the tindog coffeehouse

If the Winter Olympics were run more like the BCS…

The United States, Germany, Norway, Canada and Russia will be allowed in.

But not Belarus, Kazakhstan or Liechtenstein. They’ll have to compete in the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Olympics.

Unless, of course, a couple of them are unbeaten. Then they’ll play one another in the Fiesta Bowl.

I love the Winter Olympics, which may seem odd for a native Texan who’s only been snow skiing once in his life (and by “skiing”, I mean awkwardly falling down down the bunny slope while trying not to break anything).

And now (as if the games weren’t already interesting enough), Popular Mechanics has a breakdown of the physics behind several Olympic events, including:

• Alpine skiing – “Alpine skiers’ knees sustain about 110 ft-lb of lateral torque during turns and nearly 300 pounds of total force at the joint—almost as much torque as can be found in the engines of a ski resort’s snow-removal trucks.”
• Hockey – “When a player blasts a slap shot 30 feet from the net with 125 pounds of force, the goalie has less than 200 milliseconds to react to the flying 3-inch-wide, 1-inch-thick puck.”

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TVGuide.com seems to be the only rational voice regarding the recent scoring controversy in the women’s gymnastics competition.

On the uneven bars Chinese gymnast He Kexin tied with American gymnast Nastia Liukin, but the Chinese gymnast got the gold medal thanks to an obscure tie-breaking rule. The NBC announcers were naturally outraged.

But TVGuide’s Olympics blog puts it in perspective (emphasis mine):

A great night of performances in a variety of sports was tarnished Monday by some unattractive whining from the NBC gymnastics crew. The controversial tie-breaker in the women’s uneven bars certainly didn’t seem to make sense, but you have to wonder how much howling we would have heard if an American had come out top. China’s He Kexin and Nastia Liukin of the U.S. had identical scores, but a seemingly arbitrary formula gave the gold to He. NBC’s team — Al Trautwig, Elfie Schlegel and Tim Daggett — took great issue with this, and Trautwig even went so far as to question whether He felt she deserved the gold. Back in the studio, bellowing Bela Karolyi continued his ranting to Bob Costas, who did his best to remain impartial. I don’t remember anyone questioning Paul Hamm’s all-around victory four years ago, when a scoring error pushed his South Korean opponent back to silver.

The next event, the men’s vault, also involved a tie-breaker, one with a more clear-cut resolution — and no American athlete involved. The NBC team let that one go.

So just to recap: If there’s a scoring controversy that results in an American losing, then that’s wrong. If it results in an American winning or if no American is involved, then that’s OK.

I’ve really enjoyed watching the Olympics this year, especially the swimming events.  Watching Michael Phelps compete and win gold medal after gold medal is exciting, but it’s almost just expected that he’s going to win and that everyone else is competing for silver and bronze.

But the 2nd-biggest story to come out of Olympic swimming has got to be the sheer number of world records that have been shattered. I knew the new fancy Speedo LZR Racer suit that everyone is wearing had a lot to do with it, but mental_floss has some other reasons as well that aren’t obvious to non-athletic viewers like me.

The pool in Beijing, known as the “Water Cube,” is 3 meters deep, instead of the previous depth of 2 meters. This allows swimmers to dive deeper and continue their push off “dolphin kicks” for a longer period of time. Olympic medalist and commentator Rowdy Gaines says, “It’s just deep enough to where the waves dissipate (and) the turbulence dissipates down to the bottom.”

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