still in uniform with gold medals draped around their necks. They laid on the ice, poured champagne in each other’s mouths and soaked up the Olympic glory. Their revelry hardly would have garnered any attention, except for one minor detail: there was an Associated Press photographer on hand to capture it all on film.
Now, the International Olympic Committee has reportedly written a letter to the Canadian National Olympic Committee “to find out a few more details,” and the team has issued a public apology. What’s the big deal, you might ask? For one, 18-year-old team member Marie-Philip Poulin was snapped holding a beer, and she’s just under the legal drinking age in British Columbia. OK, so that’s inappropriate, I guess — only, in her home of Quebec, the drinking age is 18. Are people really that scandalized that someone just weeks away from her 19th birthday was caught imbibing in Vancouver after winning an Olympic gold medal?
I suspect not. Judging by the online chatter over the “incident,” the age issue is but one more complaint shoveled onto the pile. Primarily at issue is that some perceive it as a display of poor sportsmanship, which I find kind of hilarious for two reasons: 1.) Ice hockey is one of the most impolite professional sports around (within five minutes of the first men’s hockey game I attended, two players had already resorted to fisticuffs on the ice), and 2.) Have these people never witnessed the hooting, hollering, fist-pumping, champagne-popping, and exclamations of “I’m goin’ to Disneyland!” at, like, any major sporting event?
I hate to be predictable, but I gotta say it: I suspect there’s also a definite undercurrent of sexism here. For example, one blogger wrote:
My question is: Why ‘ladies’ play men’s sports and look so awkward (unlady like) in the process? Being a woman is all about being a woman (grace, softness…). Figure skating is by all standards a women’s sport, as we witnessed yesterday in Kim Yu-Na’s performance. Simply brilliant.
So ladies, make an attempt to look like females, stay away from men’s sports, don’t try to be like men, you know, that’s what the men are for.
Aw, I think he’s scared of the big bad lady athletes. Poor dude — we just aren’t used to seeing women engaged in such stereotypically manly celebration. Not only are they drinking beer, they’re also chugging champagne and smoking cigars. Looking through the photographs, you can almost hear their self-satisfied guttural belches — and, you know what? It makes me swoon in full-blown girl-crush mode. I mean, my cheeks actually ache because every time I catch a glimpse of those snapshots, I grin uncontrollably. Now these are some women I’d like to grab a beer with.
Why don’t all the haters take a note from these Canadian ladies: Grab a Molson’s and chill out, eh?
Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory
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