Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics

[jerrym]

The Olympics are back with their typical combination of great sports performances and controversies. The latter include: the overhang of war on the Korean peninsula and worldwide at the same time that we have a united South and North Korea Olympic team; the modern risk of terrorist violence; and if the past is prelude, a corruption scandal to follow related to the cost overruns that have already happened.
Nevertheless there will be some outstanding performances, and some of these are expected from Canadians, as well as the eternal question when it comes to Canadian participation in the Winter Olympics: how will the men's and women's hockey teams do?

[jerrym]

Canada, once an Olympic wuss, is now an Olympic powerhouse in the Winter Games. As 1988 host in Calgary, Canada won only five medals including zero gold; as 2010 Vancouver host, it led with 26 medals and 14 gold, followed by 25 medals in Sochi for second place. Scott Stinson describes how the turnaround occurred below.

http://nationalpost.com/feature/five...pic-powerhouse

[jerrym]

The Olympics wouldn't be the Olympics without a doping controversy. This year is no different. After the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled that 28 Russian athletes could compete because of insufficient doping evidence against them the International Olympic Committee (IOC) still refused to invite them to the games saying that there was sufficient evidence against them. Yesterday CAS came down with another ruling on 47 more Russians.

The last-ditch appeal by 47 Russian athletes and coaches to take part in the Winter Olympics has failed. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) made the dramatic announcement Friday, just hours before the opening ceremonies. ...
Russia was found by independent investigator (and Canadian) Richard McLaren in 2016 to have engaged in an enormous statesanctioned conspiracy to defeat doping tests in Sochi in 2014 — and before and beyond.
It was an unprecedented finding essentially confirmed by a separate IOC commission headed by Samuel Schmid last year. In his second report, McLaren and his team found that upwards of 1,000 individual Russian athletes were involved in or had benefited from the “manipulation to conceal positive doping tests,” though he acknowledged he wasn’t able to assess “the sufficiency of evidence to prove an Anti Doping Rules Violation (ADRV ) by any individual athlete.”
In the wake of those searing reports, the IOC banned Russia from these Games, found 43 Russian athletes had committed anti-doping rules violations, but nonetheless issued “invites” to others it considered clean. Fortytwo of the 43 banned athletes then appealed to the CAS and 28 of them won on Feb. 1, reversing their exile and theoretically meaning they could compete here. But when the IOC didn’t immediately add them to the list of invitees, they again appealed to the CAS. ...
So mysterious are the workings of the CAS — even the signs for the hearing pointed merely to an elevator — that while a panel of arbitrators reversed the IOC ban on the 28 athletes, the actual reasons for the decisions haven’t yet been released. Indications, however, in the CAS press release about the decisions is that the panel found insufficient evidence to prove individual rule violations or, in a twist on the old saying, that an absence of evidence may indeed be evidence of absence. Given that McLaren found that before WADA investigators arrived at the Moscow laboratory central to the Russian scheme samples had been destroyed en masse, that should go some distance to explain the absence. ...
But the result is, well, chaos. As WADA president Sir Craig Reedie said Thursday, “I’m saddened by the fact we are in CAS all day every day,” even on the eve of the opening ceremonies.
A year or two from now, how many more medal winners will be stripped of their hardware, how many more found to have cheated here?

https://www.pressreader.com/canada/o...82329680396833

[jerrym]

The following article includes videos of several of Canada's top medal contenders discussing their path to the Olympics and their hopes.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4013228/p...nada-athletes/

[jerrym]

Despite almost dying in a backcountry accident last year, Canadian Mark Morris came back to lead all the way in snowboard slopestyle until he had some difficulty landing in the final run and ended up with the bronze.

Mark McMorris nearly died last year. Now he's an Olympic bronze medallist https://t.co/jc2STmaRRR pic.twitter.com/cukRPmVkvA

— Regina Leader-Post (@leaderpost) February 11, 2018

[jerrym]

Canada won its first gold medal in team figure skating and follows it up with another in men's moguls. The second url contains a video of mogul winner Mikael Kingsbury.

http://nationalpost.com/sports/olymp...ce-dance-to-go

https://www.thestar.com/sports/olymp...ns-moguls.html

[Will]

I believe Canada has won the gold in men's moguls in the last three games. Bilodeau in 2010 and 2014 and now Kingsbury in 2018.

[rdavies]

Just something I heard during the last Olympics (I think), Canada and Germany are the only two countries that are good in the broadest sense of the word in most sports. Maybe you could include the US. A generalization, yes, but some of the other countries tally up medals by dominating in one or two events.

[jerrym]

Just something I heard during the last Olympics (I think), Canada and Germany are the only two countries that are good in the broadest sense of the word in most sports. Maybe you could include the US. A generalization, yes, but some of the other countries tally up medals by dominating in one or two events.

You're right. Teams such as Holland do well primarily in speed skating while Scandinavian countries typically dominate in skiing events.

[jerrym]

Canada continues to do well and is tied for second in medals. Unfortunately, one Canadian bronze medallist is receiving death threats because she won when a Korean skater was disqualified for a interference.

Canada’s Kim Boutin has been subjected to online threats following her bronze-medal win in the 500-metre short-track speedskating event at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea.
Boutin won with a time of 43.881 seconds, which put her in fourth. But the athlete from Sherbrooke, Que., was bumped up to third after South Korea’s Minjeong Choi was disqualified for interfering with the Canadian in Tuesday’s event. ...

Following her win, Boutin’s social media accounts were bombarded by apparent angry South Korean fans, some threatening the speedskater with her life.
According to Radio-Canada, most of the threats were posted on Boutin’s Instagram page, which has been turned to a private account.
“If I find you, you will die,” reads one comment, according to Radio-Canada. “Retire and I hope you have a hard life.”

https://globalnews.ca/news/4024468/k...kating-bronze/

[jerrym]

Here's how Canada on Day 6 including videos of men and women's hockey, figure and speed skating, curling, and luge.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4027295/2...ada-did-day-6/

[rdavies]

You're right. Teams such as Holland do well primarily in speed skating while Scandinavian countries typically dominate in skiing events.

Case in point

[jerrym]

Some good news to report: Kim Boutin, who after winning a bronze medal in speed skating because of the disqualification of a South Korean who had interfered with Boutin, has overcome the hate and won a second bronze medal. Great to see her be able to do this.

Four days after getting launched into a whirlwind when the disqualification of South Korea's Minjeong Choi allowed her to move into third place in the 500 metres, Boutin repeated her exploits in the 1,500 on Saturday. The short-track speedskater celebrated in the middle of the ice with a Canadian flag on her back.

"I don't want to take anything away from my medal in the 500 because I deserved it and I'm happy to have it, but after all that happened, the courage that it took me, I said to myself, 'Kim, you deserve this one as well,"' she said. "To win the medal at the line ... it was joyful, really happy." ...

Boutin received threatening messages on social media after capturing her 500 bronze and was forced to make her accounts private. She originally finished off the podium but was bumped into third when Choi was disqualified for interfering with the Canadian.
"I can't hide it, it hurt me," Boutin said while finally breaking the silence imposed by those responsible from the Canadian delegation in Pyeongchang. "I wanted to turn the page quickly but getting here, it was a slap in the face during warm-ups ... all the emotions." ...

"I had a lot of pain, but they (other athletes) took me in a circle to give me energy, to tell me that it was an isolated case and that I shouldn't worry about that," Boutin said. "It gave me a lot of courage."

https://www.ctvnews.ca/sports/kim-bo...ting-1.3807778

[jerrym]

Canadian Samuel Girard also won a medal in speed skating - gold. Unfortunately, a second Canadian was disqualified for interference, possibly against Girard.

He powered to the front of the pack right off the start, spent most of the 1,000-metre race there, and crossed the finish line for gold. It could only have been made sweeter if his mentor and teammate Charles Hamelin had been right behind him.
But short track is a cruel beast. Hamelin was disqualified in the semifinal and it appears his infraction may have been on Girard, though nobody on the Canadian team seemed quite sure.
“I really wanted to be on the podium. I really wanted this medal,” said Girard. “The plan would be to have Charles with me on the podium, but it’s short track, things happen. I was in the final today and I really give 100 per cent on the ice.” ...

He took control early and held onto it late while all hell broke loose behind him on the final lap. Two Korean finalists were sent tumbling into the mats, Hungary’s Shaolin Sandor Liu was penalized and disqualified for an infraction, and one of the Koreans, Yira Seo, picked himself up in time to cash in for bronze. American John-Henry Krueger also avoided the carnage and took silver.

http://nationalpost.com/sports/olymp...in-1000-metres

[jerrym]

The 2018 Olympics have suffered, like so many Olympics, from corruption.

The country is hosting its first Winter Games amid a national reckoning about big business, politics and the tentacles of influence that link them. Calls for a cleanup intensified this week after the heir apparent at Samsung, a top-tier Olympic sponsor, was freed from prison by a court ruling that reduced and suspended his sentence for bribery.
The Pyeongchang Games themselves stand as a symbol of the cozy ties between South Korea’s government and Samsung, its most powerful conglomerate. The company’s chairman, Lee Kun-hee, is a longtime member of the International Olympic Committee and lobbied for years behind the scenes to bring the Winter Games to South Korea. The government saw Mr. Lee as so pivotal to its Olympic dreams that after he was convicted of tax evasion in 2008, the country’s president then pardoned him expressly so he could resume lobbying for Pyeongchang. ...

In South Korea, the recent atmosphere of scandal has made it an especially awkward time for the country’s leading corporate names to be plastering Olympic venues with logos and showering athletes with freebies. The corruption allegations that ensnared Mr. Lee’s son and heir — and that last year felled Park Geun-hye, then South Korea’s president — involved bribery via sports sponsorships.
“The zeitgeist is calling for chaebol reform,” said Sun Dae-in, director of research at SDInomics, a think tank in Seoul, the capital, using the Korean term for the family-run business empires. “That puts the chaebol in a very sensitive position.” One result: Korean companies, fearful that their contributions would be “misinterpreted,” were skittish for a long time about sponsoring the Pyeongchang Games, said Chang Sea-jin, a professor at the National University of Singapore. Last April, when members of the Pyeongchang Organizing Committee met with South Korea’s finance minister to discuss the committee’s financial troubles, its chairman said that the bribery scandal was one reason organizers were having difficulty attracting corporate sponsorships, according to the Yonhap news agency.
The committee finished raising the $875 million in sponsorship money it needed only after President Moon Jae-in called on government companies, including the state electric utility, to pitch in. ...

For many South Koreans, conflicted feelings toward the nation’s business champions have already dampened the Olympic spirit. ...

A backlash against big business has been a long time coming in South Korea. For decades governments have tolerated lawbreaking tycoons so long as their companies bolstered the nation’s economic might — or, in the case of the Olympics, the nation’s global prestige. Three leaders of Pyeongchang’s winning campaign to host the Winter Games were industrialists who had, at one point or another, been convicted of financial crimes: Mr. Lee of Samsung, Cho Yang-ho of Korean Air and Park Yong-sung, formerly of the Doosan conglomerate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/b...uth-korea.html

[jerrym]

Besides the banning of many Russian athletes for previously being caught doping, there now have been a couple of athletes suspended for doping at in Pyeongchang. Japanese short track speed skater Kei Saito was suspended before he raced due to randomized testing. A Russian bronze medal winner in mixed-doublre curling, Alexander Krushelnitsky, has now tested positive for meldonium, the same drug that led to a nine month suspension for Maria Sharapova in tennis and very likely faces loss of his medal.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/20...lete-sent-home

https://globalnews.ca/news/4032722/r...ngchang-games/

[jerrym]

The 2018 Olympics have suffered, like so many Olympics, from corruption.

The country is hosting its first Winter Games amid a national reckoning about big business, politics and the tentacles of influence that link them. Calls for a cleanup intensified this week after the heir apparent at Samsung, a top-tier Olympic sponsor, was freed from prison by a court ruling that reduced and suspended his sentence for bribery.
The Pyeongchang Games themselves stand as a symbol of the cozy ties between South Korea’s government and Samsung, its most powerful conglomerate. The company’s chairman, Lee Kun-hee, is a longtime member of the International Olympic Committee and lobbied for years behind the scenes to bring the Winter Games to South Korea. The government saw Mr. Lee as so pivotal to its Olympic dreams that after he was convicted of tax evasion in 2008, the country’s president then pardoned him expressly so he could resume lobbying for Pyeongchang. ...

In South Korea, the recent atmosphere of scandal has made it an especially awkward time for the country’s leading corporate names to be plastering Olympic venues with logos and showering athletes with freebies. The corruption allegations that ensnared Mr. Lee’s son and heir — and that last year felled Park Geun-hye, then South Korea’s president — involved bribery via sports sponsorships.
“The zeitgeist is calling for chaebol reform,” said Sun Dae-in, director of research at SDInomics, a think tank in Seoul, the capital, using the Korean term for the family-run business empires. “That puts the chaebol in a very sensitive position.” One result: Korean companies, fearful that their contributions would be “misinterpreted,” were skittish for a long time about sponsoring the Pyeongchang Games, said Chang Sea-jin, a professor at the National University of Singapore. Last April, when members of the Pyeongchang Organizing Committee met with South Korea’s finance minister to discuss the committee’s financial troubles, its chairman said that the bribery scandal was one reason organizers were having difficulty attracting corporate sponsorships, according to the Yonhap news agency.
The committee finished raising the $875 million in sponsorship money it needed only after President Moon Jae-in called on government companies, including the state electric utility, to pitch in. ...

For many South Koreans, conflicted feelings toward the nation’s business champions have already dampened the Olympic spirit. ...

A backlash against big business has been a long time coming in South Korea. For decades governments have tolerated lawbreaking tycoons so long as their companies bolstered the nation’s economic might — or, in the case of the Olympics, the nation’s global prestige. Three leaders of Pyeongchang’s winning campaign to host the Winter Games were industrialists who had, at one point or another, been convicted of financial crimes: Mr. Lee of Samsung, Cho Yang-ho of Korean Air and Park Yong-sung, formerly of the Doosan conglomerate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/b...uth-korea.html

[jerrym]

In the last couple of days Canada has won two gold medals in freestyle skiing (Cassie Sharp and Brady Leman) and one in Ice Dancing (Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir), as well as a bronze in 2 women bobsleigh (Kaillie Humphries and Phylicia George) to give it 21 overall, placing it in third place overall. Canada defeated Finland 1-0 in men's hockey to advance to the semifinals against Germany. In women's hockey, Canada defeated Russia 5-0 to advance to the gold medal game against the US. Some of the video highlights are found below.

https://olympics.cbc.ca/news/article...mes-55691.html

https://olympics.cbc.ca/news/article...mes-56285.html

[Will]

Canada is having a solid games no doubt, but Norway is cleaning up!

I'm curious though as to why Canada has never been a factor in sports such as cross-country skiing, biathalon or ski jumping. I know that our athletes have been more successful in events that were added to the Olympics in the last 30 years (since Calgary), but I'd like to see some of the funding also be directed towards some of the sports listed above.

[ArgoRavi]

Canada is having a solid games no doubt, but Norway is cleaning up!

I'm curious though as to why Canada has never been a factor in sports such as cross-country skiing, biathalon or ski jumping. I know that our athletes have been more successful in events that were added to the Olympics in the last 30 years (since Calgary), but I'd like to see some of the funding also be directed towards some of the sports listed above.

Canada has made a killing in the newer Olympic sports but continue to struggle in many of the more traditional ones. I would agree with your funding suggestion here, Will.