I'm skipping ahead a few days to try to catch up with current time (Feb 9th) and get the Olympic coverage going. I'll get back to the missing days at some point.
We start today by waking up late. Our Airbnb host Sunny had been waiting for us to make breakfast, but she has to get to work at the hospitality cafe she and her daughter were asked to run for the Olympic period. As I understand it, the Gangwon county government has asked shop owners to make over their businesses to make all of the Olympic visitors flooding the area feel welcome. Sunny was chosen because she works as an English tutor and the government wanted some places where English is spoken. We agree to go with Sunny and have breakfast at her cafe. Along the way, she shows us the downtown area and where the market area is.
When we arrive, we see a sign that says English Free Mungju branch cafe. I don't have the heart to tell Sunny that English Free does not mean what she thinks it means. I also think that branch probably means brunch. There are a lot of Koreans who speak some English, but as in our experiences in Japan, they rarely get to try it out with native English speakers so these "near misses" are common.
She needed a little time to get the shop ready so she suggests that we walk down to the corner and take a look at the old building and see what is going on there. The building looks like a miniature version of the palaces we saw in Seoul. In fact, it was the home of the local government which was responsible for keeping the peace, collecting taxes, conducting the census, etc. It is not exactly clear to us what is going on, but here is the sign:
Unfortunately, this is the only English that we see. There appears to be a place where you can see traditional Korean children's games and a place where you can write a wish on a piece of paper and attach it to what looks like a Christmas tree. It looks like the tree will be burned at some point to send all of the wishes to heaven. But what we mostly see is a site that is not quite ready. There are a lot of workers scurrying around trying to get things ready. Some parts of the site appear to have been built just for this event:
We've killed enough time, so we head back to the cafe. Sunny offers us toast, which in this part of Korea means a toasted cheese sandwich, and a couple cups of chamomile tea. While we are eating, I take a bag from my pocket and beginning sticking Olympic pins on my vest. Along the way, I explain to Sunny that pin trading and collecting is the sport for Olympic spectators. She is intrigued so I give both her and her daughter USA ring pins and a pin of her choice off of my vest. Then it is time to get up and get going.
Gangneung appears to be a pretty big place:
Google maps wants to put everything in Korean which makes it hard to tell where we are going, so I am sort of taking Sunny's route this morning in the opposite direction. We eventually see a sign for Gangneung Station which is where we want to go. Here it is dressed up for the Olympics:
Across the street is what looks like an area set up to showcase the local companies and goods. We wander around a bit and then head back over to the train station to take a taxi back to Sunny's apartment to get ready for tonight's event - men's normal hill ski jumping qualification round. Google says that the apartment is only 2km away and it is fairly close because the taxi only cost 4,000 krw.
We put on our long underwear and other assorted stuff to keep us from freezing after 4+ hours with temperatures around -7 C (15 F) and head back outside. There is a bus stop not far from Sunny's apartment that is supposed to have buses going back to the train station, but we can't figure out how often they come. So we decide to walk. 2 km aught to take us about 20-25 minutes, but it actually takes more like 40 minutes. We're a little tired and sweaty after our hike, but we make it in time to get on our train to Jinbu; one stop down the line where we are supposed to pick up our shuttle bus to the venue.
We had originally planned to take an early train so that we could walk around, but when we arrive in Jinbu, we are informed by the large group of enthusiastic volunteers that the shuttle buses won't start running until 3 hours before the event which is about 2 hours from now. At least the station is warm and there is part of an Olympic exhibit on Korean history with the Winter Olympics. I say part of an exhibit because here too, workmen are still hanging up items and setting up signage. There is also a partially complete exhibit of Korean art (vases, sculpture) that is to be part of the cultural Olympiad.
We finally manage to get onto a shuttle bus, which appears to have been a party bus in a previous life based on the colored LED lighting inside. It takes about 20 minutes to get to the Alpensia Olympic Center, which is the venue for ski jumping, aerials, cross-country, biathlon and the three sliding sports: bobsleigh, skeleton and luge.
Even though we've stopped right outside the ski jumping venue, a volunteer asks us to cross the large street that is the main road into Alpensia. We walk uphill for a little while and then are asked to cross the street again to enter the venue from the other side. Strange, but okay.
Shortly after we enter the venue, we come to a stop in front of what is obviously the security area. It looks like they are also not quite ready as we stood their for a good 20 minutes before continuing on to security. I had been nervous about this because the organizing committee at the last second added camera lenses larger than 300mm to their list of forbidden items and I've got a 70-400mm zoom in my backpack. I'm not sure of how the argument about the impossibility of an old guy with essential tremor producing professional grade photos while handholding a 400mm lens at night is going to go over with a policeman who likely speaks no English, but fortunately, no one asks to look at the lens and we are on to the next stop where we have our tickets scanned.
From there, it is about a 10 minute mostly uphill walk to the venue. Along the way, I am stopped by a Korean guy. It turns out that he is a journalist and wants to ask me a few questions: Where am I from? Is this our first visit to Korea? Do you have a favorite sport or athlete? and then the one that generated his interest, "Can you tell me about these badges that you are wearing?" I tell him that in 2 weeks, pins will be a hot story and that I meet people from all over the world simply be wearing a bunch of pins on my coat and hat.
When we get to the venue itself, a volunteer is scanning the event ticket of the woman in front of us. It fails, presumably because it was already scanned right outside of the security area. We finally manage to make the volunteer understand what is going on and head into the venue looking for food. There are a few people milling around, but not many are being served. We learn from a couple of Americans, that they only have cold drinks and no hot food, but they indicate that there is another concession stand closer to our seats. We head over there. The woman running this stand let us buy two red bean and one BBQ beef steamed buns and watched her spend a good 5 minutes warming them up. I'm thinking to myself that this can't go well once the bulk of the crowd showed up. We also find that the only hot drink she has is coffee. Clearly some bugs need to be worked out of the systems because they are really not ready to be putting on an event here yet. A lot of people over the years have asked me how I tell which are the best Olympics. I usually tell them that a lot of things just don't go well for the first few days when 7 years of planning meet the first day of reality, but the good Olympics are the ones that spot the problems and rapidly fix them. We will see whether POCOG (PyeongChang Olympic Organizing Committee) can rise to the challenge.
The start time on our tickets say 21:30 and it is only 20:00, but shortly after we get there, forerunners begin jumping. We finally figure out that this first round is to set the jumping order for the actual event that begins at 21:30. Here is a picture of the top of the jump:
The normal hill is on the left, the large hill is on the right. We think that the round thing up there may be a restaurant.
The forejumpers help the judges set the start position:
The jumpers sit on that red bar and wait for their coaches to decide when the winds are just right to jump. The start bar can be moved up or down depending on the weather and how far other jumpers are going. When the jumper hits the end of the track, they try to jump up at exactly the right time to maximize lift. Then they put their skies in a V position like this,
trying to mimic an airplane wing as well asusing small hand motions to keep level and pointed at the landing point:
The normal hill has two red lines on the left. The one on top is the K point at 98 meters. Every meter beyond this point is worth 2 points to a jumper and every meter short of this point costs the jumper 2 points. The distance is measured from where the back end of their ski hits the ground. The second red line is the hill size which is in this case 109 meters. If a lot of jumpers are going farther than 109 meters, the judges will move the start position down to slow the jumpers slightly. If they are all landing short of the K point, they'll move the starting position higher up. The hill flattens out below the HS line and landing down there is dangerous as the height you are falling from increases rapidly. The next part of the score is style. Jumpers are trying to land in the telemark style like this jumper is showing - one knee bent and the other leg trailing behind. Finally, there is a compensation score that is based on the wind at takeoff. It is much easier to get lift when the wind is in your face so jumpers that get a strong tailwind gain compensation points while jumpers with a strong headwind lose points.
The event itself lacks much drama because all this is going to do is eliminate 7 jumpers out of the 57 that qualified. The other 50 will go on to the finals on Saturday night. There is a huge range of abilities between the athletes. In the first round, Fatih Arda Ipcioglu from Turkey (and Turkey's first Olympic ski jumper) managed a jump of 77.0 meters worth 21.2 pts while Andreas Wellinger from Germany jumps 112.0 meters worth 87.2 pts. The Americans are not great at ski jumping, but Kevin Bickner manages a jump of 100.5 (68.5 pts) to sit in 14th place. The other Americans are in 37th, 40th and 47th place.
The first jump only sets the start order so the second round represents a fresh start for everyone. Ipcioglu improves in the second round with a jump of 79.0 meters worth, but he still ends up in last place with 68.2 pts. However, he made it to the Olympics and he was selected to carry the Turkish flag at the Opening Ceremonies tomorrow night. Like most of the Olympians, being named an Olympian is the goal and attending the Olympics is the reward. Most of the six other jumpers who fail to qualify (two from Estonia, two from the Czech Republic, one from Kazahkstan and one from Korea) were really young (17 or 18) and were just here to get some Olympic experience.
Along the way, we see some old "friends". One of them is 45 year old Noriaki Kasai from Japan:
Unbelievably, Noriaki-san is competing in his 8th winter Olympics beginning in Albertville in 1992. (We saw him jump in Nagano, where he won several medals and was the main TV highlight replay the entire time we were there!) This is the first time that any athlete in any sport, summer or winter, has qualified for the Olympics this many times. He will be Japan's flag bearer in the Opening Ceremonies and is coming off of winning silver and bronze medals at the Sochi 2014 Olympics. Kasai finishes in 20th place with a jump of 98.0 meters (117.7pts).
Some of the others that have been around a while include 4-time Olympic gold medalist Simon Ammann from Switzerland (competing in his 6th Olympics) and 2-time Olympics silver medalist Janne Ahonen from Finland (competing in his 7th Olympics). But at the end of the day, it is clear that the current powers in ski jumping are Germany and Poland as they go into the finals with 7 jumpers out of the top 10.
At the conclusion of the event, we all try to head out into a fairly narrow walkway and immediately jam up. There is another jam up crossing the street outside the venue and another on the walk back to where we pick up the buses. When we get to the last jam, we understand that the other slow points were because security is stopping people on the walk back to keep the bus pickup area from being jammed up. Once we get down to the bus pickup area, we understand why. Spectators have to cross the main entrance to Alpensia Olympic park in order to get to the boarding area, but there are about a million buses moving along that road so pedestrians can only cross once in a while. Once across the main street, it is a short walk to the bus stop. There are plenty of buses and we manage to get on one quite quickly. But the huge delay in getting to the bus means that we've missed our train to Gangneung. Transportation is the most critical need for spectators and our hope is that this will be one of the areas that POCOG fixes quickly.
We get back to Jinbu after the 20 minute bus ride and immediately head to the information center. This was a reasonably small event so there aren't too many people ahead of us in the line. When we get to the front, we show our PyeongChang 2018 rail passes (which give us free access to trains) and the agent gives us two tickets for a train leaving in 10 minutes (it is now 12:02 AM after the event let out at 10:20 PM). The ride to Gangneung is a quick 15 minutes and it gives us a chance to thaw out.
Our understanding is that the city buses stop running at midnight so we head over to the taxi line. Before we left California, I'd printed out a few "business" cards with Sunny's address printed in Korean. This was handy because our taxi driver did not appear to speak any English. The taxi takes only about 5-10 minutes. Sunny had given us cards giving us access to her apartment building and to her apartment so all we have to do is avoid making too much noise when we come in and take off our boots (like most Asian cultures, shoes are not worn inside the home). It has been a long day!
The event itself lacks much drama because all this is going to do is eliminate 7 jumpers out of the 57 that qualified. The other 50 will go on to the finals on Saturday night. There is a huge range of abilities between the athletes. In the first round, Fatih Arda Ipcioglu from Turkey (and Turkey's first Olympic ski jumper) managed a jump of 77.0 meters worth 21.2 pts while Andreas Wellinger from Germany jumps 112.0 meters worth 87.2 pts. The Americans are not great at ski jumping, but Kevin Bickner manages a jump of 100.5 (68.5 pts) to sit in 14th place. The other Americans are in 37th, 40th and 47th place.
The first jump only sets the start order so the second round represents a fresh start for everyone. Ipcioglu improves in the second round with a jump of 79.0 meters worth, but he still ends up in last place with 68.2 pts. However, he made it to the Olympics and he was selected to carry the Turkish flag at the Opening Ceremonies tomorrow night. Like most of the Olympians, being named an Olympian is the goal and attending the Olympics is the reward. Most of the six other jumpers who fail to qualify (two from Estonia, two from the Czech Republic, one from Kazahkstan and one from Korea) were really young (17 or 18) and were just here to get some Olympic experience.
Along the way, we see some old "friends". One of them is 45 year old Noriaki Kasai from Japan:
Unbelievably, Noriaki-san is competing in his 8th winter Olympics beginning in Albertville in 1992. (We saw him jump in Nagano, where he won several medals and was the main TV highlight replay the entire time we were there!) This is the first time that any athlete in any sport, summer or winter, has qualified for the Olympics this many times. He will be Japan's flag bearer in the Opening Ceremonies and is coming off of winning silver and bronze medals at the Sochi 2014 Olympics. Kasai finishes in 20th place with a jump of 98.0 meters (117.7pts).
Some of the others that have been around a while include 4-time Olympic gold medalist Simon Ammann from Switzerland (competing in his 6th Olympics) and 2-time Olympics silver medalist Janne Ahonen from Finland (competing in his 7th Olympics). But at the end of the day, it is clear that the current powers in ski jumping are Germany and Poland as they go into the finals with 7 jumpers out of the top 10.
At the conclusion of the event, we all try to head out into a fairly narrow walkway and immediately jam up. There is another jam up crossing the street outside the venue and another on the walk back to where we pick up the buses. When we get to the last jam, we understand that the other slow points were because security is stopping people on the walk back to keep the bus pickup area from being jammed up. Once we get down to the bus pickup area, we understand why. Spectators have to cross the main entrance to Alpensia Olympic park in order to get to the boarding area, but there are about a million buses moving along that road so pedestrians can only cross once in a while. Once across the main street, it is a short walk to the bus stop. There are plenty of buses and we manage to get on one quite quickly. But the huge delay in getting to the bus means that we've missed our train to Gangneung. Transportation is the most critical need for spectators and our hope is that this will be one of the areas that POCOG fixes quickly.
We get back to Jinbu after the 20 minute bus ride and immediately head to the information center. This was a reasonably small event so there aren't too many people ahead of us in the line. When we get to the front, we show our PyeongChang 2018 rail passes (which give us free access to trains) and the agent gives us two tickets for a train leaving in 10 minutes (it is now 12:02 AM after the event let out at 10:20 PM). The ride to Gangneung is a quick 15 minutes and it gives us a chance to thaw out.
Our understanding is that the city buses stop running at midnight so we head over to the taxi line. Before we left California, I'd printed out a few "business" cards with Sunny's address printed in Korean. This was handy because our taxi driver did not appear to speak any English. The taxi takes only about 5-10 minutes. Sunny had given us cards giving us access to her apartment building and to her apartment so all we have to do is avoid making too much noise when we come in and take off our boots (like most Asian cultures, shoes are not worn inside the home). It has been a long day!
Steps for the day: 15,373*
* - iPhone died before we got home
Wow. Long cold day. Sounds fun! (hahaha)
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