The other family

Tonight's post with all the details of Ravelympic gold is at Toxophily. And here's a preview with the very happy beneficiary:

Skating

I didn't grow up in ice skating country. When I was a kid, an ice rink opened at the Chattanooga Choo Choo hotel, convention center, and shopping complex. It was the only ice rink for miles around. Schools took field trips to skate, parents threw skating birthday parties for their kids, and the whole atmosphere of ice skating had a once-in-a-lifetime aura to it.

As we were watching the figure skating at the Winter Olympics this week, Noel reminisced about Cady Gray's school field trip to the Little Rock ice rink. Kids get so excited about skating, imagining themselves gliding over the ice. Then when they get there, it's all falling down and hanging onto chairs and rails. It's hard. And I remember that from my few childhood icecapades.

So it's doubly amazing to me that these young skaters at the Olympic level grew up in families, lived in communities, and had the personal desire to persevere past the unnaturalness of the activity and become a person who can make it look completely normal.

Our attraction to ice skating is the frictionless perfection of curves and the sensation of effortless speed. I'll never have that experience; it's too late for me to become good at such an arcane activity. But there are things I make look easy that amaze others. Maybe as they watch me teach or knit, they sense their possibilities expanding. Maybe even if they never become as accomplished, they enjoy participating vicariously, or just knowing that people are capable of such things. That's part of the reason we love watching others perform at high levels.

Citius, altius, fortius

Every four years I get really passionate about curling. And this year NBC is feeding my obsession with hours of coverage on CNBC, MSNBC, and online.

In the last few days I've talked to several people who express confusion about the sport -- both how it's played and why anyone would enjoy it. Here's why I can't get enough:

• The basic rules are really simple. Anyone can see at a glance where the match stands.
• But the strategy is insanely complex. With eight shots per team per end (round), the different positions and subsequent choices multiply to infinity as a practical matter.
• It's physics; put it in the right place with the right velocity, and you'll get the result you want.
• But you have to perform. The person making the shot has to gauge, then execute speed and spin, and even the very best in the world frequently miss, sometimes badly -- two misses out of ten is a highly respectable percentage. And watching the U.S. team has been an agonizing process of whiffs and airballs.
• There's a margin of error, though, so you have a cushion -- your teammates can help you speed up a rock thrown too softly and ease your curl right into the position you were aiming for.
• And everyone participates; the entire team discusses some shots, and everybody has to do every job on the team in turn.

No doubt another attraction is the midwestern charm of the American and Canadian participants. In what other sport would television dare mike all the competitors, serenely confident that no oath stronger than "Goldarnit!" (actual expression of frustration from actual American curler this afternoon) will be uttered on air?

I will miss curling when it disappears from the media radar for another Olympiad; I may begin missing it earlier if the American men's and women's teams are eliminated in the qualifying round robin. But what fun this past week celebrating each stolen point and triple take-out! Thank you, NBC and USA Curling!

Pageantry

I've been looking forward to this day for months. It's the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games. That would be enough for this Olympic junkie, but it's also the mass cast-on for the 2010 Ravelympics, the Olympic-themed yarn event held in the sovereign nation of Ravelry.

There are nearly 9000 members of the Ravelympic group in which I am one of the administrators. Not everyone competing has joined the group, however, so I'm confident in estimating that the true count exceeds 10K.

Thousands -- literally thousands -- of knit, crochet, and woven items will be created in the next sixteen days by competitors around the world representing more than 400 teams. More importantly, thousands -- literally thousands -- of people, all ages and skill levels, will challenge themselves to do something they have never done before. Whether it be a 50,000 stitch sweater in two weeks, a dozen toys for charity, or someone's first-ever try at lace or colorwork, the spirit of the Ravelympics is to attempt something grand.

Until the torch in Vancouver is extinguished, I and my fellow volunteers will hand out medals and celebrate the achievements of these "Ravthletes" as we call them. Among them will be people mastering a skill they have long honed, and people claiming an identity as crafters they've never felt entitled to before. I'm honored to be a part of their transformation over this brief, magical period. Their trust and love changes me as much as the event changes them.

So tonight is a night to celebrate. Let the Games begin!

True love

I brought Cady Gray a present from my Montreal trip -- a plush Quatchi, the sasquatch in the trio of mascots for the Vancouver Olympics.



As is her wont when presented with new stuffed animals, Cady Gray loved Quatchi immediately. She embraced him, presented him to her dad, and professed her desire to sleep with him always "because I only sleep with my best friends."

Today she took Quatchi to school for show-and-tell. If I gather correctly, she mentioned that he is from "Vancouver Olympics 2010," that he's a sasquatch wearing earmuffs, and that her mom brought him home from Canada.

But love is pleasure mixed with pain, as we all know. There came the inevitable evening, the night after Cady Gray and Quatchi first met, when the little girl came padding out of her bedroom half an hour after lights out. She hesitated before telling us what she wanted; "Just say it," her dad urged. Her face crumpled in on itself and her voice rose to a wail: "I can't FIND QUATCHI!"

We immediately comforted her and located her little friend kicked under the bed. But even if he'd been gone forever, better to have loved and lost a sasquatch than never to have loved a sasquatch at all.

The rocket's red glare

Our local paper reprinted this fascinating Washington Post piece by Philip Pennicott on the arrangements of the various national anthems that have been playing at medal ceremonies in Beijing.

I've been struck by the interesting, often unusual orchestrations you've heard as athletes stand on the podium, especially by the lovely strings and nimble, light arrangement of "The Star Spangled Banner. And those with a better ear than mine probably recognized it, and maybe others, from the Athens games in 2004. The article mentions that in that improbably distant age, the podium version was criticized by conservative commentators for not being jingoistic enough.

The anthems have been a bit more on my radar screen than usual, thanks to this NPR story I heard a few weeks ago in which a music critic discusses the aesthetics of the genre.

The human drama of athletic competition

People of a certain age tend to associate the Olympics with ABC's Wide World Of Sports, because so many sports we now see only every four years used to appear on our televisions regularly on Saturdays -- gymnastics, diving, weightlifting. Everybody remembers the "agony of defeat" guy in the program's opening; the web is full of tributes to Vinko Bogataj, the ski jumper whose wipeout was featured week after week. But I remember just as vividly the close-up of a gymnast's face as she grimaced with her chin on the balance beam, her legs arching back over her head until her feet were at eye level. A quick googling turns up nothing about her identity.

Of course, those of us who watched Wide World (and its lighthearted Sunday cousin Superstars) also grew up with a decidedly skewed idea of what counts as a sport. Cliff diving? Motorcycle jumping? The Harlem Globetrotters? Check, check, check. I imagine that Jim McKay and Keith Jackson would have been right on top of the Olympics' recent flirtation with "junk sports": trampoline, rhythmic gymnastics, synchronized diving.

Not that I don't watch all those with fascination -- hey, I couldn't do it, and it sure is fun to listen to Bart Conner pretend that he knows what makes for a good "tramp" routine -- but you can't help but feel like the athletes in those sports are the ones who couldn't quite cut it in their older, more respectable traditions.

And she's always gone too long

Our long Conwegian nightmare is over. Noel and the kids returned just in time for dinner tonight.

And just in time for my reverse psychology trick to stop working, too. When I told Cady Gray that I missed her because I didn't have anybody to read to me, she replied helpfully, "Well, you should have just read to yourself."

I stayed up until after midnight watching the opening ceremonies from Beijing, delayed on TiVo since I had to be at summer commencement until about 8:30 pm. Even Noel, who notoriously hates the empty pageantry of the opening ceremonies, was astounded at the spectacle of such technology, human precision, and imagination. I thought that the massive event unfolded more like a personal statement than any other such ceremony I'd witnessed.

Kudos to NBC for its addition of an articulate, informative Chinese cultural commentator to its broadcast last night. It was so refreshing to feel like you were getting insights -- almost like a expert commentary track to the opening ceremonies -- rather than listening to morning show hosts read off a script. And of course, it will take an Olympiad at least for cineastes to recover from the world-turned-upside oddness of 30 million Americans hearing the name Zhang Yimou repeated twenty times an hour throughout prime time. Go rent To Live, people!

Citius, at least

I've been an Olympics buff ever since I can remember. ABC's Wide World Of Sports, with its frequent broadcasts of international sporting events, was a weekend staple on our TV growing up. I loved the pageantry and exoticism of the unfamiliar sports, and the international cast of characters. The Olympics were like a two-week smorgasbord of that feeling, and I gorged myself every four years.

In 1984, my family went to several events at the Los Angeles summer games. When Atlanta got the bid for the 1996 Centennial games, I celebrated by geeking out at the Olympic stores that opened around town, stocking up on memorabilia featuring Barcelona's superbly cute mascot, Cobi. Noel and I attended the games in '96, too. I always look forward to sixteen days of round-the-clock Olympic broadcasting glory on the TV -- heck, I wish they'd bring back the Triplecast.

So it's with deep fascination and ambivalence that I watch the massive turmoil surrounding this year's torch relay. In one sense, it's thrilling to see such a large population come together in solidarity to protest the world's collusion in China's Olympic farce. The country does not deserve a free propaganda platform in light of its regime's disregard for the Olympic ideals of peace, equality, and brotherhood. You can feel the excitement of activists sensing that for once, they have the upper hand -- that they control the message of this moment, not the managers who sought to carefully orchestrate it.

I even look forward to seeing how NBC handles the touchy political and publicity issues of the Beijing games -- how much attention will they give to the controversies and contradictions, and how much will they seek to downplay the conflict in favor of Wheaties-ready stars in waiting? It would delight me to no end to see an opening ceremony pockmarked by boycotting teams, a spectacle crippled by the refusal of the world to collude in its lies.

But of course, I want my Olympic drama, too. The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. The up close and personals. The unlikely heroes and tragic falls from grace.

The Olympic torch has now been extinguished and rerouted to keep it from falling into the hands of the people it is supposed to inspire. How much of my Olympic idealism will follow suit?