Sochi Olympics

Jason P said:

Idris said:

Jason P said:

polaris_x said:

oh yeah ... don't get me wrong ... i will watch ...

Good. I want you to be watching when USA hockey exacts revenge upon Canada.

Keep dreamin'

Just remember that we tied you last time. On your turf. And playing against superior coaching and management.

Ya ya ya, all that matters is the Gold, (the US did put in a good showing, had me kinda...kinda on edge )
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Have you seen the Team USA Bobsled? It's designed and built(?) by BMW. Perhaps not really fair for many other teams that the Americans have it. But it's just the way it is,

World Debut: BMW's New Bobsled For Olympic Team USA

The U.S. team paired up with BMW to boost its chances at the 2014 Winter Games.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crwtqxLi8T4

(Well Italy is using help from Ferrari and the UK has help from McLaren)



and of course Audi is in the Mix



and all this is really really really unfair for the Jamaican Bobsled team



huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/24/jamaican-bobsled-team_n_4645504.html

Maybe all teams should have the same equipment and access to the same standard of training facilities?

Jason P said:

polaris_x said:

oh yeah ... don't get me wrong ... i will watch ...

Good. I want you to be watching when USA hockey exacts revenge upon Canada.

i don't like either of our chances on the big ice surface ...

edit: and we smoked you on your home ice and the only reason vancouver was close was because we had luongo in net ...

Jason P said:

Holy .... ahhh, what's the word I'm looking for .... shit! They're real!!!

I've come across a couple of news articles about these double toilets.... there are apparently several of them. I just don't understand wtf anyone was thinking when they built these things..... What is the reasoning behind them??!

Sochi facilities still a work in progress

by Bruce Arthur
Feb 04, 2014 - 9:39 AM EST
Last Updated: Feb 04, 2014 - 12:17 PM EST
SOCHI, Russia — As a rule, nobody wants to hear journalists complain about travel, which is fair. Travel, if you are lucky, is a part of the job. It’s like complaining about traffic, but somewhere else.

At the Olympics, though, the standard is different, because the Olympics are a comprehensive test. The venues, security, the athletes, transportation, the media, everything. Not every Games reflects on its nation in the same way — Atlanta, for instance, wasn’t so much a pan-American project in 1996 as it was a local disaster, in so many ways.

But Sochi, like Beijing, is different; it is a hideously complex logistical test of how efficiently a country, directed from on high, can pull the whole thing off with nearly unlimited resources. And by that measure, Sochi, its Olympic facilities built practically from scratch, is having some trouble.

“In general, it is done,” said one media hotel worker who has spent the past two years in Sochi, after coming from Siberia. “But the details are not done. And the details are everything.”

She talked about how the bureaucracy had delayed construction, and how the construction companies hadn’t always been paid on time, and weather had delayed matters, too. Oh, and corruption. She was asked what would happen if Putin had ordered it be completed, and she said, “Oh, if Putin says it, it will be done.”

Well, Putin arrived Tuesday. Everyone look busy.

In Beijing, every detail was nailed down. They violated all kinds of human rights to do it, of course, but it was an expression of China’s ruthless efficiency. It showed what the country can do, when it wants to.

Sochi? Well, three of the nine mountain hotels have not been completed, and the IOC estimate that 97 per cent of the rooms are ready appears to ignore the little things.

Almost every room is missing something: lightbulbs, TVs, lamps, chairs, curtains, wifi, heat, hot water. Shower curtains are a valuable piece of the future black market here. (One American photographer was simply told, “You will not get a shower curtain.”)

Of course, the Olympics are also the Olympics of the world’s various body odours, depending on your country and its personal grooming standards, so that might just mean that for the first time, we’re all in the stew together.

Hotel reservations are lost, then found, if you’re lucky. German photographer Joerg Reuter arrived in the mountains and found the first room offered to him to be full of construction debris, with yellow-brown water and appliances that didn’t work.

The next room had construction workers still sleeping in it. The third room had a stray dog in it. Reuter was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “When I came out of the elevator, there was the dog. I said, ‘Right, that’s it.’”

(They are reportedly now killing the numerous stray dogs here, which makes every adorable mutt you see the hero of a Disney movie, directed by Quentin Tarantino. At a press conference Tuesday, Sochi 2014 spokeswoman Alexandra Kosterina said “There is a special service that catches the stray dogs and this, as far as I know, they have a special shelter for the stray dogs, and make a medical examination of them. Like pest control.” It was not comforting.)

But the hotels are where the Russian Games are visibly straining at the seams. In the Ekaterininsky Kvartal hotel, the elevator is broken and the stairway is unlit, with stairs of varying and unpredictable heights.

Outside the Chistya Prudy, there is a bag of concrete in a palm tree, leaking grey down the trunk. Inside, some of the electrical outlets are just plates screwed into drywall.

Sports Illustrated’s Brian Cazeneuve had to clamber through a window to get out of his hotel on Tuesday morning, since the doors were all unexpectedly locked. Chris Stevenson of Sun Media was without electricity for the first day.

My Postmedia colleague Cam Cole’s bathtub came loose from the wall, and therefore rocks like a ship. He has a shower curtain, though. In the Rosa Khutor section of the mountains, Stacy St. Clair of the Chicago Tribune was told by the front desk that if the water worked, “do not use on your face because it contains something very dangerous.” When it did come out of the tap, it looked like a lot like cloudy urine.

Oh, and one journalist in the Omega hotel complex had to refuse a colleague’s request to stay a night in the second twin bed because … well, there’s no easy way to say this, but when the first journalist arrived, someone had left an indeterminate amount of semen on the sheets of the second bed, and those sheets had been taken away for cleaning, and hadn’t come back.

Now, this is not a complaint. Most of the time, it doesn’t really matter. It’s inconvenience, for sponsors and officials and journos together, and most journalists are laughing when they can, and as Bonnie D. Ford of ESPN.com put it, at least it keeps your mind off the whole potential terrorism thing.

But it is a measure of how well this country has nailed down this massive project, how closely it has accomplished its mission, and what we have is a sea of little failures that give rise to the spectre of bigger ones. The Boston Globe drove a local car within a couple hundred feet of the Main Press Centre Tuesday, which is a proximity unthinkable in previous Olympics. It could make a person think about the terrorism thing again.

Maybe in a project this size, in this $51-billion Xanadu, not everything could be completed. We’re not even getting into the sidewalks that dive, or the open manholes because the covers are being stolen, or the piles of construction waste all over the city, or the tumbled earth where grass was supposed to be. The whole thing was built on a swamp, and when it rains, there will be mud. But it’s a bit of a mess, either way.

don't go changin', russia

I'm really looking forward to the hockey tournament. Its going to be hard for anybody to beat Canada. Shea Weber is playing as well as any D I have ever seen and they have better F than anybody.