Sports At Politics

Now, that the 2018 Winter Olympics, which was held last month, and 2018 Winter Paralympics, which was held earlier this month, are over, I'll wrap up the final part of this three-part review of Pyeongchang 2018 with some closing thoughts. For the second time ever, the Americans led the Paralympic medal count by both most total medals and most gold medals. In the Pyeongchang Paralympics, American athletes won 13 gold medals, 15 silver medals, and eight bronze medals, for a total of 35 total medals. Unusually for the Americans, a lot of the American Paralympic medals that were earned in Pyeongchang were earned in the sports of cross-country skiing and biathlon. A major highlight of the Paralympics for the Americans was when the American sled hockey team won its third consecutive Paralympic gold medal in an overtime thriller of a game against the Canadian team. While nearly all of NBC's television coverage of the Pyeongchang Paralympics aired on cable channels NBCSN and the Ol...

The XXIII Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang County, South Korea were, in my opinion, one of the best Winter Olympics ever held. The South Koreans did a fantastic job of hosting the games, the Games were a major diplomatic and geopolitical victory for South Korean President Moon Jae-in, and there were plenty of surprising results and close finishes during the Games. Given that my own foreign policy views tend to be very isolationist by American standards, a lot of people reading this blog post would find it surprising that I have a strong interest in the Olympics. The Olympics are pretty much the only major exception to my isolationist foreign policy views because I view the Olympics as a sporting event instead of a diplomatic event like the World Economic Forum in Switzerland or events of that nature. Also, I take this opportunity to apologize to the Shibutani siblings and the rest of the U.S. Olympic figure skating team. I claimed in a blog post before the Games that the U.S. wasn...

There are only four Olympic sports (not counting sports that are scheduled to debut or re-debut at the Olympics after 2018 or sports that have been discontinued from the Olympics) where the United States has never won a medal of any color. Three of them are Summer Olympic sports: badminton, table tennis, and team handball. The other is a Winter Olympic sport, biathlon, which is a sport combining cross-country skiing and multiple sessions of shooting at a set of five circular targets with a .22 caliber rifle. While American biathletes haven’t achieved Olympic success (despite the fact that biathlon in its modern incarnation debuted at a Winter Olympics hosted in the United States , at the 1960 Winter Olympics in California), in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Sherman Douglas High School in Florida, multiple members of the U.S. biathlon team that is competing/has competed at this year’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, have publicly spoken out in favor of...

For the first time in the Winter Olympics, there will be a mixed team event in alpine skiing. The mixed team event is considerably different than traditional alpine skiing events, as, in the mixed team event, there are two competitors on course at any one time instead of just one competitor on course, and the competition format is that of an elimination tournament. A total of 16 countries will compete in the mixed team event, with each country entering a four-skier team consisting of two male skiers and two female skiers; each team is also able to enter an alternate skier of each gender who can replace a skier of the same gender. The Olympic format for mixed team alpine skiing will be a single-elimination tournament, with the final match, called the big final, being contested for the gold and silver medals, although the losers of the semifinal matches will compete in the small final for the bronze medal. Each team is seeded based on a ranking system by the FIS, which is the IOC-appro...

Unlike the new Olympic events in curling, long track speed skating, and alpine skiing, the new big air event in Olympic snowboarding, which will debut at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, replaces an event from the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia that has since been dropped from the Winter Olympic program, parallel slalom snowboarding, although parallel giant slalom snowboarding will remain part of the Winter Olympic program. There will be separate big air events for men and women in Pyeongchang. Big air snowboarding is the only new judged event in Pyeongchang, and, for those of you who are ski jumping fans, think of big air snowboarding as more similar to the aerials event in freestyle skiing than ski jumping, although there are some differences between big air snowboarding and freestyle skiing aerials beyond the obvious difference of big air snowboarding competitors using a snowboard instead of a pair of skiis. In big air snowboarding, the ramp is a single...

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is the third blog post in a seven-part series, titled Road to Pyeongchang, previewing the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang County, South Korea.

Let me make it inherently clear that Kim Jong-un is a brutal dictator who has repeatedly threatened global armageddon by threatening to use nuclear weapons against the United States, has killed his own relatives, and leads a brazenly corrupt and completely undemocratic regime. I am absolutely not, in any way, a supporter of Kim or his political philosophy, and Kim should never be, in any way, a role model for current or future leaders of our great country. In fact, there are some similarities between Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump. For example, Trump is probably the most authoritarian-minded person to ever be president in our great country, and Trump is already one of the most corrupt presidents in U.S. history. A pair of North Korean athletes qualified for the 2018 Winter Olympics in pairs figure skating, although the North Korean Olympic committee did not officially enter the athletes prior to December 21, 2017, so any North Korean entry into the Olympics would be via...