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Official ***Winter Olympics Thread*** (1 Viewer)

Wonder if these games will make it through without any attacks at the games. A lot of athletes seem to be telling families to stay home. To me that says a lot!

 
Here are the applicant cities for the 2022 Winter Olympics:

Krakow, Poland

Oslo, Norway

Almaty, Kazakhstan

Lviv, Ukraine

Beijing, China

Kazakhstan? Isn't that Borat territory? I'd be happy with Norway. Still, I don't understand (actually I do...$$$) why the IOC doesn't re-use more previous sites. Thus avoiding some of these horrible venues.

 
Jobber said:
Here are the applicant cities for the 2022 Winter Olympics:

Krakow, Poland

Oslo, Norway

Almaty, Kazakhstan

Lviv, Ukraine

Beijing, China

Kazakhstan? Isn't that Borat territory? I'd be happy with Norway. Still, I don't understand (actually I do...$$$) why the IOC doesn't re-use more previous sites. Thus avoiding some of these horrible venues.
Click to expand...
The winter Olympics should be in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany or Austria. Places high in the mountains, where it's below freezing from October through April and it snows constantly. Hockey and figure skating should be outside on a frozen lake.

 
fantasycurse42 said:
What are the Winter Olympics?
Click to expand...
The Winter Olympics is a festival held every 4 years marked by raucous feasts and sporting contests. One of the most popular sports is called Utanrikssørbjaällen, in which large bearded men in traditional garb toss huge wooden hammers across a field where adulterous women have been staked to the ground. Onlookers wager on which whore will last the longest. She is then designated the Utanrikssørhaarløt, and all the participants have relations with her. The 2 week festival culminates in a goat auction, which honestly is pretty anticlimactic by today's standards.

 
Jobber said:
Here are the applicant cities for the 2022 Winter Olympics:

Krakow, Poland

Oslo, Norway

Almaty, Kazakhstan

Lviv, Ukraine

Beijing, China

Kazakhstan? Isn't that Borat territory? I'd be happy with Norway. Still, I don't understand (actually I do...$$$) why the IOC doesn't re-use more previous sites. Thus avoiding some of these horrible venues.
Click to expand...
Yep, Krakow and Oslo are the only ones on that list that make any sense.

 
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/sports/olympics/sochi-remains-a-work-in-progress-as-games-draw-near.html?_r=0

SOCHI, Russia — The official mascots for the Winter Olympics are a polar bear, a hare and a leopard. But walk around the complexes that will stage the Games here, with the opening ceremony Friday, and what seem more apt are a hand drill, a backhoe and a shovel.

Much of Sochi is a work in progress, and parts of it look at least a dozen all-nighters away from completion. There are unfinished hotels, half-finished stores and a mall where the only shop that is open and thriving is a Cinnabon.

Wander the premises over the course of a day and you also get a palpable sense of spectacular ambition, reflected in millions of square feet of new construction, as well as transportation hubs with spiffy trains and shiny buses. You will see an Olympic Park where sporting venues look reassuringly ready.

The combination is singular — an enterprise that is epic, pristine and in many places bewilderingly flawed.

Start with the public accommodations near what is called the Coastal Cluster, home to five ice sports arenas and the stadium for the opening ceremony. To appreciate the hotels in this area, it is probably a good idea to think of them not as hotels but rather as a rare opportunity to experience life in a centrally planned, Soviet-style dystopia.

Only then will you understand, perhaps even enjoy, the peculiar mix of grandiosity and bungling that define these buildings. Though called hotels, they look like austere, upscale apartments inspired by the Eastern Bloc — Bauhaus meets the Super 8. The exteriors are monolithic and nearly identical, except for sections of paint, in shades of yellow, taupe and mauve.

None of the buildings have names. Instead, they are identified by numbers, and as of last weekend, many of the numbers had not yet arrived. Or they had arrived and had yet to be affixed to the buildings. Instead, they were printed on a piece of paper and taped to a wall.

Breakfast is available in Building 10. But not only is Building 10 hard to find, there is no evidence that it houses a restaurant. The place, which has no name, makes subterranean hipster bars in Brooklyn seem desperate for attention. You figure out that you’re in the right place only by walking around Building 10 a few times and spotting, through a window, a woman in an apron.

On the way in, you see a man on a ladder, fixing something. This is a common sight: Last-minute touch-ups have been a feature of Olympic Games for seemingly as long there have been screwdrivers. But the list in Sochi seems extraordinarily large. There are unopened boxes of heating and air-conditioning parts and other essential hardware all over the place. On Sunday, a man in a lobby was drilling into a ceiling, working above and just to the left of a blinking Christmas tree.

A Christmas tree?

“It’s Russia,” said one of many young women who work here. She shrugged.

As an all-purpose explanation for many of the head-scratchers here, “It’s Russia” will do. It would have been a good answer when this reporter woke his first night, at 3 in the morning, to find a man with a Scandinavian accent in his bedroom. This gentleman wanted to know why someone was sleeping in the suite he had been assigned to and for which he had been given a key.

Fair question, and just one of dozens raised by these accommodations. When will the elevator start elevating again? Why is the word “Mystery” on the bottom of the television? Is that the brand name? Or a sly invitation to wonder why it does not work? And finally, when will the front desk have a system so that it does not give out keys to occupied rooms?

After breakfast, jump on a bus to the main media center. Like much of this city, the bus has the Sochi Olympics slogan emblazoned on its side: “Hot. Cool. Yours.” It sounds like a second-place pitch for the McDLT, the short-lived McDonald’s sandwich that promised to keep the burger side warm and the lettuce side chilled. The drive takes you past the odd insta-metropolis that this area has become, a hodgepodge of old churches, sleek industrial office buildings and freshly paved highways. You also pass a lot of dirt fields, dotted with newly planted trees, kept upright with twine.

From the media center, a bus takes you to the Olympic Park, which is open for sneak peeks and team warm-ups. The venues here may be the most impressive part of the Games, and are surely the most important. If the events go off without a snag, none of the other delays and none of the last-minute jackhammering will be remembered.

While some of the housing is reminiscent of a play that opened before it had enough time to rehearse, most of the venues are prepared: the Ice Cube Curling Center; Shayba Arena, which will host hockey; and Adler Arena, where speedskating will take place. The one minor exception is the Bolshoy Ice Dome, where this reporter somehow pulled the handles off two doors.

Paging a carpenter. Section 106A, please.

A couple of stray dogs are trotting around the Bolshoy. The animals have attracted a lot of attention, mostly because of reports that the city has plans to kill them ahead of the Games. But these animals may be more cunning than their would-be captors. One stray managed to penetrate the heavily secured perimeter of the media center, giving the impression that it had somehow disguised itself as a reporter.

The other half of the Olympics, where snow-related events will take place, is a 40-minute bus ride into the mountains. The journey rolls through a series of lengthy tunnels that were carved out for the Games, and whatever the environmental impact of this construction, it is hard to argue with the results. The trip is smooth.

What the Russians have built here in what is known as the mountain cluster is akin to a mid- to high-end ski resort, with shops, restaurants and hotels. Or that is what it will be when it is completed. A striking photograph of a model is displayed on a panel of the multiple-story Gorky Gorod Mall, and she is delivering her best come-hither look under the words “opening soon.” But for now, there is little hither to come to.

The mall’s doors are open, though the individual stores are not, and someone in a bear costume is dancing on the first floor to some piped-in music. But the ambience is less celebratory than anxious. Shoppers are vastly outnumbered by men wheeling pallets up ramps, or peeling plastic off glass displays, or unboxing products. The Benetton clothing store looks as if it needs another week before it can open its doors.

The situation is even worse on a gondola ride up the mountain, to a village that everyone calls 960, the number of meters it sits above sea level. A few hotels are here, in a setting so remote and with a vista so gorgeous that it seems more apt for a James Bond villain. And maybe a Bond villain would have had an easier time with construction. Walk down the village’s brick street, and you see luxury hotels with lobbies stuffed with inventory, frenetic employees and unnerved hospitality professionals.

One hotel that is open, though has yet to accept guests, is a Swissotel. There were supposed to be two here, but one fell so far behind schedule that management decided to pull workers from the site and concentrate on finishing one on time. Guests will arrive Thursday, and the place should be fully booked by Feb. 15, said Oliver Kuhn, a Swissotel manager.

What was the delay?

“Rain. A lot of rain this summer,” he said with a wry grin that said rain was not the whole story. What is the rest of the story?

“You’ll have to investigate,” he said.

Articles suggesting that the Games are not ready are a now familiar trope of pre-Olympic news coverage, but typically those articles cease in the weeks and days before the torch arrives. Sochi is cutting it close.

Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, had seven years to build these Olympics, and he staked a record $51 billion and his own reputation to realize his vision. There are life-after-the-Games plans for many of the buildings and sporting arenas, but as with every Olympics, the world’s attention will be trained here for mere weeks. With such a tiny window of life for Sochi on the international stage, one would expect that deadlines would have been met months ago.

88COMMENTS So far, the inconveniences have mostly affected the news media, perhaps the least sympathetic of the participants here. But the parents of athletes are on the way, and there is some trepidation among Olympic officials that outrage will flow if these people receive the no-hot-water treatment. Or if their hotel rooms are not ready.

Kuhn, the Swissotel manager, seemed surprisingly unstressed under the circumstances. Sitting on a bright purple chair beside an elevator, he watched supplies arrive in his lobby.

“I just came from opening a hotel in Ulan Bator,” he said of the remote Mongolian city, “so I’m used to it.”
Click to expand...
 
McGarnicle said:
Jobber said:
Here are the applicant cities for the 2022 Winter Olympics:

Krakow, Poland

Oslo, Norway

Almaty, Kazakhstan

Lviv, Ukraine

Beijing, China

Kazakhstan? Isn't that Borat territory? I'd be happy with Norway. Still, I don't understand (actually I do...$$$) why the IOC doesn't re-use more previous sites. Thus avoiding some of these horrible venues.
Click to expand...
The winter Olympics should be in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany or Austria. Places high in the mountains, where it's below freezing from October through April and it snows constantly. Hockey and figure skating should be outside on a frozen lake.
Click to expand...
Salt Lake City could host again. I was there for the entirety of the 2002 Olympics and it was very well-run.

 
Apologies for the barrage of posts, but I am completely intrigued by the

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/olympics-fourth-place-medal/sochi-s-slopestyle-course-questioned-again-after-a-second-snowboarder-is-injured-142803943.html

Sochi's slopestyle course questioned again after Shaun White and another snowboarder sustain injuriesDespite some overnight changes, Shaun White and a Finnish snowboarder were injured on Sochi's slopestyle course at Rosa Khutor Extreme Park on Tuesday. According to reports, White jammed his left wrist and Marika Enne of Finland crashed on the final jump of the course.

Enne was carried away on a stretcher and her coach Mats Lindfors told reporters that Enne had "hit her head." White's injury was described as minor. He was in good enough shape to stick around and tell reporters that Sochi's slopestyle course was "a little intimidating."

The two incidents come one day after Norway's Torstein Horgmo, a medal favorite in the men's slopestyle, broke his collarbone on Monday while attempting a difficult jump.

The tough course combined with wet conditions have drawn early criticism from athletes with a group meeting at the end of Monday's practice runs to share their concerns. Course builders have taken the complaints to heart.

From Canada.com:

Feedback given at the end of Monday’s session prompted course builders to make changes overnight, with more positive reactions coming from athletes on Tuesday.

Still, some athletes believe the course needs more work. “For women the big jumps are a little too big,” said Sarka Pancochova of the Czech Republic. “When you have really good jumps like the X Games even the women have no problem dealing with the big jumps. It’s very hard for them to figure it out. It’s progressed from yesterday.”

Slopestyle is a new event at the Winter Games and features what is more or less a downhill obstacle course built of jumps, rails and boxes. Athletes score points after being judged on their moves and tricks. For a full tutorial on slopestyle, check out Fourth-Place Medal's slopestyle guide.

"I think they wanted to make big kickers and it's not really good for riders. It's not really safe anymore," Finland's Roope Tonteri told the Toronto Sun after Monday's practice round. "I just don't want to get injured."

The freestyle nature of slopestyle makes it inherently dangerous, but something must be wrong if snowboarders are already gathering together to talk about how the course can be made safer.

Organizers must act quick to make any further changes, however. Qualification for both the men's and women's slopestyle are scheduled for Thursday with the medal events slated for this weekend.
Click to expand...
 
This event is more for the women IMO. I don't get any thrills out of women's figure skating but I do appreciate what the women go thru to get to that point. I might watch if wife can lure me to the coach but otherwise not gonna watch it.

I like some of the funky sports but we have the X games every year, we see Shaun White all the time.

This has been the NBC Holy Grail as they hitched their wagons to the Olympics and let a lot of other sports die on their network.

It really is sad how awful the pictures look over there. Does the sun ever shine there, looks like a very sad place to walk around.

 
McGarnicle said:
Jobber said:
Here are the applicant cities for the 2022 Winter Olympics:

Krakow, Poland

Oslo, Norway

Almaty, Kazakhstan

Lviv, Ukraine

Beijing, China

Kazakhstan? Isn't that Borat territory? I'd be happy with Norway. Still, I don't understand (actually I do...$$$) why the IOC doesn't re-use more previous sites. Thus avoiding some of these horrible venues.
Click to expand...
The winter Olympics should be in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany or Austria. Places high in the mountains, where it's below freezing from October through April and it snows constantly. Hockey and figure skating should be outside on a frozen lake.
Click to expand...
no Canada?

 
massraider said:
Timmay said:
massraider said:
http://deadspin.com/staying-in-sochi-is-a-hilarious-adventure-1515722114/@sarah-hedgecock
Click to expand...
Holy Cow!!
Click to expand...
My buddy is a DJ who is performing and is the musical director for some events out there, and his Facebook updates are unreal. he said it's worse than you can imagine.
Click to expand...
Feel free to post the better/crazier ones. :coffee:

What do they expect you do with piss colored water coming out of the sinks? Are they expected to shower in that too?? That's some nasty ####, good luck to everyone there.

 
I bet most of these athletes are just pissed this isn't in some nice location like Calgary, Salt Lake City or Nagano. The IOC should be really embarassed for allowing this to happen.

 
Jobber said:
I bet most of these athletes are just pissed this isn't in some nice location like Calgary, Salt Lake City or Nagano. The IOC should be really embarassed for allowing this to happen.
Click to expand...
Why? Aren't they basically known for taking big kickbacks? This just went to the highest bidder.

 
"One of the other prime contenders was Salzburg, Austria. It's home to Mozart, the Sound of Music, breathtaking beauty and centuries-old infrastructure. In other words, exactly what the Winter Olympics are supposed to look like."

Ugh.

 
That deadspin posting is crazy. I can't wait till the athletes get there in volume.

They spent how much on this thing? 50 Billion?

 
massraider said:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/sports/olympics/sochi-remains-a-work-in-progress-as-games-draw-near.html?_r=0



375]



375]SOCHI, Russia The official mascots for the Winter Olympics are a polar bear, a hare and a leopard. But walk around the complexes that will stage the Games here, with the opening ceremony Friday, and what seem more apt are a hand drill, a backhoe and a shovel.


375]Much of Sochi is a work in progress, and parts of it look at least a dozen all-nighters away from completion. There are unfinished hotels, half-finished stores and a mall where the only shop that is open and thriving is a Cinnabon.


375]Wander the premises over the course of a day and you also get a palpable sense of spectacular ambition, reflected in millions of square feet of new construction, as well as transportation hubs with spiffy trains and shiny buses. You will see an Olympic Park where sporting venues look reassuringly ready.


375]The combination is singular an enterprise that is epic, pristine and in many places bewilderingly flawed.


375]Start with the public accommodations near what is called the Coastal Cluster, home to five ice sports arenas and the stadium for the opening ceremony. To appreciate the hotels in this area, it is probably a good idea to think of them not as hotels but rather as a rare opportunity to experience life in a centrally planned, Soviet-style dystopia.


375]Only then will you understand, perhaps even enjoy, the peculiar mix of grandiosity and bungling that define these buildings. Though called hotels, they look like austere, upscale apartments inspired by the Eastern Bloc Bauhaus meets the Super 8. The exteriors are monolithic and nearly identical, except for sections of paint, in shades of yellow, taupe and mauve.


375]None of the buildings have names. Instead, they are identified by numbers, and as of last weekend, many of the numbers had not yet arrived. Or they had arrived and had yet to be affixed to the buildings. Instead, they were printed on a piece of paper and taped to a wall.


375]Breakfast is available in Building 10. But not only is Building 10 hard to find, there is no evidence that it houses a restaurant. The place, which has no name, makes subterranean hipster bars in Brooklyn seem desperate for attention. You figure out that youre in the right place only by walking around Building 10 a few times and spotting, through a window, a woman in an apron.


375]On the way in, you see a man on a ladder, fixing something. This is a common sight: Last-minute touch-ups have been a feature of Olympic Games for seemingly as long there have been screwdrivers. But the list in Sochi seems extraordinarily large. There are unopened boxes of heating and air-conditioning parts and other essential hardware all over the place. On Sunday, a man in a lobby was drilling into a ceiling, working above and just to the left of a blinking Christmas tree.


375]A Christmas tree?


375]Its Russia, said one of many young women who work here. She shrugged.


375]As an all-purpose explanation for many of the head-scratchers here, Its Russia will do. It would have been a good answer when this reporter woke his first night, at 3 in the morning, to find a man with a Scandinavian accent in his bedroom. This gentleman wanted to know why someone was sleeping in the suite he had been assigned to and for which he had been given a key.


375]Fair question, and just one of dozens raised by these accommodations. When will the elevator start elevating again? Why is the word Mystery on the bottom of the television? Is that the brand name? Or a sly invitation to wonder why it does not work? And finally, when will the front desk have a system so that it does not give out keys to occupied rooms?


375]After breakfast, jump on a bus to the main media center. Like much of this city, the bus has the Sochi Olympics slogan emblazoned on its side: Hot. Cool. Yours. It sounds like a second-place pitch for the McDLT, the short-lived McDonalds sandwich that promised to keep the burger side warm and the lettuce side chilled. The drive takes you past the odd insta-metropolis that this area has become, a hodgepodge of old churches, sleek industrial office buildings and freshly paved highways. You also pass a lot of dirt fields, dotted with newly planted trees, kept upright with twine.


375]From the media center, a bus takes you to the Olympic Park, which is open for sneak peeks and team warm-ups. The venues here may be the most impressive part of the Games, and are surely the most important. If the events go off without a snag, none of the other delays and none of the last-minute jackhammering will be remembered.


375]While some of the housing is reminiscent of a play that opened before it had enough time to rehearse, most of the venues are prepared: the Ice Cube Curling Center; Shayba Arena, which will host hockey; and Adler Arena, where speedskating will take place. The one minor exception is the Bolshoy Ice Dome, where this reporter somehow pulled the handles off two doors.


375]Paging a carpenter. Section 106A, please.


375]A couple of stray dogs are trotting around the Bolshoy. The animals have attracted a lot of attention, mostly because of reports that the city has plans to kill them ahead of the Games. But these animals may be more cunning than their would-be captors. One stray managed to penetrate the heavily secured perimeter of the media center, giving the impression that it had somehow disguised itself as a reporter.


375]The other half of the Olympics, where snow-related events will take place, is a 40-minute bus ride into the mountains. The journey rolls through a series of lengthy tunnels that were carved out for the Games, and whatever the environmental impact of this construction, it is hard to argue with the results. The trip is smooth.


375]What the Russians have built here in what is known as the mountain cluster is akin to a mid- to high-end ski resort, with shops, restaurants and hotels. Or that is what it will be when it is completed. A striking photograph of a model is displayed on a panel of the multiple-story Gorky Gorod Mall, and she is delivering her best come-hither look under the words opening soon. But for now, there is little hither to come to.


375]The malls doors are open, though the individual stores are not, and someone in a bear costume is dancing on the first floor to some piped-in music. But the ambience is less celebratory than anxious. Shoppers are vastly outnumbered by men wheeling pallets up ramps, or peeling plastic off glass displays, or unboxing products. The Benetton clothing store looks as if it needs another week before it can open its doors.



375]The situation is even worse on a gondola ride up the mountain, to a village that everyone calls 960, the number of meters it sits above sea level. A few hotels are here, in a setting so remote and with a vista so gorgeous that it seems more apt for a James Bond villain. And maybe a Bond villain would have had an easier time with construction. Walk down the villages brick street, and you see luxury hotels with lobbies stuffed with inventory, frenetic employees and unnerved hospitality professionals.



375]One hotel that is open, though has yet to accept guests, is a Swissotel. There were supposed to be two here, but one fell so far behind schedule that management decided to pull workers from the site and concentrate on finishing one on time. Guests will arrive Thursday, and the place should be fully booked by Feb. 15, said Oliver Kuhn, a Swissotel manager.



375]What was the delay?



375]Rain. A lot of rain this summer, he said with a wry grin that said rain was not the whole story. What is the rest of the story?



375]Youll have to investigate, he said.



375]Articles suggesting that the Games are not ready are a now familiar trope of pre-Olympic news coverage, but typically those articles cease in the weeks and days before the torch arrives. Sochi is cutting it close.



375]Russias president, Vladimir V. Putin, had seven years to build these Olympics, and he staked a record $51 billion and his own reputation to realize his vision. There are life-after-the-Games plans for many of the buildings and sporting arenas, but as with every Olympics, the worlds attention will be trained here for mere weeks. With such a tiny window of life for Sochi on the international stage, one would expect that deadlines would have been met months ago.

88COMMENTS

375]So far, the inconveniences have mostly affected the news media, perhaps the least sympathetic of the participants here. But the parents of athletes are on the way, and there is some trepidation among Olympic officials that outrage will flow if these people receive the no-hot-water treatment. Or if their hotel rooms are not ready.



375]Kuhn, the Swissotel manager, seemed surprisingly unstressed under the circumstances. Sitting on a bright purple chair beside an elevator, he watched supplies arrive in his lobby.



375]I just came from opening a hotel in Ulan Bator, he said of the remote Mongolian city, so Im used to it.
Click to expand...


375]
Click to expand...
Can we make this the new motto of the Sochi Winter Olympics?"It's Russia. :shrug: "

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Hotels might be ready after the olympics are over.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/03/travel/sochi-olympic-hotels/

Four days before the opening of the Winter Games, some of the hotels being built for the Olympics are reporting construction delays that could affect the tens of thousands of visitors expected to descend on the region.

The Sochi 2014 organizing committee announced that at least one of the hotels built to accommodate visiting journalists would not be ready.

"Dear Media," the committee wrote, "this is to inform you that the official opening of the hotel Gorki Grand has been postponed due to technical reasons."

In a subsequent phone conversation, Anna Efimchenko, a Sochi 2014 spokeswoman, explained to CNN that the Gorki Grand Hotel was "having some troubles with the water."

...
Click to expand...
 
Last edited by a moderator:
McGarnicle said:
Maik Jeaunz said:
My hotel has no water. If restored, the front desk says, "do not use on your face because it contains something very dangerous." #Sochi2014

Stacy St. Clair (@StacyStClair) February 4, 2014
Click to expand...
jeebus.
Click to expand...
Would not surprise me in the least if Putin was intentionally poisoning everyone.
Click to expand...
Putin poisons all of the Olympic athletes, declares himself the winner of the gold medal in all events by default, and then rips off his shirt and hops on a Siberian tiger that he rides off into sunset along the Black Sea while flipping the bird in the general direction of Chechnya.

:cueclosingceremonies:

 
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