Olympic games!
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.