Forums → The Tavern → with glowing hearts: Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics

Well I used the forum search, and all the Olympic topics were dead... so. Here is the discussion thread.

I'm guessing everyone has heard about the Georgian luger who died. Whistler has one of the fastest, if not the fastest track in the world. Obviously small countries like Georgia will not have the facilities to train on tracks as fast and dangerous as the Whistler Sliding Centre, so I think that is a huge problem with how they designed the track. Also, there are HUGE metal poles right beside the track after the final turn. Did that not raise some alarm bells to any Olympic official, who seem to be pretty aware of illegal use of the Olympic name and logo and stuff, but not safety issues like these? It's sad how these days it takes a death or other traumatic event for people to take notice.

In other news, USA takes two medals in mogul, Canada takes one. Canada still has yet to win a gold medal on Canadian territory. I'm pretty confident the women's hockey team will be able to change that after they beat Slovakia 18-0 :P

As well, certain skiing events were postponed due to poor visibility and weather conditions. The weather conditions have been plaguing us this year as we've had tonnes of snow trucked over to Cypress Mountain, just to accommodate the Olympic events. Just in time for the 2010 Games, Metro Vancouver (the surrounding area of Vancouver; cities such as Vancouver, North Vancouver, Burnaby, Surrey, Coquitlam, Richmond, etc.) has the warmest winter ever recorded. Great timing.

I think the opening ceremonies were pretty good also, but the cauldron lighting was HORRIBLE. Only three out of four cauldron-lighting apparatuses (not too sure what to call them, see pic below) came out of the ground due to a hydraulic system failure. Fun fact (not really): BC Place is actually a (Canadian) football and soccer stadium, doesn't look to much like one in the opening ceremonies, lol. They also had holographic effects during the opening ceremonies, which was amazing. At least they didn't "visually enhance" the ceremonies like in Beijing xD



You can see the one "cauldron-lighter-er" Catriona LeMay-Doan is just standing there with her torch since the hydrualic system failed, failure...