So, I’m riffing here.

But the best moment of the Olympics thus far was seeing the American speed skater Cheeks pull the Russian up onto the Gold podium at the end of the national anthem.? That looked from where I saw it like a genuine act of a good competitor.? Another great moment was when the Russian men’s skater told an interviewer to wait until the long program was over before asking him to gush over how great he is.? It was remarkable not because he said it, but because he said it so dismissively, focused instead on the competition he’s in.? They always ask such assinine questions, anyway.

This afternoon and evening was interspersed with various and sundry Winter Olympic viewing for me, and while watching, I discovered something which may seem incredibly obvious to anyone else but which I found fascinating. That was: in the Summer Olympics you can run, jump, throw, swim, shoot, or wrestle in a number of different fashions in order to achieve Olympic Gold; in the Winter Olympics, one way or another, all you’re doing is sliding around on ice.

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OK, so there was a post on the Washington Monthly blog site about the confusing nature of the scoring, and of course it is indeed a mechanically complex thing. However, in the end, my fiancee and I watched all the skating tonight up to about 10:28pm and somehow the best couple ends up in third or fourth place. Something tells me the whole thing is just crap.

For one, the US pair did something that has never been done before. I don’t know what the hell that was, but it involved throwing the chick up in the air, and that’s just cool. However, that this had never been done before in the Olympics didn’t seem to factor into thier score at all, and it seems to me if you are going to allow something unheard of into a competition rather than codifying the acceptable jumps, then you encourage such behaviour and the points should follow.

Moreover, there were plenty of other male skaters throwing female skaters all over hell, and none of those seemed to have had anything to do with anything groundbreaking. My fiancee patiently attempted to explain that it all had to do with a half-turn or something. Shit. Only a half a turn? Maybe it’s not really worth any extra points, after all. It certainly doesn’t seem worth all the extra crap I’ve been hearing about for the last month.

In the end, the couple that I thought performed worst ended up being the number one slot. Ain’t that some shit?