Now we turn to the BYU women’s rugby team.  They were forced to play on Sunday and elected to forfeit instead.  I admire their decision.  I am not sure I agree totally with their viewpoint but it must be admitted the Commandment does say do not work on the Sabbath (see Exodus 20;8-11).  One of my favorite movies is Chariots of Fire, where Eric Liddell refused to run on Sunday.  Actually God was a better Olympic coach than the British Olympic coach.  BYU also got hosed (if this story is true) by the organizers of the event.  I cannot endorse Mormon doctrine but I admire those who make a real sacrifice for their faith.  There is too little of this today.

Finally, I saw the headline in AOL news – something to the effect that honesty costs golfer a terrible price.  Here’s the Real Clear Sports take on it.  I did not realize that first place is over a million dollars!  Makes me want to get a set of clubs.  But the headline is all wrong:  It’s cheating that’s costly.  It hurts your conscience, your witness for Christ and your walk with God.  I don’t know the faith of Brian Davis, but I know something of his integrity and moral compass.  Any chance for politics after golf?

It works the same way with bloggers; I do try to find others with a similar position that have expertise in their field.  Here’s one example:

I contend that the way to help the Olympic athletes get the resources they need is the free market.  This article from Art Thiel at seattlepi.com is certainly persuasive authority (as we lawyers put it) in my favor:

Long story short, a major, continuing overhaul of the USOC put more of the broadcast TV rights fees and sponsor cash in training centers, athletic-research science and Olympic operations, as well as supporting each sport’s national governing body.

That’s a big reason why the U.S. this closing weekend finds itself atop the Winter Games standings with a record 36 medals — the first time the U.S. is astride the winter standings since 1932.

This was the result of the Steinbrenner (Yes, that one, the owner of the Yankees) commission overhauling the USOC.   One of our remarkable Nordic Combined medalists, Billy Demong, the sole gold medalist, made this observation of the new Olympic attitude:

In his fourth and most successful Olympics, Demong, from Vermontville, N.Y., bore witness to the evolution of American winter success.

“I have seen a significant change,” he said. “Now, there’s a level of expectation and professionalism among athletes on the team. We’re here to win.

“There’s a lot of guys and girls who feel very comfortable in their sports. They’re competitors entitled to do their best. We’re doing the right things with the right athletes to raise expectations.”

 No entitlement mentality here.  No bureaucrat deciding who gets help; Here’s an interesting article in regard to the athlete the Canadian sports machine forgot.  (In fairness, perhaps this athlete was not very likely to medal; however, I admire his initiative and drive.  Maybe wiht the right help, he’d do better.)  The best gets help and if they get better, they get more help.  The USOC CEO agrees:

“Sponsors get more value when there’s more American success,” said Scott Blackmun, the USOC’s new CEO. “The stories from these Games increase the appetite that sponsors have for things Olympic. The main reason it helps is the ideals our athletes portray.”

Let’s cheer the USA team!  They showed that when free market/liberty principles are at work, there will be results.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!  I’ll be off line until Wednesday; new readers try out my old articles and comment freely!  But on Wednesday, I’ll have an important announcement for my loyal readers.

After the first two of four runs, USA-1, using the Bo-Dyn Night Train bobsled, is in first place.  Let’s hope it continues!

YAHOO!

VICTORY!  The Night Train is the Olympic champion!  NBC showed Geoff Bodine in the audience.  The last gold for the USA in fouur man bobsled was in 1948!  There is a fabulous story about Steve Holcomb and his eyesight beign restored by surgery.  I’m excited!

“You want to see a competitive team,” said [Canadian] team member Marc Kennedy, “you just gotta see us play cards against one another.”

If you are tempted to reply, “Yes, Marc, that would probably be more interesting than sitting through 90 minutes of curling,” that can only mean one thing: You’ve never seen curling in person.

Curling’s appeal for me is the brainy excitement and the ability of one well-placed stone to change the entire game in one second.  it requires deep thought and better control of where the stone goes.  Alas, still no curling in Richmond, Virginia where I live.  (For more on curling or the find a club near you, go to www.curlingrocks.org) 

The sweeping does more than just lightly melt the ice, it also removes tiny particles that slow down the stone.  As one of the Canadian team members told Murphy:

“The ice is pebbled,” explained James Prette, who was sitting behind me on Tuesday as the home team put the wood to China, 10-3. “When you sweep, you’re melting those little pebbles, which allows the stone to slide faster.”

And there’s hope for older folks like me:

“Curling is huge in this country,” says Prette, who lives in Vancouver but grew up in Saskatoon. “Especially in the prairie provinces. When you’re too old for hockey, you curl.”

I never took up hockey primarily because I wanted to live long enough to vote for Reagan!  But I am clearly too old for hockey in any event. 

My grandparents in Florida (they lived in Florida most of their lives not snow birds from the North) used to play shuffleboard and I was fascinated by that.  Curling has elements similar to shuffleboard but is better all around.  But I seldom got to play shuffleboard as a kid! 

I recommend the article in full.  I especially liked the explanation of the Canadian skip or captain, Kevin Martin:

Canada’s Kevin Martin is the skip of skips, his shot-making skills the stuff of legend, his talents as dazzling as the TV lights reflecting off his bald pate.

The first recorded curling match was chronicled (in Latin) in 1540 by a Scottish notary who wrote about a contest between two monks. Coincidentally, Martin, the best player of the 21st century, resembles a kind of monk… or emergency room doctor. Unassuming, modest, devoid of flash, the 43-year-old Martin is enormously popular in this country — largely because he is an almost perfect reflection of it.

“Oh jeez, no,” he replied, when informed that another coach had described him as curling’s Michael Jordan. “I don’t think of myself anywhere near that. We’re an amateur sport.”

According to Murphy, Martin’s teams have done very well in an amateur sport.  

I’ll defintely root for Canada today but only in curling!  May they own the podium.  But we’ll get you next time!

One spectator at the Whistler Sliding Centre was particularly proud to see bobsleds bearing “USA” decals whizzing past into three of the top seven spots, and that’s because he helped buy and build the sleds.

Bobsled was always something of a tease.  There would be a chance of a medal at first but by the last run, the USA was hopelessly behind.  In the last few Olympics that began to change.  Great dedicated athletes are a large part of that.  But so is the free market.

Geoff Bodine is a NASCAR driver, winner of the Daytona 5oo in 1986, and in 1992 he discovered the USA bobsled teams had a serious problem:  They were being sold the old, substandard sleds from the European teams.  There was no way to win with the cast-off sleds of their competitors.  USA could not afford new or even used bobsleds.  He had to do something:

“When I heard that our athletes weren’t using American-made bobsleds, that was unacceptable,” Bodine said.

Bodine did more than talk; he put up his own money and collected other donations to start Bo-Dyn Bobsled Project (BOdine and Chassis DYNamics):

Bodine — assisted mightily by lead designer Bob Cuneo — has spent 18 years keeping up with bobsled technology changes, research and development costs, and whatever else that’s been needed to keep American pilots on par with the rest of the world.
 
The gap to make up was huge at first. It’s closed now, proven last year when Holcomb and Bo-Dyn’s “Night Train” won the world four-man championship — the biggest checkered flag grabbed by American bobsledders in half a century.

And Bodine is not done:

“What I get out of tonight is, the girls won a medal, that’s fantastic, but it just shows the future of the U.S. women’s bobsled team is fantastic,” Bodine said after the women’s race. “I’m more excited about that than the medal, I think. The future looks so good, and we’re not going to back off in sled development. We’re going to get better and watch out in four years.”

No government money; no subsidies, no sports ministers or bureaucrats.  Just the usual things that happens in America:  A dream, lots of effort and determination, and high goals.  As a follower of Christ, I like how Bodine puts it at the end:

“God puts things in front of us for a reason,” Bodine said. “Things happen for a reason. We don’t always see them. We don’t always see it. But I was put in the right place at the right time and it all worked out.”

This is a nice Sports Illustrated story by David Epstein on Bodine.  Perhaps a note of thanks to Bo-Dyn would be in order.  They do take donations, too.  Their web site is:  http://www.bodynbobsled.com/

I have never picked up a curling broom in a real game because my hometown, Richmond, Virginia has no curling club.  Perhaps that may change!  But, try a curling match on MSNBC before the Olympics are over. 

For more information on curling, go to the USA Curling website:  http://www.curlingrocks.net/

Most nations appear to have sports as a governmental function.  This article discusses a meeting between the German Minister of the Interior, who has sports as part of his portfolio, and his Jamaician counterpart. 

The New York Times reported that the Russian medal effort at the Vancouver Games is so poor that there are calls for the resignation of the sports minister.

“Russian Olympians Lose Historic Superiority” was the front-page headline on Thursday in Kommersant, an influential newspaper. Some politicians and commentators are calling for the firing of Russia’s sports minister and the head of the Russian Olympic Committee.

Both opposition and government leaders are saying the team better do better or heads will roll:

“The condition of Russian sports today embitters and offends all Russian citizens,” said Igor V. Lebedev, a parliamentary leader for the Liberal Democrats, a nationalist opposition party.

“Our athletes have given up their positions in every single sport,” he said in a statement, adding that officials overseeing athletic development in the country should be fired.

The governing United Russia party, led by Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, released a statement on Thursday suggesting that there could be repercussions for athletic officials if Russian athletes continued to fall short in Vancouver.

“Anything under fourth place for our team will certainly be a failure, including for those who oversee athletics in our country,” said Boris Gryzlov, a United Russia leader who is speaker of Parliament. (Russia was ranked 11th in the medal count as of Thursday morning.)

This is what happens when you mix sports and politics.  I do not want our athletes turned into political pawns.  My original idea is still out there for the IOC to adopt:  NO direct government support of the Olympic team.

I was especially impressed by the athlete from Peru’s story.  I know he has no realistic chance to win a medal, but I’ll root for him anyway!  Maybe he’ll have the run of a lifetime and win the gold!  Could happen!  I also plan to root for the Republic of Georgia after their tragic situation.  I also root for all the small countries who have no chance or who have never won a medal before.  Paraguay had never won a medal in any Olympic sport until 2004 in Athens when they won the silver in soccer.  (I went on a missions/eclipse trip to Paraguay and it is an interesting nation few get to go to!)  I also root for the three Baltic Republics (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia), occupied illegally in 1940 and thankfully never recognized as part of the USSR by our nation and finally independent at last!

In a new and potentially disturbing development, Canada is taking a decidedly unCanadian attitude toward this Olympics:  Own the Podium!

From the USA Today of January 29:

“Canada has an aggressive new attitude,” Stephen Colbert said on his Comedy Central TV show. “In contrast to their previous slogan: ‘Pardon, would it trouble you if we won a medal or two? It would? OK. Never mind!’ ”

Rarely in Olympic history has the host nation failed to win even one gold medal. Twice, the too-gracious host has been Canada — at the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal and the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary.

That won’t happen again. “Own the Podium” is more than a battle cry. It is a $117 million Canadian (about $110 million U.S.) business plan that provides Canadian athletes in select sports with more coaching, enhanced training and paid travel — plus this ambitious goal: Place first in the total medal count.

Perhaps this is the wave of the future.  The larger countries will use their technological advantages to dominate the medal count and further shut out the smaller nations.  (One thing about the Winter Olympics is that smaller nations like Norway can do well.)  Hence my enduring interest in the opening ceremonies – the nations, their costumes, their flags etc.! 

In some ways this encourages a degree of cynicism.  I always figured during the Cold War days, the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies would cheat their way to the podium while one of our athletes would be banned from the games for cold medicine!  I watched the famous ending of the USA-USSR basketball game in 1972 and shook my head in derision (I think they interrupted that game to show Taiwan being kicked out of the UN!) at how the ref put time back on the clock and the Soviets then won.      

Understand, I do want USA to do well!  BEAT CANADA!  But if some small nation that has never won or hardly wins a medal wants me to organize their curling team, I’ll take some lessons and read the rules and help them win a medal!  Ought to be a nice consulting fee out of it!  Just contact me through this blog entry! 

Remember, for more information about curling near you, contact USA Curling at this webpage.

For a curling club near you, go to USA Curling’s site. 

Another sport that swept the nation is fencing.  Here is the club in my hometown – Mechanicsville Fencing Academy.  Unlike curling, I have tried fencing on rare occasions.  The first three medals won in 2008 at Beijing were the sweep in the women’s sabre.  This was the greatest American sports moment since the Miracle on Ice in 1980.  I am sorry they did not end up on a cereal box!

Go to this site for a local fencing club neat you!

But Favre threw that interception and the Saints forced OT and in OT they won!  It is exciting at the Sanders house these next two weeks!  GEAUX SAINTS!  Beat dem Colts!