Who better than Miley Cyrus and the cast of Deliverance, among others, to recap some of the highlights — and lowlights — of the year in sport? Budget schmudget Vladimir Putin spent $US51 billion staging the Sochi Olympics, more than every other Winter Games combined. It wasn’t enough to adequately furnish the facilities, light up…
Category: Sochi Olympics 2014
Let’s hit the replay button
I’m revisiting some earlier blog posts today to catch up on a few recent developments. And because I couldn’t choose just one. A bit like the dilemma I face any time I’m offered a box of Cadbury Favourites. Total nutbag Our recent tale of Troy and his masochistic approach to endurance sport prompted a wave of…
Winter Paralympians. Inspiring? More like superhuman
Legend has it that an Aussie medallist at the Sydney 2000 Paralympics, asked by a journalist if he’d always wanted to be a Paralympian, responded: “Not when I could @#$%ing walk.” Urban myth or otherwise, it’s a story that highlights not just the dim-wittedness of some journos but the particular challenges Paralympic athletes face before…
How not to hold on to 400,000 followers (…not a problem I’ve had yet)
Alexander Broad may not be a household name but he was the biggest thing in Sochi. No, he didn’t win a medal. He didn’t even compete. He didn’t actually set foot in Sochi, or even Russia. But from his Toronto bedroom, dorm, dunny, or wherever it is that 20-year-old college students perform their social media…
Farewell from Sochi… but first, let’s rig the medal count
Something’s fishy. A little over a week ago, Russia was in eighth place on the Olympic medal tally. Sure, they bounced around a bit in the standings, hitting second place on a couple of occasions, but never once did they take the outright lead. Then, with less than 24 hours of the competition left, who…
An Olympics volunteer shares a nation’s lament
Hello again, is Vladimir. Has been a while, da? I share you secret. I have intoxicated. I am drunk whole bottle vodka. Twice. Now I have hurt in head from vodka and hurt in heart from ice hockey. All of Russia is like bear with sore head. We can’t believe we lose Olympic ice hockey….
She’s baaaaaaaack
Ten years ago, the unfolding Athens Olympics drama of Jana Pittman’s Knee provided some fantastic sport for these pages (or the emailed missives that preceded them). There were daily knee updates, media pursuits on crutches, odd Greek-inspired fashion statements, Princess Leia side buns, whale music and meditation rituals. Plus a world-class repertoire of blub —…
An open letter to Bruce Brockhoff
Alex Pullin has no idea how he got his nickname Chumpy. Or if he does he ain’t saying. Aussies of a certain age remember an ad for a dog food that was ‘so chumpy you can carve it’. Watching the men’s snowboard cross was a bit like eating said dog food. We had golden expectations…
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