The World Competes

So far, fate has seemed to keep me away from the Olympics. During the Salt Lake City 2002 Olympics, I lived in Italy, and during the Torino 2006 Olympics, I lived in the United States. Although I wasn’t able to attend either, I did have the opportunity to watch both.

One of the biggest events of the 2002 Olympics was the skating scandal, which ended up changing the way that figure skating was judged forever. The French judge was pressured to vote for the Russian skaters, Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, no matter how the other skaters did. The Russian pair made a minor technical mistake during their skate. Jamie Salé and David Pelletier, the Canadian team, skated flawlessly. Salé and Pelletier were later upgraded to duplicate gold medals, and the judging system was changed for the 2006 Torino Olympics.

2002 was the year we had two Chinese short track speed skaters named Yang Yang. At first, they were designated Yang Yang (S) and Yang Yang (L), for small and large. Yang Yang (L) didn’t like being called large, so she changed the designation to Yang Yang (A) instead, for August, her birth month. Yang Yang (A) went on to become the first Chinese athlete to win a gold medal in the winter Olympics.

The 2002 Winter Olympics was the first Olympics to be held after the 2001 terrorism attack on the World Trade Center. Although the world climate has changed a little since then, at the time, most of the world was sympathetic towards the US, who had just been the victim of a horrific attack, yet some complained that the opening ceremonies were a little too jingoistic.