Words & photos: Ethan Stone
"Feel da riddim!"
"Feel da rhyme!"
"Get on up!"
"IT'S BOBSLED TIME!"
Is there any better way to get into the Winter Olympic spirit than to watch the movie "Cool Runnings?" If there is, I haven't heard of it. And I don't think it's coincidence that this is one of the movies currently available to view on Delta trans-Atlantic flights.
The antics of the Jamaican bobsled team help get me stoked for my ultimate destination during my flight from Atlanta, Georgia to Munich, Germany — the two stops along my journey from Mt. Hood, Oregon to Sochi, Russia to cover the Olympics for Newschoolers.
Yes, Atlanta and and Munich are also former Olympic host cities, making my trip a de facto Olympic tour. Yes, they are also cities that both suffered terrorist attacks during their Games, in 1996 and 1972 respectively.
Would you consider that to be a bad omen for the Olympics I'm on my way to? Consider what you want; I don't believe in that shit.
After a solid 48 hours of flights and layovers, a glimmer of lights appears on the distant shore below my third flight. I've reached the vortex currently sucking up all the attention in the freeskiing world. Hello, Sochi.
For all of the publicity that Sochi has been getting recently, how many of you can actually point out its location on a map? Allow me to indulge in a brief geo-history lesson.
Sochi is located on the eastern shore of the Black Sea in southwestern Russia, in a region known as the Caucasus. This area is defined by the Caucasus Mountains, a rugged and remote range stretching from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. Depending on where you like to draw the line between Europe and Asia (it's a subject of contentionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundaries_between_continents#Europe_and_Asia), the Caucasus may be home to Europe's highest mountain—18,510-foot (5,642m) Mt. Elbrus, a solid three thousand feet higher than Mont Blanc in the French/Italian Alps.
Understanding Sochi's location is essential to understanding why everyone's so worried about terrorism at these Olympic Games. As an important connection between the Middle East and Eurasia, the Caucasus region has been fought over for millennia. For most of its history the Caucasus has been associated with empires and kingdoms to the south such as the Iranian Empire; only relatively recently did the Caucasus become a Russian possession. And Russia's hold on this region is still tenuous.
The diverse ethnic groups that populate the Caucasus—Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays and so on—have never jived with Russian rule. According to Wikipedia close to a million residents of the area were deported to Siberia during the 1940s. Generally speaking, that doesn't make people happy.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, several Caucasian states—Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia—became independent. Other would-be states in the region were not so lucky, and found themselves facing the sharp end of the Russian military when they attempted their own independence.
I vividly remember following the news about the Second Chechen War in the early 2000s, when Russian troops regained control of what was then the quasi-independent state of Chechnya. The fighting razed the capital city of Grozny to the ground as Russian forces mercilessly shelled the city with artillery and ballistic missiles. In 2003 the United Nations called Grozny "the most destroyed city on earth."
Again, this is no way to make friends. Though Russia has thus far successfully retained control of much of the Caucasus, a low-level insurgency still exists in this area. This makes the Olympic Games in Sochi a big, fat target for anyone that's looking to re-open the discussion.
Like many others who have visited Russia, my first taste of the country is that of bureaucracy. My birthdate has been misprinted on my Olympic Identity and Accreditation Card, which is ground enough to hold me in customs for over an hour before purchasing a new Russian visa for 3,000 rubles (don't worry, it's only about 85 bucks) to correct the error.
Although Russians are sometimes stereotyped as being reserved or even rude, my experience is anything but. I even make friends with one of the customs officers detaining me. By the time we're done, I've got an avid new Instagram follower and a pyer-vih russki druka — my first Russian friend!
I am met at the airport by fellow Newschoolers member Rachel Manning, who is volunteering at the Games in the mountain press center. She helps me navigate a maze of transportation up to the Mountain Cluster, where all of the alpine events are taking place. At around one in the morning I finally make it to the hotel, accessible via gondola, on the side of the mountain, and make a great first impression on my roommate Robin by pounding on the door of the room until he wakes up.
On the next morning it's time to get up and check this place out. Gorky Village, where my hotel is located, is a weird ghost town, a small conglomeration of built and half-built hotels and shops that does not seem to harbor a single Olympic visitor besides me. The only people I see in Gorky Village are sullen-faced workers, who all seem to be employed with sweeping up the dirt from the sidewalks in front of shuttered, vacant buildings. My hotel seems to be one of the only ones to have been completed in time for the Games—and it just opened two weeks ago.
After a morning stroll through Gorky Village, I once again take on the transportation system, navigating to the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park to finally scope out the facilities for slopestyle and halfpipe in person. As I travel up the valley via bus, foot and gondola, I finally get to experience the extent of development and devastation so poignantly described by Mitchell Scott's "Red Pow" feature in Powder magazine, not to mention the rest of the world media. Everywhere I look there is rubble, dirt and stray dogs. Roads haphazardly carved across the valley have turned hillsides—no, mountainsides—into eroding slopes of mud and dirt. You don't have to be an engineer to know that erosion is going to be one of many serious problems here in years to come.
As luck would have it, ski slopestyle practice is underway when I arrive at Rosa Khutor, so I get a few hours to watch freeskiing's brand-new Olympians roll through the course.
The jumps are as huge as they appear in photos and video—double flips on the last booter appear impossibly casual and slow. The rail section above is quirky but functional—not the rail section I would choose for an Olympic slopestyle, but it'll have to do. Goepper, Hatveit, Harlaut, Summerhayes, Logan, Zimmermann & co. are all busy dialing in their runs—the ladies in preparation for their slopestyle final tomorrow, February 11, the guys a bit more casually, with room to breathe before their final on February 13.
After briefly scoping out the "HAM" venue (halfpipe, aerials, moguls) before the start of tonight's men's moguls final, I head back towards home, still marveling at the ravaged beauty of this place, and the fact that somewhere, somehow, a single organization is responsible for all of this development—all this destruction—all of these freakin' sporting events being run like clockwork! In the time it's taken me to gain my bearings in the mountain cluster, I've missed out on all the action going down in curling - luge - hockey - biathlon - speed skating - combined slalom - and so on. It's too much for one guy to take in. No wonder other news organizations have veritable armies of employees on hand to cover the action. But don't worry Newschoolers—I got you covered!
That's it for update #1. Tomorrow the women's ski slopestyle goes down: Qualifications at 10am local time, finals at 1pm local time (that's 1:00am EST and 4:00am EST respectively). Stay tuned for a full report!
On the Ground in Sochi
Words & photos: Ethan Stone
"Feel da riddim!"
"Feel da rhyme!"
"Get on up!"
"IT'S BOBSLED TIME!"
Is there any better way to get into the Winter Olympic spirit than to watch the movie "Cool Runnings?" If there is, I haven't heard of it. And I don't think it's coincidence that this is one of the movies currently available to view on Delta trans-Atlantic flights.
The antics of the Jamaican bobsled team helped get me even more stoked for my ultimate destination during my flight from Atlanta, Georgia to Munich, Germany—the two stops along my journey from Mt. Hood, Oregon to Sochi, Russia to cover the Olympics for Newschoolers.
Yes, both Atlanta and and Munich are also Olympic cities, making my trip a de facto Olympic tour. Yes, they are also both cities which suffered terrorist attacks during their Olympic Games, in 1996 and 1972 respectively.
Would you consider that to be a bad omen for the Olympics I'm on my way to? Whatever, I don't believe in that shit.
Finally, after a solid 48 hours of flights and layovers, a glimmer of lights appears on the distant shore below my third flight. I've reached the vortex currently sucking up all the attention in the freeskiing world. Hello, Sochi.
For all of the publicity that Sochi has been getting recently, how many of you can actually point out its location on a map? Allow me to indulge in a brief geo-history lesson.
Sochi is located on the eastern shore of the Black Sea in southwestern Russia, in a region known as the Caucasus. This area is defined by the Caucasus Mountains, a rugged and remote range stretching from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. Depending on where you like to draw the line between Europe and Asia (it's a subject of contentionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundaries_between_continents#Europe_and_Asia), the Caucasus may be home to Europe's highest mountain—18,510-foot (5,642m) Mt. Elbrus, a solid three thousand feet higher than Mont Blanc in the French/Italian Alps.
Understanding Sochi's location is essential to understanding why everyone's so worried about terrorism at these Olympic Games. As an important connection between the Middle East and Eurasia, the Caucasus region has been fought over for millennia. For most of its history the Caucasus has been associated with empires and kingdoms to the south such as the Iranian Empire; only relatively recently did the Caucasus become a Russian possession. And Russia's hold on this region is still tenuous.
The diverse ethnic groups that populate the Caucasus—Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays and so on—have never jived with Russian rule. According to Wikipedia close to a million residents of the area were deported to Siberia during the 1940s. Generally speaking, that doesn't make people happy.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, several Caucasian states—Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia—became independent. Other would-be states in the region were not so lucky, and found themselves facing the sharp end of the Russian military when they attempted their own independence.
I vividly remember following the news about the Second Chechen War in the early 2000s, when Russian troops regained control of what was then the quasi-independent state of Chechnya. The fighting razed the capital city of Grozny to the ground as Russian forces mercilessly shelled the city with artillery and ballistic missiles. In 2003 the United Nations called Grozny "the most destroyed city on earth."
Again, this is no way to make friends. Though Russia has thus far successfully retained control of much of the Caucasus, a low-level insurgency still exists in this area. This makes the Olympic Games in Sochi a big, fat target for anyone that's looking to re-open the discussion.
Like many others who have visited Russia, my first taste of the country is that of bureaucracy. My birthdate has been misprinted on my Olympic Identity and Accreditation Card, which is ground enough to hold me in customs for over an hour before purchasing a new Russian visa for 3,000 rubles (don't worry, it's only about 85 bucks) to correct the error.
Although Russians are sometimes stereotyped as being reserved or even rude, my experience is anything but. I even make friends with one of the customs officers detaining me. By the time we're done, I've got an avid new Instagram follower and a pyer-vih russki druka — my first Russian friend!
I am met at the airport by fellow Newschoolers member Rachel Manning, who is volunteering at the Games in the mountain press center. She helps me navigate a maze of transportation up to the Mountain Cluster, where all of the alpine events are taking place. At around one in the morning I finally make it to the hotel, accessible via gondola, on the side of the mountain, and make a great first impression on my roommate Robin by pounding on the door of the room until he wakes up.
On the next morning it's time to get up and check this place out. Gorky Village, where my hotel is located, is a weird ghost town, a small conglomeration of built and half-built hotels and shops that does not seem to harbor a single Olympic visitor besides me. The only people I see in Gorky Village are sullen-faced workers, who all seem to be employed with sweeping up the dirt from the sidewalks in front of shuttered, vacant buildings. My hotel seems to be one of the only ones to have been completed in time for the Games—and it just opened two weeks ago.
After a morning stroll through Gorky Village, I once again take on the transportation system, navigating to the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park to finally scope out the facilities for slopestyle and halfpipe in person. As I travel up the valley via bus, foot and gondola, I finally get to experience the extent of development and devastation so poignantly described by Mitchell Scott's "Red Pow" feature in Powder magazine, not to mention the rest of the world media. Everywhere I look there is rubble, dirt and stray dogs. Roads haphazardly carved across the valley have turned hillsides—no, mountainsides—into eroding slopes of mud and dirt. You don't have to be an engineer to know that erosion is going to be one of many serious problems here in years to come.
As luck would have it, ski slopestyle practice is underway when I arrive at Rosa Khutor, so I get a few hours to watch freeskiing's brand-new Olympians roll through the course.
The jumps are as huge as they appear in photos and video—double flips on the last booter appear impossibly casual and slow. The rail section above is quirky but functional—not the rail section I would choose for an Olympic slopestyle, but it'll have to do. Goepper, Hatveit, Harlaut, Summerhayes, Logan, Zimmermann & co. are all busy dialing in their runs—the ladies in preparation for their slopestyle final tomorrow, February 11, the guys a bit more casually, with room to breathe before their final on February 13.
After briefly scoping out the "HAM" venue (halfpipe, aerials, moguls) before the start of tonight's men's moguls final, I head back towards home, still marveling at the ravaged beauty of this place, and the fact that somewhere, somehow, a single organization is responsible for all of this development—all this destruction—all of these freakin' sporting events being run like clockwork! In the time it's taken me to gain my bearings in the mountain cluster, I've missed out on all the action going down in curling - luge - hockey - biathlon - speed skating - combined slalom - and so on. It's too much for one guy to take in. No wonder other news organizations have veritable armies of employees on hand to cover the action. But don't worry Newschoolers – I got you covered!
That's it for update #1. Tomorrow the women's ski slopestyle goes down: Qualifications at 10am local time, finals at 1pm local time (that's 1:00am EST and 4:00am EST respectively). Stay tuned for a full report!
"Feel da riddim!"
"Feel da rhyme!"
"Get on up!"
"IT'S BOBSLED TIME!"
Is there any better way to get into the Winter Olympic spirit than to watch the movie "Cool Runnings?" If there is, I haven't heard of it. And I don't think it's coincidence that this is one of the movies currently available to view on Delta trans-Atlantic flights.
The antics of the Jamaican bobsled team help get me stoked for my ultimate destination during my flight from Atlanta, Georgia to Munich, Germany — the two stops along my journey from Mt. Hood, Oregon to Sochi, Russia to cover the Olympics for Newschoolers.
Yes, Atlanta and and Munich are also former Olympic host cities, making my trip a de facto Olympic tour. Yes, they are also cities that both suffered terrorist attacks during their Games, in 1996 and 1972 respectively.
Would you consider that to be a bad omen for the Olympics I'm on my way to? Consider what you want; I don't believe in that shit.
After a solid 48 hours of flights and layovers, a glimmer of lights appears on the distant shore below my third flight. I've reached the vortex currently sucking up all the attention in the freeskiing world. Hello, Sochi.
For all of the publicity that Sochi has been getting recently, how many of you can actually point out its location on a map? Allow me to indulge in a brief geo-history lesson.
Sochi is located on the eastern shore of the Black Sea in southwestern Russia, in a region known as the Caucasus. This area is defined by the Caucasus Mountains, a rugged and remote range stretching from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. Depending on where you like to draw the line between Europe and Asia (it's a subject of contentionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundaries_between_continents#Europe_and_Asia), the Caucasus may be home to Europe's highest mountain—18,510-foot (5,642m) Mt. Elbrus, a solid three thousand feet higher than Mont Blanc in the French/Italian Alps.
Understanding Sochi's location is essential to understanding why everyone's so worried about terrorism at these Olympic Games. As an important connection between the Middle East and Eurasia, the Caucasus region has been fought over for millennia. For most of its history the Caucasus has been associated with empires and kingdoms to the south such as the Iranian Empire; only relatively recently did the Caucasus become a Russian possession. And Russia's hold on this region is still tenuous.
The diverse ethnic groups that populate the Caucasus—Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays and so on—have never jived with Russian rule. According to Wikipedia close to a million residents of the area were deported to Siberia during the 1940s. Generally speaking, that doesn't make people happy.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, several Caucasian states—Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia—became independent. Other would-be states in the region were not so lucky, and found themselves facing the sharp end of the Russian military when they attempted their own independence.
I vividly remember following the news about the Second Chechen War in the early 2000s, when Russian troops regained control of what was then the quasi-independent state of Chechnya. The fighting razed the capital city of Grozny to the ground as Russian forces mercilessly shelled the city with artillery and ballistic missiles. In 2003 the United Nations called Grozny "the most destroyed city on earth."
Again, this is no way to make friends. Though Russia has thus far successfully retained control of much of the Caucasus, a low-level insurgency still exists in this area. This makes the Olympic Games in Sochi a big, fat target for anyone that's looking to re-open the discussion.
Like many others who have visited Russia, my first taste of the country is that of bureaucracy. My birthdate has been misprinted on my Olympic Identity and Accreditation Card, which is ground enough to hold me in customs for over an hour before purchasing a new Russian visa for 3,000 rubles (don't worry, it's only about 85 bucks) to correct the error.
Although Russians are sometimes stereotyped as being reserved or even rude, my experience is anything but. I even make friends with one of the customs officers detaining me. By the time we're done, I've got an avid new Instagram follower and a pyer-vih russki druka — my first Russian friend!
I am met at the airport by fellow Newschoolers member Rachel Manning, who is volunteering at the Games in the mountain press center. She helps me navigate a maze of transportation up to the Mountain Cluster, where all of the alpine events are taking place. At around one in the morning I finally make it to the hotel, accessible via gondola, on the side of the mountain, and make a great first impression on my roommate Robin by pounding on the door of the room until he wakes up.
On the next morning it's time to get up and check this place out. Gorky Village, where my hotel is located, is a weird ghost town, a small conglomeration of built and half-built hotels and shops that does not seem to harbor a single Olympic visitor besides me. The only people I see in Gorky Village are sullen-faced workers, who all seem to be employed with sweeping up the dirt from the sidewalks in front of shuttered, vacant buildings. My hotel seems to be one of the only ones to have been completed in time for the Games—and it just opened two weeks ago.
After a morning stroll through Gorky Village, I once again take on the transportation system, navigating to the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park to finally scope out the facilities for slopestyle and halfpipe in person. As I travel up the valley via bus, foot and gondola, I finally get to experience the extent of development and devastation so poignantly described by Mitchell Scott's "Red Pow" feature in Powder magazine, not to mention the rest of the world media. Everywhere I look there is rubble, dirt and stray dogs. Roads haphazardly carved across the valley have turned hillsides—no, mountainsides—into eroding slopes of mud and dirt. You don't have to be an engineer to know that erosion is going to be one of many serious problems here in years to come.
As luck would have it, ski slopestyle practice is underway when I arrive at Rosa Khutor, so I get a few hours to watch freeskiing's brand-new Olympians roll through the course.
The jumps are as huge as they appear in photos and video—double flips on the last booter appear impossibly casual and slow. The rail section above is quirky but functional—not the rail section I would choose for an Olympic slopestyle, but it'll have to do. Goepper, Hatveit, Harlaut, Summerhayes, Logan, Zimmermann & co. are all busy dialing in their runs—the ladies in preparation for their slopestyle final tomorrow, February 11, the guys a bit more casually, with room to breathe before their final on February 13.
After briefly scoping out the "HAM" venue (halfpipe, aerials, moguls) before the start of tonight's men's moguls final, I head back towards home, still marveling at the ravaged beauty of this place, and the fact that somewhere, somehow, a single organization is responsible for all of this development—all this destruction—all of these freakin' sporting events being run like clockwork! In the time it's taken me to gain my bearings in the mountain cluster, I've missed out on all the action going down in curling - luge - hockey - biathlon - speed skating - combined slalom - and so on. It's too much for one guy to take in. No wonder other news organizations have veritable armies of employees on hand to cover the action. But don't worry Newschoolers—I got you covered!
That's it for update #1. Tomorrow the women's ski slopestyle goes down: Qualifications at 10am local time, finals at 1pm local time (that's 1:00am EST and 4:00am EST respectively). Stay tuned for a full report!
On the Ground in Sochi
Words & photos: Ethan Stone
"Feel da riddim!"
"Feel da rhyme!"
"Get on up!"
"IT'S BOBSLED TIME!"
Is there any better way to get into the Winter Olympic spirit than to watch the movie "Cool Runnings?" If there is, I haven't heard of it. And I don't think it's coincidence that this is one of the movies currently available to view on Delta trans-Atlantic flights.
The antics of the Jamaican bobsled team helped get me even more stoked for my ultimate destination during my flight from Atlanta, Georgia to Munich, Germany—the two stops along my journey from Mt. Hood, Oregon to Sochi, Russia to cover the Olympics for Newschoolers.
Yes, both Atlanta and and Munich are also Olympic cities, making my trip a de facto Olympic tour. Yes, they are also both cities which suffered terrorist attacks during their Olympic Games, in 1996 and 1972 respectively.
Would you consider that to be a bad omen for the Olympics I'm on my way to? Whatever, I don't believe in that shit.
Finally, after a solid 48 hours of flights and layovers, a glimmer of lights appears on the distant shore below my third flight. I've reached the vortex currently sucking up all the attention in the freeskiing world. Hello, Sochi.
For all of the publicity that Sochi has been getting recently, how many of you can actually point out its location on a map? Allow me to indulge in a brief geo-history lesson.
Sochi is located on the eastern shore of the Black Sea in southwestern Russia, in a region known as the Caucasus. This area is defined by the Caucasus Mountains, a rugged and remote range stretching from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. Depending on where you like to draw the line between Europe and Asia (it's a subject of contentionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundaries_between_continents#Europe_and_Asia), the Caucasus may be home to Europe's highest mountain—18,510-foot (5,642m) Mt. Elbrus, a solid three thousand feet higher than Mont Blanc in the French/Italian Alps.
Understanding Sochi's location is essential to understanding why everyone's so worried about terrorism at these Olympic Games. As an important connection between the Middle East and Eurasia, the Caucasus region has been fought over for millennia. For most of its history the Caucasus has been associated with empires and kingdoms to the south such as the Iranian Empire; only relatively recently did the Caucasus become a Russian possession. And Russia's hold on this region is still tenuous.
The diverse ethnic groups that populate the Caucasus—Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays and so on—have never jived with Russian rule. According to Wikipedia close to a million residents of the area were deported to Siberia during the 1940s. Generally speaking, that doesn't make people happy.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, several Caucasian states—Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia—became independent. Other would-be states in the region were not so lucky, and found themselves facing the sharp end of the Russian military when they attempted their own independence.
I vividly remember following the news about the Second Chechen War in the early 2000s, when Russian troops regained control of what was then the quasi-independent state of Chechnya. The fighting razed the capital city of Grozny to the ground as Russian forces mercilessly shelled the city with artillery and ballistic missiles. In 2003 the United Nations called Grozny "the most destroyed city on earth."
Again, this is no way to make friends. Though Russia has thus far successfully retained control of much of the Caucasus, a low-level insurgency still exists in this area. This makes the Olympic Games in Sochi a big, fat target for anyone that's looking to re-open the discussion.
Like many others who have visited Russia, my first taste of the country is that of bureaucracy. My birthdate has been misprinted on my Olympic Identity and Accreditation Card, which is ground enough to hold me in customs for over an hour before purchasing a new Russian visa for 3,000 rubles (don't worry, it's only about 85 bucks) to correct the error.
Although Russians are sometimes stereotyped as being reserved or even rude, my experience is anything but. I even make friends with one of the customs officers detaining me. By the time we're done, I've got an avid new Instagram follower and a pyer-vih russki druka — my first Russian friend!
I am met at the airport by fellow Newschoolers member Rachel Manning, who is volunteering at the Games in the mountain press center. She helps me navigate a maze of transportation up to the Mountain Cluster, where all of the alpine events are taking place. At around one in the morning I finally make it to the hotel, accessible via gondola, on the side of the mountain, and make a great first impression on my roommate Robin by pounding on the door of the room until he wakes up.
On the next morning it's time to get up and check this place out. Gorky Village, where my hotel is located, is a weird ghost town, a small conglomeration of built and half-built hotels and shops that does not seem to harbor a single Olympic visitor besides me. The only people I see in Gorky Village are sullen-faced workers, who all seem to be employed with sweeping up the dirt from the sidewalks in front of shuttered, vacant buildings. My hotel seems to be one of the only ones to have been completed in time for the Games—and it just opened two weeks ago.
After a morning stroll through Gorky Village, I once again take on the transportation system, navigating to the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park to finally scope out the facilities for slopestyle and halfpipe in person. As I travel up the valley via bus, foot and gondola, I finally get to experience the extent of development and devastation so poignantly described by Mitchell Scott's "Red Pow" feature in Powder magazine, not to mention the rest of the world media. Everywhere I look there is rubble, dirt and stray dogs. Roads haphazardly carved across the valley have turned hillsides—no, mountainsides—into eroding slopes of mud and dirt. You don't have to be an engineer to know that erosion is going to be one of many serious problems here in years to come.
As luck would have it, ski slopestyle practice is underway when I arrive at Rosa Khutor, so I get a few hours to watch freeskiing's brand-new Olympians roll through the course.
The jumps are as huge as they appear in photos and video—double flips on the last booter appear impossibly casual and slow. The rail section above is quirky but functional—not the rail section I would choose for an Olympic slopestyle, but it'll have to do. Goepper, Hatveit, Harlaut, Summerhayes, Logan, Zimmermann & co. are all busy dialing in their runs—the ladies in preparation for their slopestyle final tomorrow, February 11, the guys a bit more casually, with room to breathe before their final on February 13.
After briefly scoping out the "HAM" venue (halfpipe, aerials, moguls) before the start of tonight's men's moguls final, I head back towards home, still marveling at the ravaged beauty of this place, and the fact that somewhere, somehow, a single organization is responsible for all of this development—all this destruction—all of these freakin' sporting events being run like clockwork! In the time it's taken me to gain my bearings in the mountain cluster, I've missed out on all the action going down in curling - luge - hockey - biathlon - speed skating - combined slalom - and so on. It's too much for one guy to take in. No wonder other news organizations have veritable armies of employees on hand to cover the action. But don't worry Newschoolers – I got you covered!
That's it for update #1. Tomorrow the women's ski slopestyle goes down: Qualifications at 10am local time, finals at 1pm local time (that's 1:00am EST and 4:00am EST respectively). Stay tuned for a full report!
