curiouSK

I was showing to my co-workers my home town - Sochi, Russia - on Google Maps and found this weird relief in Caucasus Mountains. Looks kinda funny :)

Here’s link to it on Google Maps: face from Space

Interesting things: Olympics - biggest sporting event in the world. Like every other big event organizers make sure they get extra few bucks on overpriced, yet cool, and often unique products. And lately nobody misses to sell those online. After all, this expands the cusomer reach greatly. USA - biggest market for anyone to sell products to. People here have money, they spend them, and they like spending them buying online, which latest chrismas shopping season proved. Yes, most americans are not as excited about international events, such as Olympics, as the rest of the world, but there still some that are. And with population close to 400 mil ppl many of whom are immigrants and are still following the world events this still is a lot of potential customers.

Yet americans are the only people that CAN’T buy any products in the official olympic store online. Well, there are some other nations they don’t ship to, for example Iraq and Afganistan. Why? I don’t know! .. but i do wonder. I wanted to get something there, the olympic store was running well before the olympics started. But USA wasn’t one of the countries you could register with. After olympics started i wrote them email and this is what i’ve got back:

> We regret to inform you that we cannot process your order
> as the USA is not part of the authorized countries
> to purchase products on our Olympicstore website.
> We are though working together with CIO (Committee
> International Olympic), USOC (United States Olympic
> Committee) and TOROC (Torino Organising Committee)
> to allow even US citizens to buy products from the
> www.olympicstore.it website.
>
> Please feel free to visit our store in the near future.

Two-tree organizations can’t find a way split the money of the US customers, i guess. Its a shame..

olympicstore.it

Yesterday at the Olympics in Tourin, Italy, Slovakia got their first Winter Olympics medal after becoming independent in 1993. Silver medal was won by Radoslav Židek in Snowboard cross - sport introduced only this year to the Olympics. I love watching snowboard cross, maybe because looks more like real-life ride in a park resort - trying to enjoy the fast ride down with ocasional jumps, yet trying to avoid collision with other riders. Yes, its exactly like it. I ride snowboard, but i don’t do any tricks. Not good enough yet, thats why its harder for me to “connect” with half-pipers, tho every time i watch them im amaized. Židek (and i wanna make sure you take a note of that little V on top of Z, i’ll talk about it later) could’ve won gold eazily. It looked like he kinda reaxed a tiny bit when he saw he gained disance on the rest of the group and didn’t push it as hard as he could, until an american rider passed him. Maybe he was trying to be safe and not make a stupid fall and loose the whole thing… Don’t get me wrong, though, silver Olympic medal is an amaizing accomplishment. This one in particular: as i’ve said this was first Slovak medal, and this is the first ever Olympic silver medal in snowboard cross. Very special. Other than him, some slovaks are making very close finishes - 4th and 5th places - its a very good sign. And ice hockey team started very strong by winning Russian team (which im, needless to say, very upset about :) ) and then beating Lavtia (who tied the USA in their 1st game ).

Now back to Židek. Name Židek actually reads as Zhidek, not Zidek. I guess for the simplicity reasons all names from nations that use latin based alphabet are written at the international competitions without diacritical symbols. Which produces interesting (but bad) effect - when those names are transliterated further into other languages (since everyone likes to take the information from the official sources, and not all of these athletes are well known) they sound different, and incorrect. Just something i noticed when i was reading Зидек (Zidek) instead of Жидек (Židek) in russian online media. And i don’t see how can it be different in other languages.

Olympic games are finally here! :)
I love the Olympics. I love to see such a great variety of sports packed into short period of time. Especially sports that you won’t normally see on american television, overloaded with boring baseball and american football. I love to root for my country! Russia has strong olympic traditions, and even through country’s difficult economic problems Russian sportsmen, without state’s support for sports, found ways to keep training and winning. I greatly respect that.

Even though Slovakia is an independent country only for 13 yrs the Slovaks of course are not new to the Olympics either. Many Olympic medalists of the former Czechoslovakia were Slovaks. On the official website of the Slovak Olympic Committee you can find their names. After the split of Czechoslovakia the Slovak team participated in three winter Olympics, but did not win a single medal. Which is unfortunate, because Slovakia has perfect places for training - the Tatra mountains, and they have some very strong sportsmen. Slovak ice hockey team performed surprisingly poor at the previous Olympics, considering they have full set of medals from Ice Hockey World Championships.

Anyways, second day of the Torino Olympics is almost over. I think the best slovak result I’ve seen so far was 5th place in 20km Biathlon competition by Marek Matiasko. But there still plenty of medals available to compete for…

Slovak Olympic Committee prepared nice booklet in both english and slovak about Slovakia’s olympic history and sportsmen. Here are direct links:

Part One
Part Two
Part Tree
Part Four
Part Five

You can follow Olympics at the official Torino 2006 website. They have great website, easy to navigate and all results are available live.