Skates of the Season: Olympic Notes 2

I love the differences in the same basic things. It's a nerdy proclivity I have. Anyway, I think I have a new favorite spectator Winter Olympic sport. All in due time...

I've been ice skating before! I even got Corrie ice skates for Decemberween! In both instances---the skates I got for Corrie and the skates I rented when I went skating---were of the figure skating variety.

Marc, one of our New York people (and star of the first year of this blog), had hockey skates and while I checked them out, I never wore them. I did, though, mentally spaz out at the differences and similarities between their designs:

Hockey

Figure Skating

But there's another style of skating I remember usually most often every four years: speed skating. And their skates are wild:

Speed Skating

I even found this cool graphic, and it's the kind of thing I would have enjoyed putting together myself if I was 1) more knowledgable about ice skating, and 2) artistically inclined for infographics:

But then I saw the different comparison chart/infographic. And it has the different styles for the different kinds of speed skating: so-called "speed" and "short track":

And that brings me to short track speed skating.

This could be the best thing to watch. There is a stressful pace, a ramping up of speed, true danger, cramped spaces, and a muted physicality that belies the awesome punitive and draconian rules: if you make a mistake and knock someone out, you get penalized and they move on. The finals of one 13.5 lap races (the 1500m) had 9(!) racers, because 3 had been 'advanced' because of other people's mistakes in earlier races. I rewatched it with Cass, and it had both of us wobbling on the couch like we were watching that chase scene from OBAA.

Also, shout-out to the Korean 17 year old half-pipe snowboard gold medalist, Ga on Choi. She beat her mentor and the heavily favored American Chloe Kim (from Torrance! (local shout-out)) after taking a terrible spill in a practice run, nearly doing a header on the way down from a big move.

She came back and nailed some huge moves and took home the gold. Chloe, to her credit, was very excited and ran over to embrace the newly gold-crowned and sobbing teenager.

Downhill alpine skiing and short-track speed skating are two of my new favorite things...