For more than a fortnight I have used my obsession for the games as an excuse for not sitting down to write this blog.
It was nice to be missed. My loyal readers at the fitness center and Starbucks, two of the few places I frequented during my personal DVRfest of winter sports, kept asking me why I wasn't updating the blog.
I won't miss living on the edge of spoiler alerts and early A.M. wake up calls to watch prelim events that really misled me as to the outcome of medal rounds. But I will miss the "live'' competition.
Have I mentioned I always wanted to report on an Olympics, before retiring from the newspaper business? Oh, yeah I think I did.
I'm sure I will mention it again before I retire from this blog.
I need to get over it the way Shaun White (my wayward pretend professional snowboarding son) has gotten over not medaling at the Sochi experience.
My real son and I, avid X-Game followers, knew what tricks White honed on the half pipe before the sport took off in popularity and all the current medalists cut their teeth on White's tricks.
Of course I would always tell my real son not to try any of the snowboarding or skateboarding tricks at home. I let him live vicariously through the gravity defying feats we watched on TV.
White, not my real son who is premed boy plodding through midterms in the South for another week, seemed to be back to normal on his visit with Jimmy Fallon this week on "The Tonight Show."
I figured White, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, who holds the X-Games records for gold medals and highest overall medal count, would pick himself up. He was still thrilled - despite pulling out of one event due to course conditions and finishing off the medal stand in his favored event - to be at the Olympics and a member of the team.
While I'm on White and the Olympics, I want to mention something my real son mentioned that he learned this semester in his Ancient Athletes history class.
When the Olympics were first organized, they only gave out gold medals.
Don't go intimating that your local Olympians and national treasures are losers or disappointments because they came home with silver and bronze medals. For crying out loud, they got to go to the Olympics.
They still don't give participation trophies for going to the Olympic Games. You do, however, get a lot of clothing, photos and memories. And once you are an Olympic athlete, you are always an Olympic athlete.
In some sports the odds are stacked against the athletes because of scoring systems that no one really understands. Why does everyone always act so surprised when there is controversy in the skating competitions?
I was never going to let my children participate in sports where adults could subjectively mar them for life. In this house you raced against the clock, had to make the basket, had to hit the ball or the birdie. Okay, there were a few missed calls behind the plate and at the badminton boundary lines over the years, but we kept it in perspective that our children were not playing in the Olympics. The Olympics ARE NOT an easy level to advance to if you are an American playing badminton.
Going to the Olympics IS NOT an easy feat for any athlete to achieve. Although some of the Scandinavian and German families, who come back year after year, from much smaller countries, have figured something out.
Americans have figured out how to win lots of medals in non-traditional events -- especially ones we invent.
Speaking of the Wheaties "Breakfast of Champions" box, American gold medalists free-style snowboarder Sage Kotsenburg and alpine skier Mikaela Shiffren are on the 2014 boxes.
Shiffren, 18, became the youngest Olympian to ever win her event. Kostenburg won the first ever gold medal in men's snowboard slope style.
Despite their awesome achievements, I wondered if they would have been displaced if the men's and women's ice hockey teams had won gold medals?
Today I was picking up my husband's pants at the dry cleaners and saw Olympic hockey jerseys on the carousel. Hoping there was not a HIPA agreement on dry cleaning, I asked the woman behind the counter if they might belong to one of our hometown Olympic heroes, or her family members. Even after looking at the name on the tag she had no idea.
I'm moving on.
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