timv's blog

North Carolina becomes a hotbed of Olympic speedskating

William Douglas, McClatchy News Service, February 16, 2018

The U.S. Olympic speedskating team at the 2018 Winter Olympics has a North Carolina accent.

Long track skater Heather Bergsma and short track coach Anthony Barthell hail from High Point, N.C., while long tracker Kimani Griffin is from Winston-Salem.

The Tar Heel State isn’t known as a hotbed for ice sports. But the state has a reputation as a mecca for inline skating, which has increasingly become a key supplier of talent for the U.S. ice speedskating program.

There's quite a lot in this piece about the High Point Speed and Piedmont Speed skating teams and their impact on ice speed skating at the current Olympic games.

Theron Sands is 53 and he skated in the 10,000 meters at the 2018 US Olympic Trials in Milwaukee on Thursday. I won't give away what happened beyond him reaching the qualifying standard for the trials (it takes about 10 seconds to find out) but here's a video made as part of his GoFundMe campaign while working toward it. There's a lot to appreciate about his training and preparation in here, even some wheeled skating.

Yesterday, I was looking at the formatting options for a graphing package and noticed an option to use named colors "from the xkcd survey."

That was a new thing to me. As it turns out, the author of the xkcd.com comics created an online survey of color names about five years ago and over 200,000 users contributed; discussion of results here. It's pretty funny and it's also real science. Because color names are weird.

You can also look at a list sorted alphabetically by name which reveals some rather interesting properties of the set.

Zero skating content here except that y'all are all of the people I know who would care about this at all.

Breaking: Chaucer Scholar Analyzes Trump Attack Haiku

By Josh Marshall, published March 7, 2016, 10:17 PM EST

Another one that I spotted this week:

Running on Empty

Meaghen Brown, Jun 12, 2015

Quote:

“OTS is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen in my 30 plus years of working with athletes,” says David Nieman, former vice president of the American College of Sports Medicine. “To watch someone go from that degree of proficiency to a shell of their former self is unbelievably painful and frustrating.”

New York Times article: Thigh-Popping Success on a Bike Lies in the Quads...

To cycling teams and their support staffs, large thighs are less an Olympic oddity and more a necessity specific to their sport.

By GREG BISHOP

Published: August 6, 2012

[...]

The image, a try-this-on-for-thighs comparison between one German cyclist nicknamed Gorilla (Andre Greipel) and another nicknamed Mr. Thigh (Robert Förstemann), underscored a more serious notion. Namely that cyclists, particularly track sprinters, rely on quadriceps, in all their massive, veined glory, to power them to success. Förstemann’s thighs, each comparable to a watermelon, measured 34 inches — wider than his waist.

Happened to catch this post-event report in the RSN sidebar:

The road was closed for the 18th annual Napa Valley Inline Marathon and Half Marathon so skaters, some Bay Area locals and visitors from France, Germany, Australia and other countries, could have free reign of the course.

“These people live for these types of events, where you get a closed, smooth road and you can skate distances, not just like in a roller rink where you go in circles,” said organizer David Miles, 55, of San Francisco.

Good article from last week's Kansas City Star newspaper discussing Garmin's sponsorship of pro cycling:

The Olathe-based manufacturer of GPS devices is the title sponsor for Garmin-Cervélo, a cycling team competing in the Tour de France. On Sunday it won its first Tour de France stage victory in the team time trial. Tyler Farrar won the next stage, becoming the first American to ever win on July 4 and the first to win any Tour stage since 2007.

Teammate Thor Hushovd has held onto the overall lead, and the leader’s yellow jersey, four days into the three-week race.

Sponsoring a pro cycling team can cost millions of dollars. Jake Jacobson, social media manager for Garmin, said the company had spent a large amount sponsoring the team, although it wouldn’t release the exact figure.