After a dozen Games, I thought it time to branch out and give this blog a new perspective, opting for a safer and less headache-inducing gig than following Belarusian strangers into dank basements to drink god-awful “plum wine.“
So you can now find me resurfacing the ice at the figure skating arena in Milan. Ilia Malinin, the gold medal favorite here, is known as the “Quad God,” You can henceforth refer to me as the “Ice Meister.” (No, not the “Zamboni Jaboni”)
Welcome back everyone!! Is it just me, or are these things coming around faster and faster?
I’m currently on a train to Venice, part of a seven-hour journey from Milan to Cortina to cover the women’s downhill on Sunday: Three hours on this train and then up to four hours on a bus switchbacking its way into the heart of the Dolomites. I’ll be the one in the front of the bus losing my gluten-free lunch.
Let’s find time to have some fun, shall we?
There is, in fact, an ice meister at figure skating and he’s been super helpful with our outlandish requests, which included defacing his Zamboni, and letting my colleague Jeremy White slide across the ice with a giant measuring pole.
Why? you might ask.
Malinin is heavily favored in part because he can do a quadruple axel, a jump no one else in the world can do. It’s technically a quad and a half because you take off facing forward and land facing backward. We’ll have a graphics piece published on Monday, breaking it all down.
One reason he can fit all those rotations in is that he jumps so damn high. When he skates in the free skate next Friday, we want to measure how high he jumps, which requires a lot of trigonometry (or something) that I’ve long forgotten. Thankfully, I can rely on others for that.
We needed measurements at different heights all over the ice, so with the blessing of the Ice Meister (the real one) we placed black tape at intervals on the side of the Zamboni and then took 600 photos from three positions as it resurfaced the ice. Then Jeremy slid along the ice with a measuring pole that he built at home out of pvc and carried to Milan is a ski bag. When we showed up at figure skating with a ski bag, they told us we were at the wrong venue. Unfortunately for them, we weren’t. We proceeded to take 600 more photos of the pole. All so we can build a precise virtual 3D grid on top of the rink to measure how high he jumps. Also had to use a laser to measure how far the photo positions were from each other.
Math.
Ilia, please don’t hurt yourself before that, or forget to do the quad axel!
Eat at Joe’s 
Leave a Comment