Winter Olyimpics Finale

Thankfully, the Games are coming to an end. And, thankfully, coming to an end without any terrorist activity in Sochi. Maybe the Russian security was better than I thought it would be or maybe the terrorists just didn’t want to make a statement at this time, in that place. Either way, it’s a good thing. What did I learn from these Games? Now I know what a twizzle is, and no one does a twizzle better than our two golden ice dancers, Charlie White and Meryl Davis. She looks like a porcelain doll and he like Prince Charming, but are they ever elegant when they dance across the ice, with their twizzles impeccably timed.

What else will I take from these Games? The bobsled races seem to depend too much on how the two or four in the sled get started and how well their sleds perform. It would be a more reliable test of the driver’s skill if they didn’t have the initial push, just let gravity begin the run, with one or three sacks of potatoes instead of the one or three pushers, and all the teams having to use the same sled. Then the results would depend entirely on the skill of the driver. Actually, I don’t care how they do it. It’s a silly event. I’m not a hockey fan so the hockey results aren’t as traumatic for me as for the American men’s and women’s teams that lost to the Canadians.

The most interesting thing about the figure skating was the reexamination of the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan brouhaha twenty years ago.

Now, Tonya is unattractively fat and Nancy is extremely attractive with steel grey eyes and a set mouth when she speaks of Tonya Harding.

One of the most exciting events is the speed skating around and around the ice palace. I can't figure out how they maintain their balance when they zoom around the corners nearly sidways. Four years down the road we can all go to South Korea for the 2018 Games. I’m constantly amazed at how far South Korea has come from the nation I visited over sixty years ago, a nation with the omnipresent odor of the honey buckets, the barrenness of the bombed out hillsides, the impoverished country villages with their straw huts. Now we find a thriving, democratic nation that produces wonderful automobiles and dominant female golfers. And just to the north, we find the megalomaniacal ruler of a starving nation. Amazing.