"My own brain roughly sorts them into team sports like curling and hockey, figure skating, running on snow, going down a hill on snow, sliding down an icy track, and flying through the air in much the way I might if I went skiing or snowboarding, except it's graceful and on purpose, and you generally do not end up in the hospital."
"Alpine skiing: One of my limitations as a watcher of downhill skiing is that most of the runs look similar to me unless someone crashes or unexpectedly departs the course. You could show me ten skiers going down a mountain, and without their times showing up in green or red, I would have no idea which ones were good or which ones were bad. I would simply say, "Great job getting to the bottom very quickly.""
The Winter Olympics present a concentrated but varied slate of sports that can be grouped into team sports, figure skating, skiing and snowboarding disciplines, sliding events, and aerial competitions. Spectators can find the events captivating despite surface similarities between competitors. Alpine skiing features tiny time margins—often a tenth of a second or less—that reward subtle technique, and slalom events progress from slalom to giant slalom to Super G, creating escalating speed and spectacle. Playful expansion to mega super giant slalom (M-S-G) amplifies excitement. Biathlon pairs intense exertion with the demanding task of hitting very small targets, adding unique difficulty. The combination of speed, precision, and nuance makes winter sports both technically demanding and viscerally thrilling.
Read at www.npr.org
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]