The World Competes

As you may remember, Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili was killed a month ago today, while making a luge training run hours prior to the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Aside from a few minor glitches, his death seemed to be the one black spot of the otherwise well-done games.

I know that many people around the world are having difficult financial times right now. Not only are we in the middle of a global recession, but places like Haiti and Chile have been hit with devastating earthquakes. We want to give, but it seems like we don’t have much.

The International Luge Federation (IFL) is collecting donations for the family of Nodar Kumaritashvili. His family could use their help. They lost their home to fire a few years ago, and I guess they have never fully recovered. I know what it’s like to have my house catch on fire, it happened to me in 2008… it was not a fun experience, and I had fire insurance. I’m not sure if they have that kind of security in Georgia.

If you have a little extra money, please consider making a donation to the Kumaritashvili family. While the majority of us will go on with our lives, his family has been altered forever. If you don’t, that’s understandable, but if you could, then that’s wonderful. Thanks.

A comment from a reader got me to thinking… most of us really don’t know about Paralympic skiing. I didn’t until I started reading about it. Since Thursday is Sports Day on this blog, I thought I’d write about adaptive skiing. How is it different than regular skiing?

Since there are several different kinds of disability, the Paralympic games allow people with different kinds of disabilities to compete. Currently, the Paralympic games have skiing races for visually impaired racers, sitting racers, and standing racers.

Visually impaired racers, of course have trouble seeing. You might have heard about Canada’s Brian McKeever, who was supposed to ski for Canada in the regular Vancouver Olympics. Turns out that some of Canada’s other skiers did so well in the earlier events that he was excluded from the final race selection. Had he competed in the Vancouver Olympics, he would have had to ski alone. In the Paralympics, he will be able to ski with a sighted guide. So will all the other racers.

Standing racers often use regular skis, although their poles are sometimes a little bit different than regular ski poles. Some of these skiers have lost a leg in a war zone, others are disabled in other ways, but can skill ski while standing. Downhill skiers can use prosthetic arms and legs.

Racers that can’t stand use what is called a sit-ski. This is a kind of chair attached to skis. These racers are often paraplegic for one reason or another.

Hopefully that explains some of the terms that I’ve been using, or that you might hear if you decide to watch some of the Paralympic broadcasts over the next couple of weeks.

Chris Klebl will be one of the four men representing the United States in Cross-Country in the 2010 Vancouver Paralympics. This will be his second Paralympics; he also participated in the 2006 Torino games.

Klebl was born in Düsseldorf, Germany as a US citizen, and grew up in Austria, where he enjoyed skiing and snowboarding. In 1995, a snowboarding accident left him paralyzed from the waist down. He initially took up handcycling, but then was introduced to Nordic skiing. He uses a sitski during skiing events.

Klebl has a degree in economics from Syracuse University, but currently trains full time as a Paralympic athlete. He lives in Heber City, Colorado. We wish him luck. Sit-ski events begin on Sunday, March 14th, with the men’s 15 km race.

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.