Ringing in the 2014 Olympic Games
Competition for the 2014 Winter Olympics begins on Thursday with women’s skiing super combined trials and men’s snowboarding slopestyle qualifications. The opening ceremonies, however, take place on Friday. The Olympics will be aired on NBC and its affiliate channels and will last through Feb. 23.
New Events:
There will be 12 events in these games that have not been seen in previous winter Olympics.
The first is ski halfpipe for men’s and women’s competition. This is an event that already takes place on a snowboard, but X Games fans will be excited to see this event coming to the Olympic stage.
Another X Games favorite that is going to see the Olympic snow is the slopestyle event. There will be a men’s and women’s competition for skiing and snowboarding. The event features a rail portion and a jump portion so fans can see a plethora of new athletes throwing their bodies in dangerously high situations while doing aerial stunts.
Snowboarding parallel slalom will take place in Sochi for the first time. This is an event in which two athletes race on side-by-side courses and first one down wins. This event has been in the Olympics for skiing before, but never for snowboarding.
Ski jumping has been a long-standing classic in the Olympics. However, women will compete in it for the first time ever next week.
The last three are team or relay versions of current Olympic sports. Biathlon mixed relay is a new spin on the biathlon. It is extremely popular in Europe and it is, in short, a four-person co-ed biathlon relay. The figure skating team event is basically exactly what it sounds like; countries will have different skaters to perform in different categories for a team score. Luge team relay will also be in the Olympics for the first time. It will feature a doubles team, a male athlete and a woman athlete in a team relay.
U.S. athletes to watch
Shani Davis already has two gold medals under his belt; he won the 1000-meter speed-skating events in the last two Olympics. In a week, he will go for his third-straight medal in the event.
Skiing’s bad boy Bode Miller is back for his fourth Olympic games. He is 36 years old and has lost 20 pounds. Miller broke out in Salt Lake in 2002 and then was criticized in Torino in 2006 for partying late into the night then competing the next day. Miller, however, is focused and aims to claim gold in what is likely to be his final Olympics.
Snowboarding’s superstar Shaun White skipped the X Games last month to prepare for the Olympics. White will be competing in two events this year for the first time, as slopestyle has never been in the Olympics. He will also compete in his signature event, superpipe.
Hannah Kearney is the defending women’s mogul champion in the Olympics. She is still considered one of the world’s best mogul skiers this time around, and she will attempt to become the first woman to win consecutive gold medals in freestyle skiing.
Hannah Teter is the original women’s halfpipe gold medal winner. She won it in 2006 in the inaugural Olympic halfpipe competition. She will look to reclaim the gold in this year’s games after she took silver in Vancouver in the 2010 games.
Mikaela Shiffrin is only 18, yet with Lindsey Vonn sitting out of these Olympics, she is the headline women’s ski racer. Shiffrin has already won three world cup slalom races this season and looks to be counted on for the Americans to continue to win.
Top Stories going into the Olympics
Lolo Jones, the popular American hurdler who just missed the podium in 2008 and 2012 after hitting a hurdle in both races, has given herself one more chance at an Olympic medal. She has made the U.S. bobsled team as a brakeman. This will likely be her last chance to earn an Olympic medal, something many people thought she would never achieve after the London games.
The Jamaican bobsled team will make their first appearance since 2002. A Jamaican four-man bobsled team made the Olympics in 1988, and the 1993 Disney movie “Cool Runnings” was based on its story. People are donating money to the two-man team of Winston Watts and Marvin Dixon to cover travel costs to Sochi.
Lindsey Vonn will skip these Olympics after she re-injured her surgically repaired knee in a fall in November. Vonn has been at least slightly injured for the last two Olympics, and the women’s skier with the most world cup medals will completely miss the games in Sochi. However, she said she will not retire until at least the next Olympic games in 2018, when she will be 33.
Threats on the Olympic games
The cost of these Olympic games is the highest of any in history. Russia has spent $51 billion on the games, $10 million more than the 2008 Beijing games and, according to a Dutch newspaper, more than every other Winter Olympics cost in history combined.
This has caused unrest about the games in Russia, and a terrorist organization led by a man named Doku Umarov has made threats. In late December 2013, the organization bombed public transportation hubs in Volgograd. Russian president Vladimir Putin has spared no expense on security measures for the Sochi games, and the U.S. has offered aid for protection of the Olympics.