Sunday, February 7, 2010

4 DAYS, YESS!

There's exactly 4 days until the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games starts and you can feel the spirit around you anywhere in Vancouver! From buildings decorated with red and white signage saying " GO CANADA GO!" to the eccentric colours of blue and green, embroidering downtown and Richmond. Today the StudentsLive team got to have an amazing experience; we went for a tour at the Robson Media Centre and on the way, we got to meet the members of the Czech Republic luge team for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games! :)

That's a picture of Adeleine and I with the Czech Republic's luge team! They were all really nice :)
The athletes starting from left to right is: Ondrej Hyman (age 23, Men's Singles), Lubos Jira (age 19, Doubles), Jakub Hyman(age 25, Men's Singles) and Matej Kvicala (age 20, Doubles).

I'm on the left side, Adeleine is on the right; go check out her blog at http://www.gamemisconducts.blogspot.com/ as she is also part of the StudentsLive team and will also be covering the Games.



Now for those who don't know about luge, here's a little info.

Luge is one of the Winter Olympic sports and the word "luge" means sled in french. Luge had made it's first debut in the 1949 Games in Innsbruck and is quite evidently a VERY fast sport. Luge involves either a single racer or double racers sitting on a fiberglass sled. There are fixed handles in the ice that the racers pull on and then they burst out of the start. The racers then use spiked gloves on the ice surface for extra acceleration before lying down on their backs. Their feet are stretched out in front of them and their heads are laided back to be as aerodynamic as possible, to ensure fast speed. To steer, the racers use their legs and shoulders and when they want to brake, they sit up and put their feet down and pull on the sled runners.

The track they race on is called a labyrinth and is made up of left and right turns with NO STRAIGHT sections in between. You can imagine how fast this sport is! In the Winter Olympic games, all the luge events are timed to the thousandth of a second.

Along with meeting the 4 Czech Republic athletes, the StudentsLive team got to take a tour of the Robson Media Centre, which is also called the International Media Centre. The Robson Media Centre is where different media will be working on stories, interviewing and much more. Here are some photos that I took during our tour!



Along with the amazing tour, I was walking around Robson Street and took some pictures of the great pieces of art; the pieces totally bring out the cultural vibe to the city. I would defenitly recommend going to Robson Street by public transit as during the games it will be the easist and quickest way to get around.




Anyways, today has been an AMAZING DAY :) I'm extremely excited for the Games to start and I'm sure that there will be lots of spirit!
- xoxo Lorie

2 comments:

  1. I love all your pictures! Such an exciting day it was :) And it was nice to have some facts on luge, I learned a thing or two from this post.

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  2. great article and sweet pics! keep it up :)

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