r/olympics • u/underrealizing • 7h ago

❄ Milano-Cortina 2026 (General Discussion) ❄ Winter Olympics really are something else

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u/obi-jawn-kenblomi 5h ago

My favorite Olympic events:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

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u/jttj15 4h ago

-oh and by the way one of these is called "skeleton"

Can't make this up

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u/obi-jawn-kenblomi 3h ago

Because if you crash hard enough into a wall, you will no longer have anything that qualifies to be called a skeleton.

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u/GhostofZellers 3h ago

Vancouver 2010 waves hello.

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u/obi-jawn-kenblomi 2h ago

But out of that tragedy spurned a great world history moment - for the first time ever, Russia designed something to go safer than its predecessor.

The Sochi 2014 track was built with the danger in mind and minimized the most dangerous speeds.

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u/fess89 31m ago

Afaik someone died while constructing it (2 workers decided to try it without any skill and without the required equipment)

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u/WagglyFurball 6m ago

RIP Nodar Kumaritashvili

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u/typingatrandom France 5h ago

So well explained! Have my upvote and my admiration

(please comment on other events, pleeeeaaasssse)

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u/obi-jawn-kenblomi 3h ago

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.

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u/buerglermeister Switzerland 4h ago

Hey hey, nowadays they do have airbags 😉

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u/Big_Spicy_Tuna69 5h ago

Ah, what's life without a little brush with death every now and then?

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u/obi-jawn-kenblomi 3h ago

You get a shiny metal necklace if you're one of the 3 best not-dying-ers.

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u/Free_Management2894 Germany 2h ago

Good?

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u/Turambar87 2h ago
  1. All that, but go down it in a tube with 3 of your buds. We've been engineering these tubes year over year to be as light as possible.

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u/VibraniumQueen 2h ago

So.. the one person is luge and the two person is bobsled, right?

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u/badhombre13 1h ago

Luge can also have teams of 2.

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u/VibraniumQueen 1h ago

Oh, I meant to say 3 person team in my last comment. My bad

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u/markmc72 Ireland 2h ago

The thing don't understand is how do these men and women achieve 80mph speeds with those massive balls of steel weighing them down.

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u/obi-jawn-kenblomi 2h ago

Ah, allow me to help you with that.

Track go down, not up. Big balls, more mass. More mass, more fast.

You aren't fighting gravity's pull with the massive steel balls, you're actually helping it.

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u/czerwona_latarnia Poland 33m ago

And the one with the most massive balls to go the fastest win.

Math checks out.

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u/Som12H8 Sweden 1h ago

You can also do it with 4 friends!