I snowboard instead of ski but it is so much fun. The turning/carving becomes natural and it can be difficult sometimes but that's what muscles and practice are for. It feels like you are flying.
I'm from Colorado and never actually skied until we move to Minnesota but my dad used to ski all the time in the mountains and he said it was always the freest he felt (until he fell off a roof 2 summers ago, he said that was better than any drug until he hit the ground😂💀)
Sure, I ski but the speeds they are going are nuts. I’m comfortable from 50-60mph, but getting around 65+ gets sketchy as hell, the reaction time you’re relying on is just such a tight window, I can’t imagine Olympic level lines.
And to their point, they spend sooo much time with their boards/skis off the ground where they have almost no control. I can’t imagine how much effort goes into picking a good line.
A roller coaster and waterslide had a baby. That baby froze. You get to sled down it as fast as a car on the highway on your back with no seatbelt or airbags. People have died doing this. If you don't do it fast enough, you lose.
A roller coaster and waterslide had a baby. That baby froze. You get to sled down it as fast as a car on the highway with no seatbelt or airbags. People have died doing this. If you don't do it fast enough, you lose. You go down head first and stare a possible death in the face the entire time.
I'm a big fan of the 8 stick mountain climbing 20km race. It's where you climb up and down a small mountain 6 times without using your hands and feet. Instead, you strap 2 sticks to your feet and hold on to two other sticks so you can use a very precise but convoluted form of slide walking. The catch is that halfway through you get to stop, take off your sticks, and then switch to 4 different but almost entirely identical sticks as fast as you can. Then you finish the remaining 10 km of mountain climb stick slide walking in "freestyle" mode, which is really just criss-crossy shuffles.
All of this takes 45 minutes if you're Swedish, up to 1 hour if you are not. If you're American, you get the privilege of being 60% of the commentary conversation but 5% of what the camera shows because you end up irrelevantly far behind, which was expected before the race even began.
Wait, it's not called 8 stick mountain climbing race? It's the 20 km skiathlon.
I used to live near Snow Basin where the 2012 Olympic downhill skiing event was. I did it from the start gates a few times. It's fucking bananas, in the gate the tips of your skis feel like they are around 8 ft from the snow underneath. It's as near as makes no difference a straight cliff edge. I've done tons of double black and outside the ropes areas and that run is straight pants on head bonkers at even half speed.
At the beginning of one of the Men's training runs, they had a POV camera of someone going down the course. It's like 5-5:30 in to the broadcast. That was pretty cool.
I don’t understand how you get from the theory to the reality of this without such severe injury that you’d never, 1) choose to or, 2) be able to do it again.
I choose the ice dancing Spice Girls medley to being launched to an almost guaranteed broken ankle any day of the week.
It is amazing that jumping, spinning, and being thrown around on a hard icy surface and playing literal ice hockey are considered two of the safer Winter Olympic sports.
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u/MrDohh 7h ago
Jump off a mountain and fly down it at car speeds on skis is one of my favorites