Winter Paralympic Games Start Today

Earlier this year I posted a number of stories on the Winter Olympics.
Now the Winter Paralympic Games are about to begin in Sochi.  Opening ceremonies are today (Friday) with competitions starting Saturday.


These Paralympic Games are held every 4 years following the Winter Olympics.  They will last ten days with athletes from more than 40 countries participating in five categories of sporting events.


Winter Paralympic sporting events include:
Alpine skiing.
Biathlon (combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting).
Cross-country skiing.
Ice sledge hockey.
Wheelchair curling.


In 2014, two medal events in para-snowboarding have been added to the schedule.  You’ll find lots more details at http://www.sochi2014.com/en


Politics and Sports


Last Saturday Toronto Star Sports columnist Cathal Kelly called for an athlete’s boycott of the Winter Paralympic Games in Sochi. http://www.thestar.com/sports/sochi2014/2014/03/01/canada_needs_to_step_up_and_boycott_paralympic_games_in_sochi_kelly.html


There have been boycotts before.  Did they do any good?  Did anything in the world of politics change as a result of these boycotts?  Probably not. 


Here is a story from the Star from last summer when there was speculation that the Sochi Olympic Games that just finished in February would be boycotted. The story does a good job of conveying the perspective of athletes who were burned in 1980 when the Moscow Games were boycotted because of the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.


In advance of a possible boycott of Beijing 2008, I wrote a little piece on the recent history of such actions.  http://foreveryoungnews.com/posts/1231-the-spirit-lives-on


Re-reading that piece now, it seems I was a bit of a poseur for the Olympic movement.  “Faster Higher Stronger;” maybe I drank the Kool Aid.  There is more to consider.


Today’s situation, for example.  Right now, the host of the Para Olympics has invaded a sovereign nation.  A mere three hundred miles from Sochi, sixteen thousand Russian troops are in control of Crimea.
I’m thinking back to last summer when I read Laura Hillenbrand’s book Unbroken.  It is a World War II story of “survival, resilience and redemption.”  Olympian Louis Zamperini, the subject of the book, was an American Airman who crashed in the Pacific in WWII. He then spent 2 1/2 years in a Japanese POW camp.  Conditions were brutal.  


If not for the war, Zamperini might have been the first runner to crack the four-minute barrier for the mile.  (As you know, Brit Roger Banister achieved that milestone in 1954.)


Hillenbrand’s book is a great read.  Her observations on the 1936 Games where 19 year-old Zamperini finished eighth in the 5,000 metres are relevant to today’s situation, I think.


At Hitler’s Berlin Olympics, the Germans took these Olympics to a completely different level compared to previous games.  Did their games legitimize, to some extent, the Third Reich?  Yes, they did.


But after the Games were over things were different.  Hillenbrand recounts how American basketball player Frank Lubin stayed behind for a few days after the official closing of the Olympics.


“His German hosts had invited him out for dinner, so they cruised the streets in search of a restaurant.  A pretty place caught Lubin’s eye, but when he suggested it, his hosts balked: a Star of David hung in the window.  To be seen there, they said 'might prove harmful to us.’  The group found a gentile restaurant, then visited a public swimming pool.  As they walked in, Lubin saw a sign reading JUDEN VERBOTEN.  The sign hadn’t been there during the Games.”  


Lubin knew that “(s)omething terrible was coming.”


Can we compare Hitler’s Germany to Putin’s Russia? Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird did just earlier this week.


The athletes who are currently in Sochi have worked for four years and more to get to this competition. These athletes are probably the closest we get to real amateur athletes these days. Punishing them by imposing a boycott won’t correct injustices in Russia politics or change things on the international scene. Nevertheless,  participation in these two international events would seem   to endorse Putin’s repressive regime and the validate the obscene spending on facilities that has become the modern Olympics.
 
For this and other reasons, it has come time to rethink the Olympics.


I’ll come back to this in my next post.

Sochi 2014 - Eh to Zed

(This story originally appeared at http://foreveryoungnews.com/)


Albertville was the site of the 1992 Olympics where Kerrin Lee Gartner took the downhill skiing event.  While lee-Gartner was a consistent performer, with 46 top ten finishes in her carer she won only one other international race in her career.
Bandy, an 11 player a side sport played on ice on a Canadian football sized field, is a demonstration sport in Sochi. 

Clara Hughes, Canadian skater and cyclist, won four winter and two summer medals in her career.

Dineen, Kevin, pointless as a player in the 84 Olympics, is now the women’s team coach.

Eisler, Lloyd, a four time Olympian skater, twice won bronze with partner Isabelle Braseur. 

Fifty-two gold medals have been won by Canadian athletes since the first Winter Olympics held in Chamonix France in 1924.

Greene, Senator Nancy took gold in the Giant Slalom in Grenoble games in 1968.

Hurd, Alexander captured silver and bronze medals in Lake Placid in 1932, our only individual medal in those Olympics. 

Ice Hockey is the official name of the sport we like to call our own. In his book Memories of a Man Who Couldn’t Play (Doubleday, 1996.)  author David Adams Richards says “hockey is greater than ice hockey - the latter being a European invention.”

Jeremy Wotherspoon was second in the 500-metre speed skating event in Ngano in 1998.  Now 37, Wotherspoon failed to make the team in a comeback attempt earlier this season.  

Klassen, Cindy won a record five speed skating medals at Turin, Italy in 2006.

Lascelles Brown, Canadian bobsledder and medalist in 2006, competed for Jamaica in Salt Lake City, is back in the fold after pushing Monaco’s two-man sled for a time.

Military Patrol was a sport in the ’24 Games.  It evolved into the sport of Biathlon. Marian Bedard’s Lillehamer (94) medals in this sport are fondly remembered.

Nordic Combined puts ski jumping and cross-country together.  It has been an event in every Winter Olympics. 

Oslo hosted the ‘52 games where we won nothing but hockey.

Podivinsky, Ed’s downhill bronze in Lillehammer was well received after the lean years in Alpine Skiing that followed funding cuts after the Calgary Olympics.

Quinn, Pat coached 2002 Team Canada to their first Olympic gold medal since 1952.  

Rover.  Seven a side hockey featured the rover position in 1920 when the Falcons, a Winnipeg team made up of players of Icelandic heritage, won the first ever Ice Hockey gold in the Summer Olympics.   

Skeleton was included in the 1924 Olympics but disappeared from the games until 1948, disappeared again until 02. In Turin (06) Vaughan Ontario’s Duff Gibson, at 39 years, became our oldest Gold medalist ever.

Toller Cranston, artist and skater, took a bronze in the second Innsbruck Olympics (76)  

Underdog Ross Rebagliati, who briefly had his Nagano snowboard gold taken away for testing positive for marijuana use, announced plans to open up a medical marijuana franchise last year.

Vancouver Olympics were expensive at $7 billion.  Would you believe Sochi14 will cost $51 billion according to latest estimates?

Vogt, Kathy speed skated in Lake Placid in 1980 as now husband Randy Gregg skated on defence for Team Canada.  Their kids, Jamie in Long Track and Jessica in Short Track skating both donned Canadian colours in 2010.  Jamie is back this year.  

Winter Pentathlon comprised of cross-country and downhill skiing, shooting, fencing and horse riding was contested in 1948 for the first and last time.

XIII or thirteenth winter Olympics were hosted by Lake Placid, New York. Skater Gaeten Boucher burst onto the scene here with a second place finish in the men’s 1,000 metres.

Yurkiw, Larisa downhill skier, qualified on January 11^th and has been raising her own funds.   Read her blog at http://larisayurkiw.blogspot.ca/ at 

Zero medals. Our output in luge, ski jumping and Nordic combined. 

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Olympic Memories - Innsbruck January 29 – February 9, 1964

(This is my sixth post related to the Sochi 2014 Olympics.  This story originally appeared at http://foreveryoungnews.com/)

It has been fifty years since the Innsbruck 64 Olympics.

Those games were a breakthrough of sorts as for the first time events were held throughout surrounding areas that is not a just one location.  This change pushed spectator attendance to over 1 million spectators. The only problem was snow, there wasn’t any.  The Austrian Army was required to carve out huge bricks of the white stuff from the mountains and transport it to luge and bobsled runs and ski slopes.  

Fifty-five Canadians competed in eight sports in Innsbruck very different from the two hundred plus Canucks who will contest 14 of 15 Olympic sports in Sochi this month.

The highlight for Canadians in these Austrian games was the surprise victory of Vic Emery in the four-man bobsled event.  Surprising, as fifty years ago there was no bobsled facility in Canada.  Emery his brother John, Peter Kirby and Doug Anakin practiced in a Montreal gym and apparently got in a few runs at the 1932 Olympic bobsled run in lake Placid New York.

Petra Burka captured bronze in women’s figure skating.  Seventeen-year-old Burka was coached by her mother Ellen who later went on to coach Toller Cranston and many others.  Petra won the world championship the next year in Colorado.

The pairs team of Debbie Wilkes and Guy Revell took the bronze, then later were awarded silver medals when it was decided that the second place finishers were professionals.  That ruling was later reversed.  Wilkes, who became a broadcaster, retired as a skater later that year at the age of 17.  

Another controversy occurred in men’s hockey.  Our amateur team finished fourth after the criteria for breaking ties in the standings was changed during the competition.

In 1976, the Winter Olympics came back to this west Austrian city when Denver withdrew as a host.