Olympic Notes

I imagine that if the folks at VANOC did any 'worst case scenario' planning, it must have looked pretty similar to the first day of the Olympics, steady rain, continued uncooperative weather postponing the alpine events, a cauldron malfunction, and of course, overshadowing all else, the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili in a training accident.

Still, watching the performances by Ammann, Malysz and Schlierenzauer in the ski jump as they soared down the hill in Whistler this morning was a good reminder of the pure athleticism that lies at the central core of all the hoopla that is the Olympics.

While I'm writing, I wanted to just mention a couple of posts I wrote prior to the 2006 games in Torino:

One: Explaining the methodology I used to construct a consistent historical comparison of national performance in the Winter Olympics over time.

and Two: The results of applying that methodology, updated to reflect the 2006 results. I'll update the chart at the end of these games

Good luck to all the athletes, especially the Canadian ones :)