Typically, I suffer a burst of motivation during an Olympic Games – it usually gets me as far as one lap around the block or a couple of days at the pool before it fades and I revert to form. But hope springs in the shape of biathlon – where athletes are still peaking in their thirties and…
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Beers and cheers at Weasel House
Okay, so my motivation might not have been entirely pure when I popped by Whistler’s Weasel House after the downhill event yesterday to interview members of the Blue Army about their epic efforts to fight back the weather and prepare the race courses for the alpine Olympic events. After all, there was free beer on…
Highlights from the men’s Olympic downhill
Confession: there were a few moments on Monday during the men’s Olympic downhill that I was hoping the guys would ski a bit slower. Seriously, I can’t type that fast. As Canadian medal hopeful, Cowboy Robbie Dixon said, after he crashed and burned on the course: “I was definitely putting some crazy in there. It didn’t…
Rob Boyd is God, but a pantheon of newcomers is chomping at the bit to take the title
Doug Lewis will have a bird’s eye view of the men’s Alpine Olympic downhill tomorrow morning, (weather permitting.) The two-time U.S. Olympian, who made his first top ten placing on the Dave Murray Downhill in Whistler at the World Cup in 1984, will be calling the event for the Olympic Broadcasting Service alongside Chris Davenport and JP…
Playing the waiting Games as Ullr and El Nino battle it out
All that stands between the Dave Murray Downhill and Olympic perfection is about seven degrees Celsius – that’s the temperature drop required to take the current valley conditions (El Nino special) to cold enough to turn a water-logged course into boilerplate ice. “This course is excellent,” FIS men’s race director Guenter Hunjara told a small…
The final torchbearer
Debate is renewed about who the final torchbearer for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games will be after organisers announced that it won’t be hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. Furlong said spectators will find out the final torchbearer’s identity on Friday night: “You can think about this as long as you’d like and you can think about the…
Thrillseekers – you were born to huck…
New research underway at the University of British Columbia suggests those Olympic ski racers and aerialists preparing to hurl themselves down mountains were destined to seek out excessive speeds and massive air… they may be genetically pre-disposed to thrill-seeking behaviour. UBC PhD candidate Cynthia Thomson was encouraged to pursue her line of research when her…
Douglas Coupland would have been an Olympian…
Deborah Solomon puts her questions to Canadian pop-lit icon, Douglas Coupland in this weekend’s New York Times magazine, proving the man is as sharp as a kebab skewer, especially when he’s not being edited by a committee of VANOC-word-police, as one suspects happened in his Vancouver 2010 Official Souvenir Program piece. (For that story, Coupland…
Sustainable tourism is frog pose.
Okay, so technically I was procrastinating last weekend when I sat down at my desk and started thinking about what sustainable tourism means to me… Technically, I already had something I should have been working on… Technically, writing that article was going to contribute to my own personal fiscal sustainability. Inspiration strikes in this way….
2010 reasons to head to Pemberton this February
The inukshuk, an Inuit wayfinder, points the way to Pemberton. There are easily 2010 Reasons to Take a Road-Trip to Pemberton This February – lots of the community’s attributes were crowd-sourced at GamesTown2010 – almost 500 submissions were logged by local chest-beaters, and people are still posting… The Village of Pemberton, Chamber of Commerce and…
Lisa Richardson Bylines 