Posts from the ‘Beijing’ Category

One More Thing, Cuz Won Gold

My longtime friend and Olympics coconspirator, Bedel Saget, has the habit of calling all of us Cuz. And to be fair, when you see us all together, the family resemblances are pretty striking.

But as fate would have it, his actual cousin (or more accurately, his cousin’s son) was on the Canadian Olympic short track team. So we all grabbed our cameras for what Bedel called a “family outing” and headed to the Capital Indoor Stadium for the men’s short track 5,000-meter relay. Canada was favored. Canada, and Bedel’s our cousin, Jordan Pierre-Gilles, won gold. Family reunions will never be the same.

If you’ve seen a short track relay you know it’s mayhem: cutting off your opponents and pushing your teammates. This race was no different. It looked more like a Black Friday sale than an Olympic race.

I tried to capture some of that in the photos below. (As you’ll see, not all are from Jordan’s race. He wore 67 on his helmet).

A very special thanks to all of you for tagging along on another Olympic adventure. It makes all the subzero temperatures and food hunting worthwhile. A special thanks to those who commented, even the ones named Anonymous and Someone. It’s what breathes life into the blog.

Next stop: Paris?

No Cheering in the Press Box

There’s an axiom in sports journalism: No cheering in the press box.

The only thing you can root for is a good story. No rooting for athletes, or teams, or in the case of the Olympics, countries. Most of the time, it’s not that hard. Im not, for instance, the Mets beat writer. I’m almost never in that press box, so I watch and root from the comfort of my couch.

It took a while, but we found food

Being confined to the Olympic and covid bubble can really make for an uninteresting eating experience. Robots make for good blog posts, but their culinary skills are a bit — rusty? Restaurants in the mountains more than made up for the frigid temps we found there. The first one we found was Green Dragon. which for those of you from Cornwall, should sound familiar. (For the rest of you, Green Dragons is the name nickname for our high school sports teams.

Blades

Hi All, in our final assignment of the Games, we’re at the Women’s figure skating free skate. Here is a slideshow of some shots I took at the short program.

Chocolate? Roses? Vials?

I think we can all agree that nothing says Happy Valentine’s Day quite like a heart made from Covid test vials filled with samples. Romance at its finest. This photo was taken by Daniel Victor, one of our reporters from the London Bureau, who is staying at our hotel in Beijing.

Stuck in the Mountains

If you’re going to be “stuck” somewhere, this is the place.

On Thursday we traveled up to the Snow Park in Zhangjiakou to shoot the men’s halfpipe final on Friday. Saturday was an off-day from shooting anything live. Got to sleep until about 9. Then worked in our mountain office on things for later this week.

Sliding Around

For the second time in three days, I went to the Alpine skiing center to spend the day gathering photos and info for a piece I intended to do later next week on how Mikaela Shiffrin’s Olympics had gone. As I’m sure you know, they haven’t worked out so well for her so far. She’ll have other races, downhill, super-g and Alpine combined, but the two she skied out of, slalom and giants slalom are her two best events. She was favored for gold win both of those.