Olympic Musings

Now that the 20th Winter Olympic Games are firmly underway, a few thoughts I've had about the festivities.

• Well, the opening ceremony was its usual weird self. Always nice to see Peter Gabriel, although I'm fairly certain he wouldn't be too keen on Bob Costas's description of him as "former lead singer of Genesis," seeing as how Pete's been out of the band for more than three decades! Also, does anybody think "Imagine" was an odd choice, given the "Imagine there's no countries," line? An Olympics without countries wouldn't really work, would it? Still, any ceremony that involves a Ferrari F1 car doing donuts isn't a bad thing.

• The whole "Torino" thing has bugged me for weeks. If you're learning Italian, that's fine, but for us normal English speakers the name of the host city is "Turin." Alas, the decision to parlare italiano is not a plot of the suits at NBC. Rather, it is the request of the organizing committee, as "Turin" apparently doesn't have enough zing to it. Thanks to CCR for the pointer.

• Autocross is about the lowest thing on the motorsport totem poll (I say that as a fan and competitor, by the way), so we frequently like to play up the success of racers who got their start dodging cones. But I never figured I'd root for one in the Olympics. Tanith Belbin, one half of the United States's best medal hopes in ice dancing, is an avid autocrosser. More than that - she drives an EP3 Civic Si, just like me. So we know she's got good taste, at the very least.

• Hopefully, Tanith won't end up at my new favorite blog, DFL. As you might expect from the name, it is dedicated to keeping track of the athletes in the Olympics who finish dead last in each sport. At this point, Romania leads the upside down metal table with 5 DFL competitors.

Feel free to hum the Olympic fanfare to yourself while reading this entry!