VANCOUVER 2010

Tja Kaj, ik zit er toch ff anders in. M.b.t. de eerste 3 namen akkoord. Maar m.b.t. van Riessen en reserve Bruintjes zeg ik, wijs Timmer aan, want kans op verrassing. Die andere twee, jonge, dames kunnen over vier jaar weer, als ze er dan nog staan.
Hetzelfde denk ik uiteraard over het geval Wennemars.

Franz Krienbuhl, nou daar is een naam die ik de afgelopen 30 jaar niet gehoord heb! Ik heb hem nog even gegoogled.

http://geschiedenis.vpro.nl/artikelen/42959265/

http://www.vidoemo.com/yvideo.php?i=aTZhNF9HcWuRpRFN2VGM&zwiterse-schaats-roger-schneider-2009-na-franz-krienbuhl-1974=

En op die tweede daar stond ook dit:

http://www.vidoemo.com/yvideo.php?i=SG10eHpMcWuRpczV4b00&wereldrecord-sven-kramer-10-kilometer

Ik denk dat ik al eens vermeld heb dat ik daarbij aanwezig was. Mooie gebeurtenis was dat.

Maar die Franz, daar is een wedstrijd naar vernoemd, en dat heeft Sven nog niet gered.

http://www.sportnavigator.nl/interview-ronald-bosker.html

Franz Krienbuhl was ook de uitvinder van het moderne schaatspak; heb die korte docu over hem ook gezien, is de moeite waard.

Leuk filmpje Jaap over die Argentijn; bedankt!

Mijn hart wordt altijd erg warm van dat type deelnemer.

Ja, daar komt ie weer met zo'n lang verhaal...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/sports/olympics/09speedskate.html

February 9, 2010
Speedskating’s Olympic Rewards Fail to Pay the Bills
By KAREN CROUSE

Tears welled in Kip Carpenter’s eyes last fall as he addressed the Wisconsin Speedskating Association board at the Pettit National Ice Center. One of the athletes he coaches, Jilleanne Rookard, had an abundance of talent, desire and grit, he explained, but a cash deficit threatened to derail her bid to make the 2010 United States Olympic team.

Rookard was at a crossroads, said Carpenter, a two-time Olympian and a bronze medalist at the 2002 Salt Lake Games. Without financial assistance, she would have to quit training, possibly before the team for the Vancouver Games was chosen in December.

The association responded to Carpenter’s appeal by writing Rookard a check for $1,000. In a telephone interview, Katie Traver, the group’s secretary, said: “Our reaction was, ‘Of course we’re going to give her this money.’ It was a call for help.”

In a niche sport like speedskating, people bond like the atoms that make up ice. As word of Rookard’s precarious financial situation trickled out, the donations poured in.

“I budgeted about $12,000 until the end of the year,” Rookard said in December, “and that’s how much I got.”

Rookard, 27, made the switch from in-line skating to speedskating just three years ago, but her story is older than clap skates. With 75 medals, speedskating is the United States’ most successful sport at the Winter Games, and yet fame and fortune remain as ephemeral for long-track skaters as their breath in the winter air.

Thirty years after Eric Heiden won a record five Olympic gold medals at the 1980 Lake Placid Games, the sport still suffers in the United States from a scarcity of television coverage and 400-meter ovals. The Pettit Center in suburban Milwaukee is one of four 400-meter ovals in the country (and one of two indoor facilities). A fifth, an outdoor rink in Butte, Mont., has fallen into disrepair.

The sport demands a farmer’s ethic that seems increasingly at odds with a fast-food nation, which perhaps also explains the sport’s niche appeal. Traver said 2,100 long-track speedskaters were registered in the United States, many of whom volunteered as coaches and meet officials after they stopped competing.

Rookard’s story resonated with the two-time Olympian Dave Tamburrino, who said, “It doesn’t sound like much has changed in 15 years.”

Tamburrino, now the corporate marketing director for the Milwaukee Brewers, was 21 when he made the 1994 Olympic team and finished in a tie for 22nd in the 1,500 meters in Lillehammer, Norway. The next season, while training for the World Cup circuit, he said, “I found myself not having two nickels to rub together.”

The bounty was not much better for Tamburrino’s teammate Dan Jansen, a four-time Olympianwho won a gold medal in 1994 in the 1,000 meters. Despite being the pre-eminent sprinter of his time, Jansen did not get rich quick.

“Fund-raisers to try to go to Europe to train, things like that, were very common,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

Jansen added: “I thought I was rich when I made $50,000 one year. Might have made $100,000 the last couple of years, and then I was loaded.”

Jennifer Rodriguez, a double bronze medalist at the 2002 Salt Lake Games who will compete in her fourth Olympics in Vancouver, was asked how much she made from skating in sponsorships and stipends in her best year.

“I’ve never seen six figures,” she said.

Catherine Rainey, a three-time Olympian, lost her job at the Home Depot last year when the company ended its United States Olympic Committee sponsorship. On the bright side, “the Bank of Mom and Dad has been fabulous,” she said.

Rookard’s father died of a heart attack when she was 18, and her mother, Claire, was found to have multiple myeloma in 2005. With six siblings, Rookard could count on a wealth of emotional support but little financial assistance.

In the lead-up to the three-month Olympic team selection process in the fall, Rookard was living in the furnished basement of a speedskating family near the Pettit Center.

Her monthly rent was $300. She was training 8 to 10 hours a day, a schedule that restricted her employment options. Rookard, who was not receiving a stipend from the U.S.O.C. or U.S. Speedskating, worked 20 hours a week as a D.J. at a roller rink and subsisted on leftover pizza from birthday parties.

A year after she took up speedskating, she qualified for the 2007 national World Cup team. Instead of moving to Salt Lake City, where the team is based, Rookard stayed in Milwaukee to be closer to her mother, who lived a few hours away in Woodhaven, Mich.

It was a costly decision, but one she said she did not regret. In Salt Lake City, national team members do not have to pay for coaching or ice time. In Milwaukee, Rookard pays $315 a month for ice and coaching, a fee Carpenter waived when she did not have the money.

“It has been pretty rough,” Rookard said last fall. “There’s times when I’ve had $30 in my bank account. There are times when I don’t know how I’m going to get through it.”

She persevered because she viewed representing her country and her community in the Olympics as a calling worthy of taking a vow of poverty.

“It’s about finishing what I started,” Rookard said. “It’s about my family. It’s about the people who did all the small things for me — drove me to practice and cheered for me and held me when I struggled. I just want to honor them and do my best and thank them for allowing me to do what I love.”

The United States Olympic movement eschews government support in favor of a more grass-roots approach. The U.S.O.C. relies on private donations to offset expenses not covered by corporate sponsorships, but the economic downturn has blighted the giving tree.

In October, U.S. Speedskating experienced a $300,000 budget shortfall after the Dutch bank DSB, its primary sponsor, declared bankruptcy. In swooped the comedian Stephen Colbert, who rallied viewers of his Comedy Central show, “The Colbert Report,” in a speedskating telethon of sorts that has raised more than $300,000 in three months.

He said he could relate to the speedskaters’ circumstances.

“Believe me, I spent 20 years racking up huge debts pursuing comedy,” Colbert wrote in an e-mail message.

He recently donned a sequin-fringed bodysuit and challenged Shani Davis, America’s best multimedal hope in long track, to a race that was broadcast on his show. Afforded a 450-meter head start, Colbert lost but gained a signature move: the Panicky Flail.

With the exception of Davis, who initially took umbrage with Colbert’s barbs at Canadians, speedskaters have seemed delighted to have Colbert in their corner. They are grateful for the spotlight he has trained on their sport, and for a subsequent deal U.S. Speedskating signed with Verizon Wireless, a sponsor of Colbert’s show.

But what will happen once the flame is extinguished in Vancouver? Speedskating officials wonder where they will find the money to pay for training and travel leading to the next Winter Games, in Russia.

“We’re trying to find now sponsorships for the next four years,” said Bob Crowley, the executive director of U.S. Speedskating. “That’s certainly a concern.”

Rookard’s worries eased in mid-December when she made the Olympic team in three events: 1,500, 3,000 and 5,000 meters. She then received a $5,000 stipend from U.S. Speedskating to cover her training for the season.

Her celebration was short-lived. Before Christmas, Rookard’s mother, who was her most ardent supporter, died.

“The last thing she gave me,” Rookard said in an e-mail message, “was a diamond necklace of hers.”

While valuable, no price can be attached to the heirloom. The same can be said of the Olympic memories Rookard will string together.

Terwijl het bij de Amerikanen armoe troef is, kan bij de Canadezen het geld blijkbaar niet op. Die willen koste wat kost de meeste medailles winnen...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/sports/olympics/10podium.html

February 10, 2010
Canada’s Medal Quest: Gold, and Lots of It
By CHARLES McGRATH

No Canadian has ever won an Olympic gold medal on home soil, not even at the Winter Games, where one would think Canadians might have a bit of an advantage. But all that may be about to change if the organizers of the Vancouver Games, which begin Friday, have their way.

They want to rewire the national mind-set and come away with not just a couple of golds but the most medals over all. They have dedicated roughly $118 million to enhancing the performance of Canadian athletes, and have financed something called the Top Secret project, in which teams of scientists have been studying the various winter sports in hope of gaining a technological edge.

The organization in charge of improving Canada’s medal performance has the un-Canadian-sounding name Own the Podium, and its chief executive, Roger Jackson, said: “We’ve never been pressured before to perform to a stated goal. Thirty medals or more is what we’re hoping for this time. I think we can get those.”

Talk like this, so nakedly ambitious, makes some Canadians uneasy. Theirs is a vast country that in many ways is run like a small town, with small-town values, and it has a highly developed culture of modesty, if not a collective inferiority complex. The athletic record in general is a little underwhelming, and some Canadians think that is because their countrymen prefer that, considering a good effort just as valuable as a trunkload of trophies, maybe better.

The Canadian writer George Woodcock once said: “Canadians do not like heroes, and so they do not have them. They do not even have great men in the accepted sense of the word.”

And in a famous attack on the national mythology, the novelist Margaret Atwood said that what passed for heroism in her country was mere survival. She wrote, “Canadians are forever taking the national pulse like doctors at a sickbed: the aim is not to see whether the patient will live well but simply whether he will live at all.”

As Noah Richler, a Canadian writer and the author of “This Is My Country, What’s Yours?,” pointed out, Canadians have long memories, hate public failure and have not forgotten the overweening kayaker Adam van Koeverden, who after predicting success for himself finished next to last in the 1,000-meter final at the Beijing Games. They also recall the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal, where the organizers could not even get the Olympic stadium finished on time. (The Montreal Games were the first Olympics in Canada; the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary were the second, and the Vancouver Games will be the third.)

Some critics on the left have complained that the logo on the Canadian uniforms — a maple leaf surrounded by the letter C — is too similar to that of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party. They have tried to connect all this unseemly talk of winning to what they see as Canada’s aggressive, overly American-like presence in Afghanistan.

But others have enthusiastically subscribed to the Vancouver philosophy. Ken Dryden, the Hockey Hall of Famer and former goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, who is now a Liberal member of Parliament, said: “Canada is likely to do really well this time. In the past, Canada would always win a couple of medals, but you were never sure who. It just somehow happened. That’s the way it was decade after decade, winter or summer.

“But this time I think it’s going to different, and if we do dramatically better, it will be a very good reflection of where we are as a country but don’t quite know it. The Canada we are today is really much different from the Canada of our mythologies and storytellers. ‘Typically Canadian, eh?’ That’s the old myth — that horrible, arm’s-length putdown, the sense that somehow it’s just not going to turn out.”

This change in attitude stems in part from West Coast brashness and initiative. Michael Chambers, the president of the Canadian Olympic Committee, said that when Canada decided to bid for the 2010 Games, it was mostly with the idea of giving another chance to Quebec, which narrowly missed out on the 2002 Games. But Calgary, which had successfully run the 1988 Winter Olympics, and Vancouver also showed interest. The winning proposal was put together by the Vancouver Organizing Committee, or Vanoc, an organization backed by the local sporting community and by the tourism industry.

Vanoc’s chief executive, John Furlong, said that the group, which had an operating budget of $1.75 billion, realized early on that it needed to make the Games an event of national interest, not just a British Columbia phenomenon, and that the best way to accomplish that was for the home team to do well.

“For us, it was a very simple conclusion,” he said. “We needed a confident, strong Canadian team.” In the end, Vanoc provided half the money for Own the Podium, and the Canadian government provided the rest.

Compared with what Olympic powers like Australia and the United States spend, Own the Podium’s budget is “chump change,” Jackson said. But it represents a new way of thinking. Instead of dividing the money evenly, the Canadian way, the group aimed at the sports with the most medals and the athletes with the best chance of winning them.

“Some gains are easier than others,” Jackson said, adding that Canada had made great strides in X Games sports like snowboarding and freestyle skiing. “But the program is working.”

Canada finished fourth in total medals at the Salt Lake Olympics in 2002 and third at Turin, Italy, in 2006.

The Top Secret project, which the Jan. 18 issue of the Canadian weekly Maclean’s reported on, spent $8 million over five years looking into things like super-low-friction bases for snowboards and whether curling brooms really melt the ice. (They don’t, but they warm it enough to reduce surface friction, especially if the broom is dry.)

Scientists used a missile guidance system to track skiers, and built a giant catapult, a human slingshot, to hurl speedskaters into a turn to practice cornering. If anything, the program may be too high-tech. Maclean’s suggested that the rash of injuries that afflicted the ski team in late December — which some regarded as typically Canadian — might have resulted from skis that were simply too fast.

The Top Secret program does not appear to have extended to ice hockey, which has always been the great exception to the national culture of modesty, civility and pacifism. The game, especially the way the Canadians play it, is rugged and antagonistic, and may be the escape valve that makes Canadian niceness possible.

“Hockey has grace and beauty, which aren’t very Canadian,” the writer and artist Bruce McCall, a Canadian transplanted to New York, said. “It also has violence, which Canadians officially disapprove of but in fact they love.”

The game has accounted for many of the country’s unalloyed and unabashed moments of triumph, like the victory over the Soviets in a legendary 1972 exhibition series or the late goal, Gretzky to Lemieux, that won the 1987 Canada Cup.

“God bless the lugers and the bobsledders,” Dave Bidini, a Canadian musician, writer and filmmaker, said, “but at the end of the day, it’s a hockey tournament.”

And in the mind of many Canadians, if the home hockey team does not win the gold, everything else that happens in Vancouver — all those lab experiments, all those millions spent — will have been a waste. Canadians of the old, self-doubting school remember what happened in Turin, when the home team was suddenly unable to put the puck in the net, lost to the Russians, 2-0, in the quarterfinals and finished the tournament in seventh place. This year’s team is under immense pressure not to fold like that. The psychic health of the country depends upon it.

Hockey in Vancouver will be played on a National Hockey League-size rink, and not, as is customary, the larger Olympic-size ice sheet. Furlong said it would have been too expensive to build a rink for which there would not be much use afterward. But noting that the smaller rink benefits the close-checking Canadian style of play, many European players, and the Russians in particular, have grumbled about a conspiracy to take away their traditional advantage of speed and puck movement. To listen to them, the new medal-hungry Canadians will stop at nothing.

“If Canadians have an Olympic fantasy, it’s this,” said Gary Mason, a Vancouver-based columnist for The Globe and Mail. “We’re neck and neck in the medal count and it all comes down to the final event, men’s hockey. Canada and Russia are tied, 2-2, in the third, and Sidney Crosby knocks in the winning goal in overtime.”

Speciaal voor de heren (en lesbiennes natuurlijk) onder ons, topfavoriete voor de super G dames, Lyndsey Vonn

http://www.gosee.de/images/content2/17lindsey-first.jpg

Ik verwacht ook dat Canada heel veel medailles gaat halen, alleen niet dat ze het goud pakken op het onderdeel waar ze het meest trots op zouden zijn (Ijshockey); door die bijna timide " doe maar normaal" mentaliteit missen ze mi net dat beetje killerinstinct om onder die immense druk juist DAT goud te pakken.

Nederlanders hebben ook die (m.i) waardeloze middelmatige, conformistische, uniformiteit houding (Bomans heeft er eens iets prachtigs over gezegd mbt ons landschap en onze mentaliteit), maar Nederlanders hebben wel lef en een hele grote bek, dat ontberen de Canadezen.

Vraag maar eens aan Vlamingen hoe bescheiden en niet-boven-het-maaivelderig zij ons vinden.... Nederlanders zijn zeker op sportgebied best arrogant hoor.

Kaj schreef:Nederlanders zijn zeker op sportgebied best arrogant hoor.

Arrogant, dat is zoiets als "ik ben de beste, dus geef mij maar voorrang." Wat je nodig hebt om te winnen is zoiets als "ik geloof in mijzelf dat ik de beste ben, en ik doe wat ik ook maar moet doen om te winnen." Ik ben het met je eens dat Nederlanders wel arrogant kunnen zijn, maar dat is niet het juiste woord dat bij deze discussie over Nederlanders en Canadezen past.

Kaj, ik heb ook nergens gezegd dat we bescheiden zijn, kijk maar eens naar het rijgedrag hier tov de hoflijkheid bij onze Oosterburen.
Kop boven het maaiveld is mbt prestaties, dat wordt altijd afgestraft en onze maatschappij is er ook niet op ingericht.
Hoogbegaafden en topatleten om maar wat te noemen hebben het dan ook ontzettend moeilijk hier. De hele structuur is gericht op de middelmaat en als je excelleert wordt er van je verwacht dat je vooral "heel gewoon" blijft.

Canadezen hebben dat ook, maar zijn daarbij ook nog eens timide en bescheiden, idd op het hebben van een minderwaardigheidscomplex af.

De spelen zijn nog niet begonnen of de 21 jarige rodelaar Nodar Kumaritashvili is overleden tijdens de training.
Ik moet hierover even mijn woede en frustratie kwijt. Welke godvergeten idioot heeft het in z' n botte kop gehaald om bij het uitkomen van een bocht stalen balken neer te zetten!

Meerdere incidenten zijn er al geweest van de week op deze rodelbaan die al als zeer gevaarlijk werd bestempeld; er ligt ook al een Roemeense in het ziekenhuis; gaat er dan bij die lui geen lampje branden?
Verschrikkelijk dit.

Onderstaande beelden zijn heel schokkend, ik heb erbij gehuild.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/12/nodar-kumaritashvili-cras_n_460474.html

Nou Jaap Heart Of Gold had misschien nog gekund of met het oog op Sven's optreden Harvest

Joyce schreef:En bij K D Lang wist ik eerst niet of ik nou naar een man of een vrouw zat te kijken,vanwege het driedelig kostuum, wat ze droeg...pas nadat Mart Smeets zei dat het de zangeres K D Lang was, ging er een lichtje branden...loll

Tot een halve minuut geleden was ik daar ook nog niet uit. Thnx!