Typically I am adept at tuning out the various pontification that goes on around me during the day-Lord knows I can find more than my fill of ill-informed "takes" on "issues" right here online, with the added bonus that on the Internet, nobody knows you're rolling your eyes-but in this case, for whatever reason, I couldn't help but react.

"I totally disagree," I sputtered. "These Olympics have been great."

There was silence; a minor faceoff. At this point we were both standing because we sit directly across from one another and can't see over our computer screens otherwise.

"They had that massive mechanical failure at the Opening Ceremonies?" he reminded me and everyone else sneaking glances in our direction. "They don't have any snow. And uh, a guy died."

That. Yes. Whoops. I'd been talking more so about, like, the ratings.

Which have surprised me, particularly given the howls of anger reverberating throughout the land regarding NBC's mine mine mine all mine gimme mine Olympic coverage. (Would you ever have guessed that Deadspin has readers who write in, passionately, proclaiming that "I too am extremely upset with the coverage by NBC. When they completely didn't show any speed skating last night in prime time I was furious at them"?)

These cries have been matched in their wounded stridency only by those of people who expect such local niche websites as the New York Times to tailor their own coverage in such a way that ensures that no results will be reported until everyone in every time zone everywhere has had a chance to get home from work, pour a glass of wine, and pause 20 minutes so they can fast forward their DVR through the commercials.

"This is not Taliban news, nor TARP news, or even Paula Jones type news," scolded Matt Gooch of Harrisonburg, Va. Ken Waters of Phoenix, meanwhile, was faced with his own personal Sophie's choice. "Per usual, I have to basically go on a two week sans NY Times 'vacation', and go temporarily dumb, doing so," he explained. "That's a lose/lose." Is it now?

Still, I get it. Some of the sportswriters that I follow on Twitter have, in their quest to be FIRST!, taken to writing things like "SPOILER ALERT: Lindsey Vonn has won the gold." Which... by the time my eyes have seen and processed the first two words, they've probably also gone ahead and seen and processed the entire rest of the sentence, you know?

The good news is that now I can BE one of those Twitterers, because recently I was tipped off to a live feed existing in a cobwebbed corner of the Internet. It was a shadowy transaction during which I was sworn to utter secrecy, and I'm pretty sure that I'm now either on some RCMP watchlist or have joined the Illuminati, or probably both. One sports blogger to whom I recounted my strange experience responded thusly: "Whenever I enter the feed-pirate demimonde, I feel like I'm walking into Rick's Café, only with less Ingrid Bergman."

But now I can watch the biathalon live from the comfort of my office chair and at great risk to my ongoing employment! In contrast to Ken Waters' point above, that is a win-fucking-win. Meanwhile, I just tried to check out Shaun White's gold medal winning halfpipe run from the other night on the official sanctioned NBC website and spent like three minutes wrestling with stern pop-up messages and plugins that I don't have the IT permissions to install on my drive.
I gave up. It'll probably be on YouTube in a few months.

* * *

Perhaps I ought to apologize for my own shameful lack of live coverage of these Games, but some dude has already cornered the market on saying sorry for today. But please, leave my kids alone, and also accept this peace offering in the form of random bulleted thoughts about what we've seen and how we should feel about it as we round the halfway point of Vancouver 2010.

• I may be alone on the planet in thinking this, but I find the snowboarders' jean-look pants to be a brilliant and meta contribution to the gaper genre. (For some historical background, I refer you to this Bible: "If you ski in jeans, you're a gaper. If you wear a jester hat, or big, tinted aviator glasses on the hill, you're a gaper.")

• Speaking of pants, Norway decided to go the John Daly route and Rob Walker imagined a terrifying future with a much brighter Brooklyn.

• Some follow-up thoughts to things we've discussed previously: 1) Fortra-West was all set to unload Whistler and some other properties like evil Stratton at a public auction to be held today in New York (I wanted to attend! Vail Resorts is said to be interested!) but they got an eleventh hour reprieve and now have a week to come up with $150 million. 2) Ski cross is finally coming atcha on Sunday and you'd be moronic not to watch. 3) Shani Davis won the gold and looked and sounded genuinely happy this time, yay for him! And 4) Sports Illustrated staffers must have been reading all the Lindsey Vonn butt talk with evil glee, knowing that in just a few days they'd have her all up in a bikini.

• God, I loved Plushenko's sweet jacket and I even felt a lil' bad for him when he was sulking on the medal stand, but what a dick: "If the Olympic champion doesn't know how to jump quad, it's not men's figure skating, it's dancing."

• Fuck Yeah Johnny Weir Dot Tumblr Dot Com.

• We need to figure out how to advance the field of cryogenics quickly enough so that it's like, actually working by the time Martin Brodeur ultimately expires. We can't let him go. The man saved Canada in an overtime shootout yesterday, which is so whatever until you remember that the man is THIRTY SEVEN YEARS OLD and plays a position that involves him hunching over and doing splits all day. I'm completely in awe and I am a Rangers fan.

• Finally, check out this photo finish in cross country skiing. This is how I look when I enter the apartments of friends who live in walkups.

Katie Baker writes mostly about sports and weddings and so the Winter Olympics just kind of seemed like the next logical step.

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But now I'm pretty much over it. For the real crime, as it turns out, is the blandest of all: unoriginality.

For just as the 90's are BACK in high fashion and literature, so too have we trawled them for cover design. From 1992:

He's wearing a helmet, but still, fair enough.

(Props to the mag, by the way, for the slick and searchable "SI Vault"; it's amazing the number of outrageous ski-themed covers from the 50's and 60's. Should you be so inclined, do check out 1957's "New American Look in Ski Clothes". Ooh, I like this lady's lipstick! And I know 1968 wasn't the brightest of years, but come on: Jean-Claude Killy sure makes up for a lot.)

It's always so awkward when athletes doll up. Was there anything worse than Kerri Strug in street clothes? Vonn pulls it off mostly, but for all of her marketable polish she remains kind of a goof. A goof who likes to go 150 on the autobahn!

But enough about skiers. I've covered that ground, which is more than can be said for the snow in Vancouver. Things are getting so bad that they're building jumps with hay bales and trucking in snow. Olympic officials (who must be freaking out) are gritting their teeth and making harried statements. "It's beautifully white and clean and it looks great on television," said Renee Smith-Valade.

She meant the snow, not Joe Biden, who will be leading the US delegation in Vancouver. Given his considerable foreign relations expertise and his ongoing involvement with the Special Olympics, I can't think of a more suitable man for the job.

As far as I have been able to ascertain via Google, this particular diplomatic assignment involves hanging out with Mike Eruzione and Peggy Fleming, and oh my God, is Biden going to wear a warmup and march in the parade!? This column on the wonderfully manic Brian Burke seems to suggest as much, but I'm not going to get all my hopes up just yet.

Given the lack of meteorological cooperation-cue the "shoulda had the Olympics in DC!" yuks-many athletes must be glad they're competing indoors. And while someone has already got the Johnny Weir beat covered, less attention has been paid to some other blade-wearing athletes.

The US speedskaters, who along with Vonn are the country's top medal contenders, got bad news in October when large sponsor DSB, a Dutch bank, went kaput. The speedskating federation, faced with a $300,000 hole in its budget, was bailed out by an unlikely benefactor: Stephen Colbert. No stranger to odd publicity stunts, Colbert used his powers for good in asking viewers to donate to the cause. In the first week alone they raised $202,000.

It was not without controversy. Shani Davis, who holds several world records in long track and is widely expected to take home some gold medals, went on record against the talk show host. "He's a jerk," he told a reporter in early December. "You can put that in the paper." No one, including Davis's pal Apolo Ohno, was quite certain of the reason for the rancor; as it turned out, Davis was likely reacting to a 2006 bit in which Colbert faux-chastised him for not skating in the team pursuit event in Turin.

It was a touchy subject. The team pursuit "flap" in Turin resulted in a public feud between Davis and teammate Chad Hedrick that overshadowed Davis' gold medal in the 1000m (the first gold to a black athlete in an individual Winter event in Olympics history) and culminated in a press conference so horrifically painful that it moved ESPN writer Eric Adelson to reach deep into history for a suitable comparison:

It's funny. This type of rivalry goes all the way back to the beginning of U.S. history. More than 200 years ago, a Northerner named Alexander Hamilton and a Southerner named Thomas Jefferson disliked each other so intensely that a new nation nearly crumbled in their wake. And even though that rift still exists today, we have both of them to thank for the role they played in building America.

We can only hope to eventually say the same about the fallout from SkateGate II.

While Davis and Hedrick have yet to forge a new republic, they now exist on civil terms. And the rift with Colbert is a thing of the past-Davis even agreed to appear on the show.

Still, Davis remains a bit of a lone wolf, self-coached and self-represented. He has no ties to the US Speedskating Federation, and by request does not even appear in the media guide. His mother handles his press, which is to say: she is the one who denies the requests. (This go-it-aloneness, apparently, is like catnip to the Dutch: this ABC piece introduces us to characters like Ruud Bakker-no relation-the "leader of Kleintje Pils, a [Dutch] band that travels to most major skating meets and has serenaded the American for years.")

The issue of Sports Illustrated pictured above contains lengthy profiles of Davis as well as Vonn; expect them, along with Ohno, Evan Lysacek, Shaun White-and who knows, maybe the bobsledder dudes?-to dominate coverage.

And in spite of my reluctance to reward the SI cover designers for their uninspired choice, it's worth getting a copy of the Vonn-fronted SI, if only as a guide to who's who in all the random sports, but also so you can flip to a second photo of her on page 52.

Because while much is the same as the cover shot-Red Bull screams prominently from the front of her head, her legs splay in impossible angles, and she's still wearing pink; no word on the earrings though-in this one she is actually in motion, leaning into a turn, glaring out from behind her goggles, pressing her tongue against the roof of her mouth with the concentration of a four-year-old learning to write out her letters.

It's a much better look.

Katie Baker writes mostly about sports and weddings and so the Winter Olympics just kind of seemed like the next logical step.

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"In the United States," begins something that reads like a high school essay, "the 1960s were a time of revolution, of young people challenging authority and demanding change." It was during that decade, the writer goes on to note, that "social change and freedom of expression led to new and exciting...

...
...
...skiing techniques."

(Cripes, is there anything the Boomers aren't taking credit for?)

That illuminating glimpse into modern history is part of the official Olympics website's description of freestyle skiing, the umbrella category that comprises aerials, moguls and the Games' newest "medal discipline": ski cross.

Ski cross sounds confusingly like cross country skiing but is actually nothing of the sort: the event is most accurately described as being a roller derby on skis. (Some people compare it to short track speedskating, but I don't understand how that is at all helpful.) In contrast to traditional downhill ski racing, ski cross competitors battle not only the clock but each other, competing in groups of four or six on a man-made track covered in jumps, dips, and hairpin turns.

In late 2006, ski cross was greenlighted for inclusion in the 2010 Games by the IOC, while other events like "curling mixed doubles" and "luge team competition" were denied entry. The most controversial neg, though, went to womens' ski jumping. "It's like they're putting us aside and saying no women allowed," said then-15 year old Canadian ski jumper Katie Willis. "I don't think that's right."

By the IOC's current standards, it wasn't: the bylines mandate that any sport added to the Olympics must have a mens' and womens' competition. But ski jumping, having been an Olympic mens' event since 1924, was not subject to the rule. So an international contingent of womens' ski jumpers opted to do what any wronged party would: sue.

It was a spirited attempt. The women sued the Vancouver arm of the Olympics Organizing Committee, VANOC, for gender discrimination in direct violation of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. B.C. Supreme Court Justice Lauri Ann Fenlon agreed that the women had been victims of discrimination-but by the IOC, a body not subject to the Charter.

In a ruling whose circuitousness would have pleased Joseph Heller, Fenlon found that VANOC did have to abide by the Charter-"an argument that VANOC lawyers [had] vigorously contested"-but that VANOC had a duty to follow IOC decisions, "a situation she confessed was 'somewhat distasteful'." (The ski jumpers' appeal of Fenlon's decision was turned down a few weeks ago.)

Why did the IOC say no in the first place? The most blunt explanation came from committee president Jacques Rogge: "We do not want the medals to be watered down by too little a pool of very good jumpers." Ice cold!

You can argue with that rationale if you'd like-I don't profess to be an expert in the international womens' ski jumping depth chart-but I do know one thing: you've seen one ski jumper in that trademark midair pose, you've kinda seen them all. The sport can be a snoozer, especially on TV.

As opposed to, I segue, ski cross! The IOC's decision to include the sport was largely a reaction to the success of snowboard cross (think roller derby but on snowboards) which made an instant splash in its debut in the 2006 Olympics in Torino. "We'd heard that the television guys were asking, when they saw boarder cross, 'Do they do this on skis too?'" said Canadian Freestyle Ski Association CEO Peter Judge. "When you hear that query coming from someone paying billions in revenue, you tend to listen to your customer.''

In the wake of Torino, even stodgy PBS got all, as the kids say, amped:

JEFFREY BROWN: Christine, my son said this new sport of snowboard cross looks like a video game come to life, which you know is a high compliment from a 12-year-old. Tell us more about this sport and its new stars.
CHRISTINE BRENNAN: Well, that's exactly what the International Olympic Committee wants to hear because they're looking for that next generation of viewer, Jeff, to be able to try to get them, latch them into the Olympic Games and have them watch for several generations. ... But it's kind of that joy de vive, that freshness of those kids that whiz by you on the slopes when you're skiing as a recreational skier.
JEFFREY BROWN: It looked to me like some of the young women in that snowboard half pipe were listening to their iPods as they were soaring through the air.
CHRISTINE BRENNAN: Well, trying to interview them is really tough because they kind of walk by and, you know, they have got the headsets in and it's hard to know, hey, by the way, could you stop and talk for a few minutes, so they're having a great time. I think visually it's a terrific thing for the games because it's not just the old stuff and you bring in a different breed of athlete, you know, the online skating type people.

Presumably she said inline skating, but the world may never know. At any rate, TV audiences loved the sports' rollicking pace and crashtastic wipeouts, and the footage of American darling Lindsey Jacobellis doing her best impression of a hotdogging wide receiver tripping over himself at the 2-yard line while high-stepping untouched toward the endzone ended up one of the most widely viewed videos on NBC's website.

If you are one of those people who were enthralled by the minutia of superdelegates or who love to dissect the inner workings of the BCS rankings, you will probably be interested in the Goldberg contraption that is the ski cross Olympic qualifying procedure. I am not one of those people. So I'll just presume, based on some strong recent World Cup finishes, that the two men who will be representing the US in ski cross will be Daron Rahlves and Casey Puckett, aged 36 and 37 respectively.

I have much to say about the two men, both of whom are former members of the US Alpine ski racing team who came out of retirement to compete in the new event, but in the interest of time and your Twittention I will summarize each one in 140 characters or less:

Rahlves: Most decorated US downhill and Super G skier ever but no Olympic medals; won the World Jetski Championship in 1993; had a ridonkulous crash.

Puckett: Wrote blog post that included the phrase "pull your pants down so that I can see the urine come out of your penis"; had a ridonkulous crash.

Regardless of who qualifies, it's a well known fact that any Olympic sport worth its weight in gold medals must be accompanied by a scandal. (Creep on creepin' on, figure skating!) And for ski cross, it's the clothes.

"The French and the Austrians were just trying to cut corners," said Puckett in a recent interview when asked about the minor controversy that ensued when those prissy little Euros started icing up the race tracks and wearing tight Lyrca ski-racing suits in lieu of traditional baggier two-piece getups. (The International Ski Federation has since issued guidelines banning one-piece suits and mandating a minimum gap between material and skin, although some worry that its new textile regulations are too vague to be effective.)

It may sound silly, but to a sport seeking to differentiate itself from its stodgy-if-speedy downhill-racing predecessors, the issue is of grave importance. "Skiercross in general is in conflict with itself," declared Seth Wescott, the reigning snowboard cross Olympic gold medalist and apparent Dali Lama. Fellow snowboard crosser Nate Holland had more aesthetics-minded complaints: "When you add speed suits, it looks like crap."

Puckett, for his part, referred back to the ancient history of the sport's early-60s pioneers in making his case.

"The first competitors of ski cross were anti-establishment, big mountain freeriders," he blogged last year. They "wouldn't be caught dead in a race suit."

Previously: Hockey Meat, the Disaster of Whistler Blackcomb and Next Year in Vancouver

Katie Baker writes mostly about sports and weddings and so the Winter Olympics just kind of seemed like the next logical step.

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I can deal with being emasculated by China though. It's like losing a bar fight to a bouncer named Tiny: everyone appreciates the effort and is seriously just relieved you didn't end up dead. But there are no real tough guys at the Winter Olympics, only a bunch of slippery Bradley Cooper lookalikes with names like Lljljlars Krkkynyk who are going to charm your girlfriend with their naturally rosy complexions and then ride her like a goddamn NordicTrack. These guys play ice hockey like the happy little munchkins on a frozen lake that they once were: they glide, they soar, they "use every inch of the ice." They are graceful and fleet of foot. They are really good. They are pussies.

And so the rallying cry of Team USA seems to be: if you can't join them, beat the shit out of them. Brian Burke, the U.S. men's ice hockey team team's general manager (who sounds like a butcher in his spare time), has a vision. "There will be some beef on this team; there will be some muscle," he said back in August. "We'll need some big-body guys, and guys who can win face-offs, block shots-and some bangers. We'll need some beef on the hook among those bottom six forwards."

I know. Hockey people talk really weird. But with apologies to Jonathan Safran Foer, Operation American Beef might be our mediocre team's only real chance at success. There's even something of a method to the meatness, because for the first time in, I think, ever, the games will be played on a smaller NHL-sized rink rather than the roomier "international" ice that those slippery Finns know how to use every inch of. Which means: $10 million in capital cost savings, 500ish additional seats, 13.5 fewer feet of ice width-wise and thus, according to the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences, "significantly more collisions of all types in all categories and subdivisions within categories." (The subdivisions are there to differentiate between poundings "involving the head directly or indirectly.")

In other words, per square inch of ice surface, there will be that much more glass-boarded perimeter against which Brian Burke's Big Body Bangers can subdivide the skull of Lars from Ljungby. U! S! A!

***

The rationale for the smaller rink is nothing more than that it was already there, home to the Vancouver Canuckleheads (a dis I learned in 1994 as a young Rangers fan that comes second only to "Toronto MakeBeliefs" in the annals of searing nicknames for struggling Canadian franchises). But the rink will still be getting a makeover, if only nominally: IOC rules prohibit the corporate branding of Olympic venues, and so the General Motors Place-aka The Garage-will be temporarily and blandly rechristened as the "Canada Hockey Place", as in: "...and we'll see you back here at the Canada Hockey Place right after a few words from Coca-Cola! The official soft drink of Vancouver 2010! And Visa! Proud partner of the Olympic Games! Visa: it's everywhere you want to be!"

According to the most important primary source documentation of our time, Internet Comment Sections, the locals were none too pleased to hear of the change. "Banning a Corporate name?" wrote one Dr. Andrei Smyslov on the CBC's website. "How ridiculous given the Olympics are only about Corporate advertising. Who are they trying to fool?" Word. Even amateur linguists (word!) took offense. "Canada Hockey Place sounds like an English translation from another language that didn't quite make the jump into the lexicon pool," Steve778 lamented. I LOL'd.

There is dark comedy to be found in the fact that a sad clunker of a company like General Motors, now majority-owned by the US Treasury and the Canadian government, is considered too corporate for the Olympics, while another Winter Games venue is snared in the web of a real estate development holding company that is in turn clutched in the talons of a giant private equity fund-and it gets off scot-free.

I am referring to Whistler-Blackcomb, the massive ski and par-tay destination that boasts over 200 trails and 8,000 skiable acres and-far more relevant to the bottom line-6,540 seats across 17 restaurants that will gladly welcome both the Olympic crowds and the free marketing provided by the warm fireside stylings of Bob Costas over sweeping blimp footage onnnn NBC!

You can protest all you want that Whistler is the name of the TOWN! or Blackcomb is the name of the PEAK! and I will look at you calmly and not hear a thing-it's a skill I developed as a bruised and battered country club staffer-because I know in my heart that you are wrong. Whistler-Blackcomb is the name of the brand, a brand that has been developed and managed and focus-grouped to within an inch of its life by Intrawest, the same evil emperor that finds it appropriate to charge unsuspecting n00bs EIGHTY DOLLARS for the privilege of spending one lone day on the icy, shitty, chokingly crowded slopes of another of its brands: Stratton, in Vermont. That place is the worst.
(Picture via.)

Intrawest fancies itself the "Leader in Experiential Destination Resorts", and if you initially misread that as "Experimental" the way I did it's okay because we weren't really wrong. According to a 1999 Forbes article tellingly titled "The Disney of Skiing," Intrawest prefers its properties "meticulously planned, from the serpentine path of the village (it gives a greater sense of discovery than a straight path) to the 20-foot distance between wastebaskets (studies show people will carry an empty wrapper 25 feet before dropping it on the ground)."

I think zero of those studies took place in New York.

***

The story of Intrawest since that Forbes piece was written ten years ago is really just the story of the end of the world as we know it.

The stock, range-bound around its IPO price of roughly $17 for most of the early Naughties, began to take off along with the market in 2005. By 2006, large shareholder Pirate Capital was agitating for Intrawest to put itself up for sale (aw, remember the heady days of activist hedge funds?) because "public markets could not adequately value Intrawest's landholdings, or fully appreciate its complex joint ventures." Stupid public markets! And lo, in swooped Fortress Investment Group LLC with an offer to envelop Intrawest into its dark velvet private cloaks for a cool $2.8 billion, or $35 per share, a 32% premium over the stock's then-current price. Fortress no doubt baked in that hefty extra not because it expected a small explosion in the number of gapers shredding gnar but moreso because it expected a huge explosion in the value of Intrawest's portfolio of... all together now... real estate.

And then, and then, and then and thennnnn.... Fortress Investment Group LLC itself went public in February 2007. But if you were the poor sap who thought it would be a good idea to snag some Fortress in its hot $31 IPO, well then you, pal, have lost 87% of your cash money The stock now trades around $4.

It was trading at $1 last fall, which was when Fortress had a leeeetle beeet of deeeeficulty refinancing the $1.7 billion of debt it had taken on to buy Intrawest. The deal was pushed through at literally the eleventh hour, an experience that you would think would result in a kinder-gentler private equity behemoth. But please, no one ever made any money abiding by The Golden Rule, and so right around that time Fortress callously halted funding to a Vancouver builder named Millenium that had fallen a skosh behind on its scheduled payments.

This 2007 Maclean's article about Millenium's big project (ominously marketed as "Vancouver's Last Waterfront Community") skips you down the same terrible repressed-memory lane that a 1999 ode to Pets.com would have in 2002.

$200 million of orders on the first day of sales! A smirking, Ray Bans-wearing, up-from-the-bootstraps bigwig! Trendy bells and whistles that buyers care about "not one bit!" And, with hindsight, the grim specter of impending DOOM.

Whatever, why should we care? Who wasn't getting financing pulled a year ago? Well, it's just funny cause this particular Millenium development wasn't just any old highrise project: this was the Olympic Village for the very same Games that Fortress hopes to squeeze dollars from. (Cue Al Michaels: "It's a beautiful day here at Whistler-Blackcomb mountain!") But long story short: cleverly crafted contracts included scary language like "completion guarantee" that basically meant that the city of Vancouver, and not Fortress, was ultimately on the hook; and longer story shorter: so sorry, taxpayers!

That this is complicated, and confusing, probably means the IOC is equally bewildered-which is why they don't force anyone to call the mountain Canada Ski Place.

Just last week, Intrawest announced that it was selling off its floundering property Copper Mountain, a place where a younger and much more adorable version of me first learned what it was like to fall in love with an older woman. (If you're out there, Ski Instructor Jenny, call me!) "If this had occurred in the not-too-distant past one might expect the eventual buyer to come from the hotel or real estate sector, but times have changed," understated the editorial board of the Summit (CO) Daily News following the sale. The buyer was the Web 2.0-sounding Powdr Corp, and I haven't yet decided whether I'm going to believe that the chill bro-wner is really just about the skiing, dude. (John Darnaby Cumming? He has climbed Mount Rainier 69 times.)

Anyway! One dude who really is just about the skiing is Lindsey Vonn. I have much to say about her sometime else but just know that you're going to see a lot of this lady in the coming months, which is cool by me because she is smoking hot and just about everything an American woman should be. Her sponsors include Under Armour, and Alka-Seltzer, and Red Bull, and Intrawest nemesis Vail Resorts. And, if you're lucky, YOU. Check her out at the majestic Whistler-Blackcomb resort this February! Onnnnnnnn NBC!

Katie Baker writes mostly about sports and weddings and so the Winter Olympics just kind of seemed like the next logical step.

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