How the he'll do they know that they have the best in the world competing at an event that 95% of the world has never even heard of? I get that in any-sport there is a huge level of luck and in many cases money for coaches, lessons, travel etc needed to compete to become a world class athlete but at least in the Summer Games the events are mostly ones that anybody has at least tried as a child.
I was afforded the opportunity to try most everything a little kid wanted to try. I played baseball (badly), I played football (badly), I tried out for Basketball, acted in the Theater, ran track, played the Tuba but spent most of my teenage years devoted to my Rock & Roll band and co-editing a fanzine. I would say that I had little to no talent in most endeavors but the opportunities were afforded me.
What I never got to try was skiing down a hill and shooting a rifle at a target or doing thirty flips in the air after a ski-jump or pushing a large stone across a pond of ice to try to shuffle-board it as close to a large circle as possible. Not only did I not try them, I don't live in a cold enough place that I could even reasonably be expected to train at them.
If I was never afforded the chance to do this stuff, how do I know that I could not have been an olympic caliber athlete at that exact sport (chances are I wouldn't be as my mother pointed out) but whose to say that Alex Rodriguez or Kobe Bryant couldn't have competed in the bobsled? The only reason he isn't because where the hell was he going to find a place to even learn this thing?
Look at the ski-jump, please tell me where somebody could even start to learn this thing which I am sure you have to start practicing when you are 5 years old.
Any sport where you need to have a dedicated 2 mile track is not one which can honestly be considered a World Champion event to find the best in the world as you can only come up with a trophy to award to the best at the sport. You are competing against such a small percentage of the world that calling somebody a world champion in the Biathalon is doing a disservice to the winner of the Olympic gold in the 100 meter dash.
The athletes we see may very well be the best of who play these winter events but I have to imagine the total amount of people who have even heard of (let alone tried) the Nordic Combine event is surely less than the amount of people running the loop in Central Park on any given Sunday in NYC alone.
So congratulations to the winners of the Biathalon, Nordic Combine and the Ski Jump you have beaten all comers and you can go back to your lives of anonymity.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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