The World Competes

If you’re like me, you’d really like to go to the Olympics someday. However, for the vast majority of us, the Olympics are not likely to go to your home city, at least not any time soon. To go to the Olympics will take a lot of planning. For the next couple of Tuesdays, I’m going to discuss planning a trip to the Olympics. Although it’s too early to make arrangements for any trip other than the 2010 Singapore Youth Games, it’s never too early to make long-range plans to attend the Olympics in 2012 London, 2014 Sochi, 2016 Rio, or even 2018 (which I’m guessing will be in PyeongChang, South Korea).

What probably keeps most people from getting to the Olympics is money. I know that’s what has prevented me from going to the Olympics since I started wanting to go. Going to the Olympics can be expensive, and can take quite a while to save up for. Depending on how fast you can put away money, you may be able to save up for a trip to the Olympics as early as 2012. I personally am shooting for 2014 or 2016. Here are some tips for saving:

1. Take care of necessities first. For the last few Olympics, this has been my biggest hurdle. It makes no sense to have your car repossessed or have your home foreclosed upon in order to save to go to the Olympics. In this economy, job losses and underemployment could keep you from saving for a trip to the Olympics. Once you can take care of your needs, you can concentrate on saving.

2. Find creative ways to save. If your basic necessities are taken care of, you can start saving; however, there still may not be a lot of extra money to go around. This is where you can start finding creative ways to save.

• Give up your morning latte (or purchase a smaller size) and save the difference
• Keep a spare change jar. As a kid, we used to have a big, 5 gallon glass jug in our living room. My mom would put spare change in it. When it came time to cash it out, it had hundreds of dollars in it. It can really add up.
• Use coupons. My mom funded several vacations by using coupons. She put the money that she saved by using coupons into our vacation fund. We were able to pay for a trip every few years this way.
• Set aside money when you get the chance. Try to set a goal to set aside $5, $10, or any other affordable amount on a weekly basis. The more you can set aside, of course, the faster you will be able to save for the trip you want.

3. Don’t pay to save your money. Depending on where you live, your bank may charge you to have a bank account. While you may want to start a savings account specifically for saving money for your Olympics trip, it makes no sense to pay for the privilege, especially with bank accounts paying no interest. Find out what the minimum amount of money you need for a free account, and open one when you have that amount.

It takes a lot of planning and determination to save up for a large trip like going to the Olympics. Hopefully these tips can help.

The 2010 Vancouver Paralympics start this week. There is no planned television coverage, although interested viewers can watch it as it is broadcast over the Internet. The regular Olympics are fairly popular, but the Paralympics are barely even an afterthought.

I personally never thought much about the Paralympics until 2008, when Natalie du Toit entered the Open Water Swim, becoming one of the few people to participate in both the Olympics and Paralympics. I’m not even sure that I had heard about them prior to that. I was impressed by her story, and I’m sure that there are a couple hundred other great stories like hers in the Paralympics. With a potential treasure-trove of human interest stories in the Paralympics, I wonder why they are not more popular. Here are some of my ideas:

• The Paralympics, which are competitive, are confused with the Special Olympics, which encourage trying and feeling good about participation
• People are uncomfortable with seeing disabled people because they are reminded of their own fragility
• Most disabled people that the average person comes in contact with is old and perhaps a little slow. Perhaps they get the impression that the events will not be that exciting.
• The most popular events, like short track speed skating, figure skating, and snowboarding, are not Paralympic events (yet).
• The Paralympics do not have the same kind of advertisement
• The Paralympics are not broadcast on television.

What are your thoughts?

With the 2010 Vancouver Paralympics starting this week, I thought that I’d take a look back at the previous Paralympic games in Torino.

Although the United States was second in the Olympic rankings in the able-bodied Torino Olympics, it placed fifth in the rankings for the Paralympics, with 7 gold medals and 12 total. Russia blew away the competition, with 13 gold medals and 33 total medals. 39 nations and 486 athletes participated. There were 20 events.

Torino was the first year that the Paralympics were broadcast over the Internet (as they will be in Vancouver). Out of all the drug tests that were given, there were no doping violations (I’d like to see that one in the regular Olympics).

Here’s a video that recaps the 2006 Paralympic experience from the point of view of the Polish team:

In honor of the upcoming Paralympics, I’m featuring a Paralympian as this week’s inspirational athlete.

Heath Calhoun is a member of the Paralympic ski team. The 2010 Vancouver Paralympics will be his first Olympic games.

Calhoun joined the military in 1999, and after completing training, was assigned to the 101st Air Division in Iraq. While deployed, he was in a convoy that was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade. He remembers the explosion, but blacked out shortly afterwards. As a result of the attack, he lost both of his legs below the knees. One of his fellow soldiers was killed in the attack.

Calhoun spent nine months at Walter Reed medical center in rehabilitation. He also became involved in sports. In 2008, he decided to train for the Paralympics.

Heath Calhoun has earned several awards, including Ski Race Magazine’s Role model of the year for 2009, and first place in the Super-G event at the US National Championships.

Heath Calhoun is an inspiration, not only because he was willing to sacrifice his legs for his country, but that he was able to move on from his injury.

The IOC is really missing out on a gold mine, and its too bad, because one simple move could be a win-win situation for all.

I’m talking about YouTube. Universal Sports is already on the bandwagon, and the IOC would do itself a tremendous favor if it would join in.

The YouTube of today is not like the YouTube of two years ago. There are more opportunities to control your content, and there are ways to make money off your content, at least for bigger companies like the Olympics.

I can see why the IOC wouldn’t want everybody posting Olympic YouTube videos up all over the Internet. They are very protective of their brand, and if anybody could embed Olympics programming on their web site, it might dilute their brand. The problem, however, is that they are not posting them up anywhere. If I want to see the award winning performances of Dorothy Hammel or the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics, I can’t; at least I’m not supposed to. There are some Olympics videos that sneak by and aren’t taken down for a while, but there is a lot of footage that is not available.

The IOC could post their videos on YouTube, disable embedding, and get more people interested in the Olympics. People like to browse on YouTube, and they like to search things that interest them. So in four years, when someone references Shawn White’s gold-medal winning halfpipe performance, people could look it up.

There are decades of Olympic videos just sitting in some vault that nobody has the opportunity of looking at. They aren’t selling videos of all this footage on Amazon.com; they might as well get some use out of it.

One of the Paralympic events is sledge hockey. This game is similar to ice hockey, but it allows athletes that are unable to walk or stand to compete. Instead of standing and skating like in regular hockey, athletes sit in a specially developed-sledge.

In prior Paralympics, sledge hockey was a men-only sport. For Vancouver, it has gone temporarily coed. No decision has been made on what to do about the 2014 Sochi Paralympics, but officials are trying to make Paralympic events more available to women, so there may be permanent changes in four years.

Eight teams have qualified for the 2010 Paralympics. The first games will take place on March 13, 2010.

If you watched the figure skating competition in the Vancouver Olympics, especially ladies’ figure skating, you may have heard a few references to Sonja Henie. She skated for Norway, and had an extremely long career that started early.

Henie was just 11 years old when she skated in her first Olympics, the 1924 Chamonix Olympics. She wasn’t exactly sure what to do, and skated over to the sidelines during the performance to ask what to do next. Not surprisingly, she came in eighth place, in an Olympics where only 13 ladies competed.

In 1928 in St. Moritz, 27 ladies competed, but Sonja Henie was ready. She came in first place. She would repeat this feat in 1932 Lake Placid and in the 1936 games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in which 80 ladies competed. The Olympic Games did not take place for another 12 years due to World War II, but Henie wouldn’t have been eligible to compete in a fifth Olympics anyway, as she gave up her amateur status after the 1936 Olympics.

Henie became very popular, and the police had to escort her in several cities. She became friendly with Adolph Hitler, and gave the Nazi salute during a performance in Berlin in 1935. While this may sound controversial today, at the time, Hitler was popular with many people all over the world, even in the United States.

After her skating career was over, Henie went into films. She starred in One in a Million and nine other films. She proved to have a good head for business: in 1941, her contract ran out the day before she finished filming Sun Valley Serenade, and she ended up convincing Twentieth Century Fox to pay her $225,000 for one day of work.

In her 50s, Henie was diagnosed with leukemia. She died in 1969 at age 57. She is considered by many to be one of the best figure skaters ever.

If you were thrilled by Evan Lysacek’s gold-medal winning performance and wish that you could see a bit more of him, you’re in luck. He will be taking part in this season’s Dancing with the Stars, starting March 22nd. He won’t be the first skater to dance in the starlight, Kristi Yamaguchi is also a Stars veteran (she won in May 2008).

Apolo Ohno and Shawn Johnson are other Olympic athletes that have taken their turn dancing (and winning).

Another athlete scheduled to appear this upcoming season is Chad Ochocinco of the Cincinnati Bengals. Pamela Anderson and Buzz Aldrin are also scheduled to compete.

More information about the next season of Dancing with the Stars is available at Yahoo.com.

Sochi Russia by Brookelorren

The Russians aren’t happy. They’re so upset, in fact, that president Medvedev is asking the people responsible for preparing the Olympic athletes to resign. Those that don’t, he threatens to fire. Russia only won three gold medals, and 15 medals overall. They were hoping to win at least 30 medals, and place in the top three countries winning medals.

I can see how they might be disappointed. Once powerhouses in figure skating, they fail to reach the podium at all in pairs or the ladies skate, breaking a streak that has been going on for decades. Evgeni Plushenko wound up with silver when he was hoping for gold. They didn’t exactly have a hot year.

I have been thinking over the last couple of weeks about what it takes for a country to have a lot of great athletes. The country really has to invest in a sport to see medals. The United States Ski Team wasn’t able to fund the ski cross team, and we had two competitors, no female competitors, and no medals. It does have money for skiing, and we had Lindsey Vonn, Bode Miller, and Julia Mancuso.

Russia is not in its economic heyday right now. In fact, they haven’t been doing well for quite some time. It takes years to make a champion, especially in sports like figure skating. If the people (or government) of Russia does not invest in its athletes, they’re not going to see results. And that takes money.

China has been doing well in the Olympics, and I expect them to do better in the future. China has a growing economy, and invests the time and money in its athletes. They work even their snowboarders hard. They will probably do well in both London and Sochi.

Will Russia get back to its glory days? I think that they can perform better in Sochi than they did in Vancouver. Russia is improving economically, while at the same time the Western nations are having a tough time supporting their athletes. They could do better in Sochi, but I’m not sure that they have enough time to become the Russian powerhouse that they once were. Not in four years.

With the Vancouver Olympics wrapping up, it’s time to start looking forward to the next Olympic games. In a normal year, it would be simple enough: the London games are next in 2012. But times have changed for the Olympics, and it’s not that simple.

The next event on the Olympic calendar is the Youth Olympic Games in Singapore, this year. It’s less than six months away. I have no idea what to expect with these new Youth Olympics. The event is supposed to be a low-pressure event for the younger athletes, yet they hired Michael Phelps as an ambassador. I’m not sure how much publicity these games are likely to get. The Paralympic games, which will take place in a little less than two weeks, don’t get much publicity at all.

In 1924 in Chamonix, the first Olympic games wasn’t even called an Olympics. It was then known as “International Sports Week”, but was relabeled after the fact. It only had 16 events and 325 competitors from 16 countries. The recent Vancouver Olympics, in comparison, had 86 events and 2,629 athletes from 82 nations. What the Youth Olympics start out as may not be what they end up actually being.

So it should be interesting to see. Also, it will be interesting to see who does well at the first Youth Olympic games, if it is covered by the media. Many of the first Youth Olympic champions will be seen on the podiums in 2012, especially in fields like gymnastics, where younger athletes are favored. Then again, some athletes in events like gymnastics may reach the height of their careers before 2012.

While I do intend on including some coverage of the Paralympic games, the big focus for now will be on Singapore and London, the two upcoming games.