Olympics: 2014 Sochi Olympics
Skiers get first look at 2014 Sochi site
Fabrice Cofrini/AFP/Getty ImagesA view of the Rosa Khutor Mountain Resort, host to some of the 2014 alpine skiing events.The Summer Olympics in London may be just around the corner, but American skiers recently got a taste of the slopes above Sochi, site of the 2014 Winter Olympics, when Russia held its first alpine World Cup races this month.
Lindsey Vonn clinched her fifth consecutive World Cup downhill title with a third-place finish there last weekend and Bode Miller finished fourth two weekends ago on what will be the 2014 Olympics downhill course. Miller told reporters at the event that the hill setup and jumps are good, but the course has too many turns.
"The Olympic downhill has to be the real thing and especially when you have such a great venue as this, it would be awesome to showcase it well," he said. "But this is way too turny for a downhill. It's borderline obnoxious for a downhill being that turny. It is tough when they've never run a race before, but I'm sure they're learning as much as we are and I'm sure they'll figure out how to use this terrain and make something special."
Vonn told reporters she liked the race hill.
"It's hard to compare this course to the other courses on the World Cup because it's so unique," she said at a press conference. "The terrain is really cool. It has everything -- side hills, traverses. It has a lot of terrain. It has flats, steeps. It has turns like a super-G, it has big, open turns. It really has everything. I don't think the jumps are too challenging for the women. I think it's good just the way it is."
Sochi is a large resort city of 400,000 on the Black Sea with a very mild winter climate with average temperatures near 50 in February. The Olympic alpine venue is located at the new resort of Rosa Khutor in the mountains above the city.
In an email to reporters, U.S. ski team media representative Doug Haney detailed how arriving there was like landing in a boom of the industrial revolution.
"Sparks flew from all directions as welders blasted train trestles, sky cranes hoisted beams, bus stops were humming. It was 8:30 p.m. Fifty thousand people have been working 'round the clock for the past year and a half building for 2014. Another 25,000 will be added to that number in the next year."
"This is the coolest hill I've ever seen for ski racing -- downhill, super-G -- it doesn't matter,'' Travis Ganong told reporters on the slope. "This hill is just awesome, top to bottom. It has really steep technical sections, really cool rolls and terrain with bank turns, and then big jumps and the mountains around here are gorgeous. The set can probably use some change before the Olympics and they'll work on that in the next couple of years, but in general this is a great hill."
Planets are aligned for Weir's comeback
I wasn't surprised when I saw Johnny Weir's comeback announcement. All the planets in his personal universe have aligned to make a return to competition completely logical. If he attacks his mission with all the purposefulness he promises, Weir could have the best of two worlds: Representing his country in a country he loves.
The 27-year-old Weir, long coached by Russians, speaks the language and has immersed himself in Russian culture; earlier this month, he married an Atlanta-based lawyer of Russian heritage. What better place to visualize the skate of his life than his home away from home during the 2014 Sochi Olympics?
There's another intangible. Weir has always been comfortable in his own skin, and he is a thoughtful, witty interview, but there was one area where he stubbornly asserted his right to remain silent. Now that his sexual orientation is a non-issue (as it always should have been), that's one less distraction from his goal. If he's called on to be a spokesman for gay athletes, my guess is he's ready.
I also wasn't surprised to see Weir's news go viral. There may be better jumpers and spinners among the pool of men gunning for Sochi in two years, but there is no better pure performer, and that has won him a huge and loyal fan base.
Limber and elegant, a risk-taker in his costumes and choreography, Weir's artistry is hard to fit within the rigid mathematics that now circumscribe figure skating. I thought Weir's scores in the free skate at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics were too low, and I wasn't alone. He'll have to earn his way into the stony hearts and calculators of the judges again, and that will likely involve full mastery of a quadruple jump.
There are no sure bets two years out from the next Winter Games. But I have no doubt it will be interesting to see Johnny Weir give skating another go.
It seems like the answer would be "yes" if Bylsma got his way.
While there is still no decision about whether NHL players will be allowed to participate in the Games, Bylsma has done some work with USA Hockey this summer and seems interested in being the team's head coach.
"I'd be more than willing to be a part of a staff, but my goal isn't just to be a part of a staff," Bylsma said at the Research, Development and Orientation Camp this week, according to NHL.com. "At least, the written goal is not just to be part of the staff."
Bylsma worked with coaches at the USA Hockey National Junior Evaluation Camp in Lake Placid, N.Y., last week. Pittsburgh general manager Ray Shero told NHL.com that working with USA Hockey has been a goal of Bylsma's since he joined the Penguins' organization.
"For me, there is a great deal of passion and energy and I get jacked up about going to Lake Placid and being with those kids," Bylsma said, according to NHL.com. "And it was the first time for me to wear the USA Hockey on my jacket. I took it home and I'll be wearing it proudly."
Shero added that Bylsma has been on the radar of USA Hockey executive Jim Johansson.
IOC's Killy says Sochi work is on track
Jean-Claude Killy made the comments Tuesday at the conclusion of a two-day visit by a working group to the Black Sea city. The visit comes before a full inspection tour by the IOC Coordination Commission for Sochi in mid-September.
According to a statement from the Sochi organizing committee, Killy said the inspectors "have seen continued progress in the development of the sporting venues both in the coastal cluster and in the mountains." He said much remained to be done in developing adequate hotel accommodation and operational planning, "but we are confident Sochi 2014 and its partners are on track to deliver their commitments."
Women's ski jump OK'd, but battle not over
The best women's ski jumpers in the United States rose at dawn Wednesday and made their way to the Park City, Utah, home of former Salt Lake City Mayor DeeDee Corradini. Bagels and coffee were served. They dialed a number that would allow them to listen in on a news conference in London and waited to hear if their sport had finally been cleared for landing.
When International Olympic Committee sports director Christophe Dubi announced that women would jump at the Sochi Games in 2014 -- the culmination of a vigorous and at times contentious fight for the past several years -- it was a thrill, a relief and a challenge all wrapped into one.
"There's not a group out there more prepared for the world stage than we are," said 23-year-old U.S. team member Alissa Johnson, who began jumping when she was 5. "It's a huge weight off our shoulders, and the rain cloud's no longer following us wherever we go. But the battle doesn't end here."
Now, Johnson said, she and her teammates are intent on demonstrating that their performances can be just as breathtaking and compelling as their male counterparts.
Ski jumping was the last male-only skiing discipline in the Olympics. The women had petitioned for inclusion for years; but, leading up to the 2010 Vancouver Games, a multinational group of competitors mounted a more concerted effort to get on the schedule and eventually took their case to court. Although they lost, Corradini -- president of Women's Ski Jumping USA, the foundation that funds the women's program -- said the lawsuit was still the turning point in her mind.
"It gave us the ability to get the attention of the world and the IOC," she said. "We'd been trying to get the facts out, and we won in the sense that it exposed that this was discrimination."
The women will compete in only one event, the shorter "normal hill," in Sochi as opposed to the men, who jump the normal hill, the large hill and contest a team event. Corradini said the women will keep pushing to add those events, as well as Nordic combined (ski jumping and cross-country skiing), in future Olympics.
Top women are capable of jumping the same distances as top men. Men build up more speed on the approach, or "inrun," because they weigh more, but women, by virtue of being lighter, can sail farther in the air. Lindsey Van, the 2009 world champion from the U.S., held the distance record for both genders on the normal hill in Vancouver for two years before it was broken by several male skiers in the Olympics.
FIS, skiing's world governing body, has sanctioned the first women's World Cup circuit for the 2011-12 season. It will consist of between 10 and 14 events, some in conjunction with the men, and will include at least one event in the United States. The lower-tier Continental Cup series also will continue.
The details of integrating the top women's jumpers with the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association are yet to be worked out. (VISA, a major sponsor of the USSA, also is the chief sponsor of the women's ski jumping foundation.)
On Wednesday, Van said the news "hasn't really set in" and admitted it has been hard to stay positive at times during a campaign that hit obstacle after obstacle. (Russian organizers reportedly put up some last-minute resistance to including the women.) She said she'll decide season by season whether to keep competing.
And Van said she is more than ready for the inevitable name-game confusion between her and her alpine skiing counterpart, Lindsey Vonn, born a month apart in 1984.
The U.S. women hope to continue the country's recent success in Nordic sports, headlined by the men's Nordic combined team in Vancouver. Gold medalist Billy Demong is among the women's supporters.
"They have been persistent in their pursuit of growing the sport and raising the level, and the fact that they've had two very competitive World Championships in Liberec [Czech Republic] and Oslo [Norway] illustrates that they have arrived at a point where they need to be taken seriously by the IOC," he said earlier this week. "Inclusion in Sochi can do nothing but help up the popularity of the sport and the level of the competition."