Bob Sledding 2026

We watch the Olympics all day so you don’t have to.

In Men’s Ice Hockey, the semifinal games were played.  The U.S swamped Slovakia 6-2.  Canada, though, had a tougher match-up against Finland and not only squeaked by 3-2, but had to come back from down 2-0 for a thrilling win where they scored the game-winning goal with just 35 seconds left.  So, the Gold Medal game will come down to the same as the Women’s competition – the U.S against Canada.

And…well, that’s pretty much it for the sports that I care about.  We’re in the dog days of the Olympics, with most of the final two days being competition in extreme sports and non-stop curling.   In the extreme sports, they had various competition where the competitors went flying in the air and did somersaults.  And in curling, Switzerland was playing Norway when I last checked in.  One of the teams was up by two points in the eighth round.  So, now, you're caught up...

Which leads to a few pick-up items.

This is a fun, behind-the-scenes 8-minute montage raw video footage after Alysa Liu won the Gold Medal in Figure Skating.  It shows off her joyful goofiness isn’t just in those high-profile moments, but all the time.  Two things stand out for me in it – mostly, it’s how truly warm and caring she is in embracing the two Japanese skaters she beat, especially the 17-year-old Ami Nakai, disappointed at losing and helped feel joyous at getting the Bronze Medal.  (I read online that Nakai had held up four fingers, thinking she finished in fourth place, out of the medals, but Liu made clear to her that she came in third, which is why she helped Nakai celebrate.  I checked a bunch of videos, looking for the “four fingers,” so I can’t confirm that.)  The other thing I like is late in the video when she references the Gala Skating Exhibition when the medal winners put on a big show and, in the middle of all the post-win excitement, enthusiastically tells the person with the camera, “I’m going through my Gala program in my head right now. It’ll be awesome!  You all are gonna love it.”  I can only imagine.  Can’t wait.  I can’t embed this “behind-the-scene” video, but you can watch it here.

By the way, the Gala Skating Exhibition streams live on Peacock this Saturday morning at 11 AM Pacific Time.  It will then air on NBC around an hour later, starting at 11:55 AM Pacific Time on Saturday (interrupted briefly for the 2-person Bobsled finals), and then the NBC Primetime broadcast on Saturday night will air highlights. The full Gala will re-air on USA Network at 10:30 PM Pacific Time Sunday night.

As I’ve noted, I actually do watch curling.  Not a lot – and not at length (there’s a limit of time one can watch curling without having a beer in one hand and a six-pack in the refrigerator) – but I do watch.  But it’s ridiculous how much curling NBC broadcasts on the USA Network.  Hours a day, every day.  I’m sure they have viewers.  I’m equally sure (since in the U.S., curling is only “big” – a flexible term -- in Wisconsin, Minnesota and northern Illinois) that if they aired Puppy Bowl reruns during those hours, the ratings wouldn’t be much different. So, it seems that NBC just wants to be able to fill-up all that time with anything that qualifies as Olympics events.  And that’s fine.  But there’s a lot of material they could mix in there instead, even from off-beat competitions between countries that aren’t the U.S.  Even as just a change-of-pace from yet another curling match between Great Britain and Sweden.  And by the way, to repeat, I do watch curling – but what I find most gnawing is not that it’s boring and weird, but the very opposite:  it’s all the non-stop, piercing yelling that goes on every time the rock slides down the ice. “Hurry!!”  “Off!!”  “Hard!!” “Whoa!!”  “Clean!!!  Clean!!  Clean!!!!”  “Whoa!!” “Off!!  Off!”  “Hard!!”  “Clean!!”  “Hurry!!”  “Whoa!!  Whoa!! “Whoa!!  Whoa!!”  “Off!!”  Hard!!!  Hard!!  Haaaaaaard!!!”  “Clean!!! “Off!!”  “Haaaaard!!!  Hard!!”  And, of course, “Get me a beer!!!”

I wrote this above the other day, but didn’t get around including it, since actual events were expecting to be covered.  I mention this because this afternoon I was watching Pardon the Interruption on ESPN, when co-host Tony Kornheiser brought up curling.  He mentioned how he and his other co-host Michael Wilbon would actually go to curling games when the two of them still covered the Olympics.  And he said he sort of enjoys curling, but…but then he went into a very funny rant about all the hours and hours coverage.  And how whenever you turn on the USA Network, it’s like all they have is curling.  And he went on -- “When does it end???  It just goes on and on and on and on.  When does it end?!!!  What are they going to do??!!  Have the Gold Medal game in August???!!”  And then added, “For all I know, they’re just showing reruns of curling from an earlier Olympiad.”

Ditto.

​Finally, the other day, when discussing the announcing, I mentioned that the expert analyst for a lot of the extreme ski-jumping events, Todd Richards, fell too much into jargon without any explanation.  And he finally got too much for the play-by-play announcer.  Richards made a comment about how the competitor should have tried a "Casual double-switch tail butter double bio 1620” (and no, I am not making that up, I rewound the DVR to transcribe it.  That's an actual quote!!).  And the announcer calmly chuckled, “You just lost so many people right now.”  To which even Richards acknowledged, “Yeah, that’s a lot of names.”

More to come…

Though not much more.