The Winter Olympics 2010

I'm obsessively watching the Olympics all day every day. I actually think we are on a better time difference over here then Europe. When I wake up the morning the athletes are working hard there in their afternoon the day before in Vancouver. We also have 8 TV screen surrounding me in the office and they are all showing some form of sport or news.

What I find interesting is that Australian television focus on the more modern sports in the Olympics such as snowboarding and snowboard cross, whereas as far as I can remember last time I watched the winter Olympics in Sweden they focused heavily on Cross country skiing, Biathlon and Slalom. I guess that is because Australia might not have good cross country skiers but they do have a 8 decent snowboarders and mogul (puckel pist) skiers where as Sweden only has the one participant in Snowboarding.

We do however seem to do really well in Curling. I actually really like Curling, once I got it all explained to me by a physics professor a couple of years ago (must have been 1998). Apparently as a curling player you need to take into account how many people are there to watch the event as the ice will react to the assembled heat in the hall and melt at different rates. Hence they need to brush the ice at different speeds. I think that sounds quite funny. Not many other events are physically affected by the number of viewers. I wonder if there are certain teams that are better at different viewer numbers, like Canada being better when the arena is half full whereas the current world champions Britain might be better at a full arena. Also how do you train for this. Do you to be able to practice with high speed melting ice force buss loads of people into the arena to simulate the competition environment. What people could you force, maybe it could be a way for the government to create jobs for people,as the unemployment number in some countries are rising. You know, during the curling preseason I work as a arena heater, like a seasonal job. Maybe something for back packers in Canada to think about.

But then again, it's probably cheaper just to get a whole bunch of electric heaters.