Winter Olympics I

This is supposedly the biathlete shooting his rifle. Doesn't it look more like some guy looking to take out a crowd of people?

I find that a lot of the Winter Olympic sports don't make sense when you really scrutinize them. They make sense at first, but baffle the mind if you look too closely. Take the biathlon. Some guy skies to a stand, takes his rifle out and shoots at a target. Great. I love it. I can picture burly Scandinavian men two hundred years ago shooting reindeer and skiing home to feast and build furniture. But the modern incarnation seems to have taken the fun out of it: some guy skis to a stand, takes his rifle out, which is nothing more than a uber-high-tech series of tubes and joints, eyes up a stationary target, and then makes an almost imperceptible movement of his finger and a dot appears on the target. I just don't see the challenge. Sure, you've been skiing for about a twenty miles, your hands are cold, but the guy is wearing uber-high-tech gloves keeping his fingers nimble and the guns don't seem to offer any kind of kickback. And the target doesn't move!

The luge is another example. According to King Kaufman of Salon.com, the luge developed from the times when Alpine loggers would slide down timber trails to get home in the evening. Great. Sign me up. Today, some guy in a neoprene body suit lays flat on a sled and if he is good, he can turns his ankles in at an appropriate angle. What a tremendous athlete. If you can lie flat and immobile for forty-five seconds and turn your feet towards one another, you qualify for the luge.

The other thing that annoys me about the speed sports of the Winter Olympics (luge, bobsled, skiing) is how small the difference between winner and loser is. For example, the time difference between first and tenth place for the women's luge was 1.664 seconds. Mind you, the entire event is more than 3 minutes long. The percentage difference between first and tenth place is 0.89%... and I rounded up!

In the span of "one Mississippi, two Mississ...", ten people speeded over the line.

Doesn't that mean that we are reaching the limits of our speed? If there is that much compression of times, the only way we are going to get any faster is through improved technology. Well, either that or get better stop watches.