Liu Jiayu of China had such good style, even the hack Vancouver2010.com photographer could get a good shot of her.
Over the past few days, the Vancouver Olympics have taught me a lot. I’ve learned various languages, thanks to the sketchy Euro streams I opted to watch rather than NBC (ok, I only really understood when they called the tricks and even then…) I’ve learned that you can make an Olympic-sized halfpipe without any snow fall (but don’t expect it to be quite as good as if the temps were appropriate) and most importantly, I learned you should always let the girls go first.
Historically women have always gotten the short end of the stick, having to bear children, do the cooking and cleaning, etc., and the 2010 Games were no exception. As a wise man succinctly put it, watching the women’s halfpipe event today was sort of like trying to get psyched on a little league game after you just finished watching the world series. It’s not that the girls aren’t good, it’s just, they aren’t as good as the guys.
But since the IOC and NBC blew just about everything else at this Olympics, why would they get this right, anyway? On this 7th day of Olympic competition, it seems even NBC might be figuring out that not providing a live stream, and showing the event live on one coast but not the other, might not build the hype like they expected, rather just annoy people. Even Brian Williams made sure to announce “spoiler alert” before flashing results of bygone, but not-yet-aired events on the Nightly News screen. Perhaps #nbcsucks hash tags did something after all.
Oh right, this was going to be a story about the Women’s halfpipe, which while it had highlights, such as the Chinese boy with good style and Benny Bright’s soccer coach uniform, for the most part it was a somewhat anti-climactic watch. There were a lot of falls and scores in the single digits. Torah thew an solid and stylish run including a bs3, switch bs7, and cab 7 to bring the gold back down under, but there was no promised double cork. Poor Kelly Clark didn’t have Jesus’s support on her snowboard (he wasn’t an Olympic sponsor) so she was forced to sing, loudly, to hype herself up. It was only enough for bronze. In silver was Hannah Teter, who is going to sell plenty of panties for Haiti, now that she’s allowed to endorse them.
So now, we can all go back to concentrating on important things, such as mocking press releases and posting homey edits. Hopefully Preston will even write some more poetry. And oh yeah, (SPOILER ALERT) the full final results from women’s halfpipe:
1 BRIGHT Torah 45.0
2 TETER Hannah 42.4
3 CLARK Kelly 42.2
4 LIU Jiayu 39.3
5 RODRIGUEZ Sophie 34.4
6 NICOLL Mercedes 34.3
7 SUN Zhifeng 33.0
8 CRAWFORD Holly 30.3
9 HALLER Ursina 27.9
10 HIGHT Elena 24.6
11 BLEILER Gretchen 14.7
12 CASTELLET Queralt DNS
women’s snowboarding, yucky