Your PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics anticipation thread!

The North Korean athletes/musicians at their Olympic welcoming ceremony. They don’t seem too impressed with a South Korean breakdancing (to “A little less conversation, a little more action” no less) pic.twitter.com/egssLISeJQ

— Anna Fifield (@annafifield) February 8, 2018

xpost -- No worries, found a feed. (With Canadian commentary rather than none at all but I'll take that.)

i am watching the incredibly crappy livestream at: http://stream.nbcolympics.com/2018-winter-olympics-primetime-show-feb-9

is this what people are saying on tv? are people paying to see this shit? this is fucking awful

a third of the screen is dedicated to a series of the least interesting trivia possible

https://i.imgur.com/Bx7V7U2.png

for serbia they literally just listed the three languages spoken there

another 10% is dedicated to letting you know what you're watching

apparently the stadium is packed with people and the light show just makes it appear like no one is there. the seats closest to the floor are reserved for the ~2,000 athletes. but that stadium holds 35,000, and no matter how the light flashes across the seats, it looks like the stadium is mostly empty

this is weird

Yeah it was a little odd.

what is a little odd is this cover of imagine

Indeed

Already looking like a classic Olympics for over-hyped British athletes falling flat on their faces - quite literally in many cases. Few things in life are funnier than Team GB failures.

Shame about Katie Ormerod though

Feel sorry for the athletes, obviously, but hard to suppress a giggle when listening to some BBC correspondent solemnly reporting another sporting disaster.

Speed skating is a bit like greyhound racing, the one who gets to the first bend in the lead usually stays there while the rest take chunks out of each other in behind

what kind of maniac looks at skeleton/luge and thinks ‘yeah i could do that’

luge gives me the phear

what kind of maniac looks at skeleton/luge and thinks ‘yeah i could do that’

um

do tombots dream of olympic luge

luge control to major tom
take your clenching skills and put your helmet on

i heart the biathlon - it’s like a james bond event

^ Specifically The Spy Who Loved Me

Parachute off a cliff to end the race or nothing.

"The bronze medallist couldn't actually be here but..."

Egg on my Bond-fan face, it was of course For Your Eyes Only that featured the undercover biathlete henchman Erich Kriegler

http://www.007museum.com/Eric_Kriegler.jpg

i could get with curling more if there wasn’t so much shouting

^^^ I was watching this with the sound muted last night because the amount of shouting from the Canadian mixed doubles team was stressing me out

The yelling is what makes it fun!

it is very similar to lawn bowls & i am kind of into that aspect

plus all the competitors look like league ten-pin bowlers 😂

I had it on at about 4am because I couldn't sleep and I was kind of groggy and this guy was sweeping so frantically it was like I was having an anxiety dream where I was forced to play a sport with incomprehensible rules while someone bellows at me

lol

the whole sport seems like an snl sketch with the brooms & shit but it is kinda engaging once u lock in

The long distance short track speed skating looks deceptively easy, like they are strolling. And the way they stick their legs out at the end is comical.

The 3 hours of snowboard qualifications this morning was a treat, despite British results.

watching snowboarding now
sweet moves bros 🤙🏻

1620’s make me feel so old
what a world we live in

Was watching the semis of the men’s 1500m short track. I like how the judges can just keep adding people to the final after they get clattered. The final today is going to have 9 skaters.

short track is so nuts

Going to watch some of the team figure skating stuff later while listening to this, as it's also happening right now:

http://kzsu.stanford.edu/dayofnoise/

So my artistic conclusions might not be that of the judges.

nice

i am still in my pyjamas :D

first day of winter lympics is like christmas

Rightly!

about to watch something involving a chap called Max Parrot

pronounced pa-roe

~canada~

chap called Carlos Garcia Knight just crushed his first run

as tt just said to me, some of these people have had to grow into their names by becoming snowboarders

Just watching Skiathlon makes all of my muscles hurt, god these women are machines <3

Max Parrot cruelly denied and the Yank* takes it, who knew

*just kidding y'all I love you really

Max Parrot’s qualifying performance was so good, he is so precise

We stayed up to see Medvedeva's record short program score! Spectacular stuff. tt was raving about the Israeli competitor but we hadn't yet adjusted to just how good they are nowadays

re snowstyle: Red Gerard looks like a blond version of the paperboy from Better Off Dead “GIMME MY TWO DOLLARS”

god that last round was brutal, the snow looked like concrete on those jumps, so many dudes ate it!!

Lovely night in the team figure skating for sure. Favorite performance probably the Italian pairs, that was damn fun.

Bradie Tennell had some bonkers spin moves going on

Bradie is a lovely skater but she looks like she’s kept underground, she’s so alarmingly pale lol

Fuck that, Scotland lost out to Japan :(

Didn't hold out much hope for billy given that he qualified 11th and then fell over on his first jump. Shows what I know...

That one bloke had a board that was solid black on both sides, which looked cool. He finished in bottom 3.

Parallel snowboard slalom got ffwded through.

Kids, don't be greedy. That's what I took away from the curling.

my german coworker enthused about the hockey gold game was on point, this is kind of intense

Travel advisory: Germans in Canada should exercise a high degree of empathy. Be nice, don’t gloat, give hugs, buy rounds of hot chocolate.

Just imagine how you would feel if Canada beat us in soccer 😱

🇩🇪 ❤️ 🇨🇦#CANGER @TeamD @CanadaFP @GermanyInCanada @KanadaBotschaft pic.twitter.com/0HlHoxMA7E

— GermanForeignOffice (@GermanyDiplo) February 23, 2018

Final tally after an exciting women's 30km

https://i.imgur.com/479zUF3.png

Was striking how many times I turned on the BBC evening coverage to find a table full of female experts talking about sport. This afternoon, after the closing ceremony, there was the female presenter and 4 others, all Olympians. (Actually not that surprising because we did better in the female sports)

(Woodsy and a couple more blokes had been on earlier)

ok that black & white sequence at the closing ceremonies was epic, and I loved Tara's response to it, too.

Only thing that could've made it better is if they'd been able to get the rights to Prisencolinensinainciusol, which was clearly the original intent.

The only conceivable downside to the erosion of homophobia is people feeling the need to tolerate Johnny Weir.

you're such a grump!

flamboyant twinks at the Olympics are about as edgy as Bob Hope in 1990

edginess, it's what we need in our olympics

4:23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcYd0yP53Rw

we don't, Tom, but clearly out gays winning stuff and going Full Divine in the booth is the most important thing to happen to our society since Black Panther.

Have you even had coffee yet

yep!

actually i do like some edginess at the Olympics [BlackPower1968.jpg]

I actually watched two mins of the closing ceremony yesterday. It was nice.

That is all.

russian hockey team sang their banned national anthem, that’s... something

First Olympics I missed all of bcz #life xp

Medal winners on the One Show. Billy looks like he'd rather be anywhere else. Currently sitting through a vt on fly tipping...

Will US Olympic Committee change before next Olympics? That might require congressional action, so answer is probably no.

As The Post’s Will Hobson has reported, the USOC is supposed to be a nonprofit, yet 129 of its staff make over six figures, and 14 of its execs are paid more than $200,000.

...The Post’s Hobson detailed the USOC’s inaction on sexual abuse complaints across multiple sports, including gymnastics, swimming, speedskating, judo, and taekwondo.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/the-olympic-flame-has-been-extinguished-the-usoc-should-be-next/2018/02/26/a00648ca-1b05-11e8-9de1-147dd2df3829_story.html?utm_term=.835327a0bd7f

revive.

i want one of those chairs with skis.

the VI downhill (various flavours) seemed to be a single run, no qualifications, no best of three, just one run. uk did quite well out of favourites falling over, but still, seems a bit brutal that 4 years of training comes down to that.

snowboard cross course looks fun. much more compact than the other olympics.

watching blind people ski at like 80mph is giving me crazy anxiety

I have no idea how they do the slalom.

Wheelchair curling is kind of dull without the launching and the sweeping.

Robot legged snowboarders look post-human.

Wow at Iranian snowboarder pretty much climbing down the banked slalom. Currently taken 5 minutes more than the leader's time for a one minute course.

They all look a bit trepidatious about it despite it being based on the snowboard cross course (I think it's been recut a bit and the flags moved to be a bit tighter)

7 paralympic medals for the UK, all down to 2 blind girls

Is there really no olympics thread, or does it just have an unsearchable title?

prob not, been a weird olympics!

there's some chatter in the most generic winter olympics thread. but not much

this one Winter Olympics: Search and Destroy