Your PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics anticipation thread!

It's never too early to feel the warmth!

https://thelibertarianrepublic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Parallel-Lines-Diverging-Lives-Revisiting-Korea%E2%80%99s-DMZ_main.jpg

But at least PyeongChang is a little farther from the DMZ than Seoul.

Official site

And we got mascots! Please enjoy Soohorang the white tiger and his bud Bandabi the Asiatic black bear. (The latter is the mascot for the Paralympics Games.)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f3/Soohorang_and_Bandabi.jpg

Anyway, let's just enjoy some drama out of the gate:

https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1057211/ioc-reveal-crunch-december-executive-board-meeting-will-make-decision-on-russian-participation-at-pyeongchang-2018

Mixed doubles in curling has started, we are under way!

I for one admire your relentless enthusiasm about this foolish charade called Olympics. And I genuinely mean that in the nicest possible way.

Mixed doubles seems like a pretty sweet mix-up of the format. Shorter, fewer, different team dynamics.

Curling <3

I for one admire your relentless enthusiasm about this foolish charade called Olympics. And I genuinely mean that in the nicest possible way.

First Olympics I ever remember seeing on TV was 1980 Lake Placid. Some things are just ingrained.

Couple of hours until the opening ceremony is GO. Tomorrow though, cross country and biathlon, the real deal.

<3 the Japanese figure skaters performing to Yuri On Ice.

Looking forward to the ski jumping tomorrow.

Some really neat shit happening in this opening ceremony, but I guess Americans will get it delayed for prime time

Bermuda will regret their shorts decision. Poor flag bearer looks miserable.

Having the nations do their walk in Korean alphabet order is a nice touch. That music in the background though...

I take it back, there's 'Likey likey'!

Feared we'd just get Gangnam Style at one point

Jamaica <3

This is nice, North and South Korea together. Surely no leader of the free world will put them in harms way.

Who is the Korean Bill Bailey?

Kim Yuna is the greatest... of all time!§

So a simple question: where the hell can I stream a replay of the opening ceremony as is? (Because NBC did do that, very nice, only I was, quite logically, asleep, and they're not offering it for replay yet, thanks guys.)

They're airing it tonight, might not want to offer up a replay before that. Just guesswork. I'm in Europe though.

The North Korean athletes/musicians at their Olympic welcoming ceremony. They don’t seem too impressed with a South Korean breakdancing (to “A little less conversation, a little more action” no less) pic.twitter.com/egssLISeJQ

— Anna Fifield (@annafifield) February 8, 2018

xpost -- No worries, found a feed. (With Canadian commentary rather than none at all but I'll take that.)

i am watching the incredibly crappy livestream at: http://stream.nbcolympics.com/2018-winter-olympics-primetime-show-feb-9

is this what people are saying on tv? are people paying to see this shit? this is fucking awful

a third of the screen is dedicated to a series of the least interesting trivia possible

https://i.imgur.com/Bx7V7U2.png

for serbia they literally just listed the three languages spoken there

another 10% is dedicated to letting you know what you're watching

apparently the stadium is packed with people and the light show just makes it appear like no one is there. the seats closest to the floor are reserved for the ~2,000 athletes. but that stadium holds 35,000, and no matter how the light flashes across the seats, it looks like the stadium is mostly empty

this is weird

Yeah it was a little odd.

what is a little odd is this cover of imagine

Indeed

Already looking like a classic Olympics for over-hyped British athletes falling flat on their faces - quite literally in many cases. Few things in life are funnier than Team GB failures.

Shame about Katie Ormerod though

Feel sorry for the athletes, obviously, but hard to suppress a giggle when listening to some BBC correspondent solemnly reporting another sporting disaster.

Speed skating is a bit like greyhound racing, the one who gets to the first bend in the lead usually stays there while the rest take chunks out of each other in behind

what kind of maniac looks at skeleton/luge and thinks ‘yeah i could do that’

luge gives me the phear

what kind of maniac looks at skeleton/luge and thinks ‘yeah i could do that’

um

do tombots dream of olympic luge

luge control to major tom
take your clenching skills and put your helmet on

i heart the biathlon - it’s like a james bond event

^ Specifically The Spy Who Loved Me

Parachute off a cliff to end the race or nothing.

"The bronze medallist couldn't actually be here but..."

Egg on my Bond-fan face, it was of course For Your Eyes Only that featured the undercover biathlete henchman Erich Kriegler

http://www.007museum.com/Eric_Kriegler.jpg

i could get with curling more if there wasn’t so much shouting

^^^ I was watching this with the sound muted last night because the amount of shouting from the Canadian mixed doubles team was stressing me out

The yelling is what makes it fun!

it is very similar to lawn bowls & i am kind of into that aspect

plus all the competitors look like league ten-pin bowlers 😂

I had it on at about 4am because I couldn't sleep and I was kind of groggy and this guy was sweeping so frantically it was like I was having an anxiety dream where I was forced to play a sport with incomprehensible rules while someone bellows at me

lol

the whole sport seems like an snl sketch with the brooms & shit but it is kinda engaging once u lock in

lamoreaux's ankle breaker was too

CBC is soothing us with a montage of gold medals past

damn, what a game! i have an adrenaline rush from watching that.

What a game

I cried myself to sleep and just woke up and see the medal ceremony

Come on boys it’s on you now

They should penalise athletes who flaunt the logos on their skis / boards / helmets. We can see them, you don't need to wave them in our faces.

All that and the US men's curling team makes the gold medal round...over Canada.

Also, I did like this

Gold medal comes with a promotion 👀 pic.twitter.com/3RaifjMVqe

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) February 22, 2018

okay i know the (men's hockey) rosters are weird without nhlers but how did germany beat sweden *and* canada

olympic hockey is just training for us

this was a couple days ago but this is easily a US top ten all time sports call

UNBELIEVABLE!@kikkanimal & @jessdiggs earn the first ever cross-country #gold medal for @TeamUSA, with a pass that will go down in American Olympic history! #WinterOlympics #BestOfUS https://t.co/4YMw63E4C3 pic.twitter.com/bfHoGnPCWw

— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) February 22, 2018

Call by Chad Salmela btw

They should penalise athletes who flaunt the logos on their skis / boards / helmets. We can see them, you don't need to wave them in our faces.

― koogs, Thursday, 22 February 2018 9:39 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It’s interesting because equipment logos ar banned at the summer games but not at the winter games. I guess there’s less money in winter sport so harder to have a whole other set of equipment. The athletes are just doing what they do at every other race but it does seem unolympian.

I bought four Burton snowboards only this morning!

I have found it interesting that moguls skiiers almost all have the same brand of boots as mine but almost none of the other skiers in other disciplines seem to use them. No need for logos though, they are a really distinctive shape.

Logo sizes changed in 2016:

http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/15/news/companies/olympics-brands-rio-usa/index.html

But some of those boards were 4ft of pure nitro advert

And didn't they get around this in 2012 by having iirc distinctly coloured running shoes, like dayglo pink and yellow? (Same way tobacco companies did with f1 I guess, black and gold for jps etc)

Yes, IIRC all the specialized bikes in the London games were a really distinctive orange.

ledecka 'enjoys watching British TV – particularly Red Dwarf. “She has seen it 4,000 times,” says Banks, laughing. “She is aways speaking about it during dinner. And she also likes Blackadder and, of course, Top Gear.'

sick as a parrot eh

still, means another medal for gb, and in a proper sport this time

(atkins' bronze also proper. but now it's time for sleep as they're showing bobsleigh again. h8 the bob/luge events so much)

And hurrah for curling.

Fuck that, Scotland lost out to Japan :(

Didn't hold out much hope for billy given that he qualified 11th and then fell over on his first jump. Shows what I know...

That one bloke had a board that was solid black on both sides, which looked cool. He finished in bottom 3.

Parallel snowboard slalom got ffwded through.

Kids, don't be greedy. That's what I took away from the curling.

my german coworker enthused about the hockey gold game was on point, this is kind of intense

Travel advisory: Germans in Canada should exercise a high degree of empathy. Be nice, don’t gloat, give hugs, buy rounds of hot chocolate.

Just imagine how you would feel if Canada beat us in soccer 😱

🇩🇪 ❤️ 🇨🇦#CANGER @TeamD @CanadaFP @GermanyInCanada @KanadaBotschaft pic.twitter.com/0HlHoxMA7E

— GermanForeignOffice (@GermanyDiplo) February 23, 2018

Final tally after an exciting women's 30km

https://i.imgur.com/479zUF3.png

Was striking how many times I turned on the BBC evening coverage to find a table full of female experts talking about sport. This afternoon, after the closing ceremony, there was the female presenter and 4 others, all Olympians. (Actually not that surprising because we did better in the female sports)

(Woodsy and a couple more blokes had been on earlier)

ok that black & white sequence at the closing ceremonies was epic, and I loved Tara's response to it, too.

Only thing that could've made it better is if they'd been able to get the rights to Prisencolinensinainciusol, which was clearly the original intent.

The only conceivable downside to the erosion of homophobia is people feeling the need to tolerate Johnny Weir.

you're such a grump!

flamboyant twinks at the Olympics are about as edgy as Bob Hope in 1990

edginess, it's what we need in our olympics

4:23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcYd0yP53Rw

we don't, Tom, but clearly out gays winning stuff and going Full Divine in the booth is the most important thing to happen to our society since Black Panther.

Have you even had coffee yet

yep!

actually i do like some edginess at the Olympics [BlackPower1968.jpg]

I actually watched two mins of the closing ceremony yesterday. It was nice.

That is all.

russian hockey team sang their banned national anthem, that’s... something

First Olympics I missed all of bcz #life xp

Medal winners on the One Show. Billy looks like he'd rather be anywhere else. Currently sitting through a vt on fly tipping...

Will US Olympic Committee change before next Olympics? That might require congressional action, so answer is probably no.

As The Post’s Will Hobson has reported, the USOC is supposed to be a nonprofit, yet 129 of its staff make over six figures, and 14 of its execs are paid more than $200,000.

...The Post’s Hobson detailed the USOC’s inaction on sexual abuse complaints across multiple sports, including gymnastics, swimming, speedskating, judo, and taekwondo.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/the-olympic-flame-has-been-extinguished-the-usoc-should-be-next/2018/02/26/a00648ca-1b05-11e8-9de1-147dd2df3829_story.html?utm_term=.835327a0bd7f

revive.

i want one of those chairs with skis.

the VI downhill (various flavours) seemed to be a single run, no qualifications, no best of three, just one run. uk did quite well out of favourites falling over, but still, seems a bit brutal that 4 years of training comes down to that.

snowboard cross course looks fun. much more compact than the other olympics.

watching blind people ski at like 80mph is giving me crazy anxiety

I have no idea how they do the slalom.

Wheelchair curling is kind of dull without the launching and the sweeping.

Robot legged snowboarders look post-human.

Wow at Iranian snowboarder pretty much climbing down the banked slalom. Currently taken 5 minutes more than the leader's time for a one minute course.

They all look a bit trepidatious about it despite it being based on the snowboard cross course (I think it's been recut a bit and the flags moved to be a bit tighter)

7 paralympic medals for the UK, all down to 2 blind girls

Is there really no olympics thread, or does it just have an unsearchable title?

prob not, been a weird olympics!

there's some chatter in the most generic winter olympics thread. but not much

this one Winter Olympics: Search and Destroy