Ted Ligety – doin’ his slalom thing. Commentator said a really interesting thing:
“He doesn’t get nervous. He has ice water in his veins. Those gates are coming at him every 6/10ths of a second – and to him it looks like they’re coming in slow motion.”
Amazing. I’ve heard that about certain athletes, how their perception skews, and clears during competition – I’ve heard it in terms of hand-eye stuff as well. A fast ball to most of us would seem … impossible to hit. A blur of white. But certain players … can just see it coming … as though that 98 mph fastball is moving in slo-mo.
Didn’t you just love his whole Gold moment?!! I was bawling — BAWLING!! The way his parents were crying?? Oh, man. I always lose it when they show the parents. All the years of anxiety and watching and hoping for their child. The dad was just giddy.
Oh — and what about the guy who got the silver? He skis down the hill and knows at the end — with one skater left, that he’ll get a medal, silver or bronze. And he does NOT care that it’s not gold. He’s practically dancing for the JOY of a medal — any medal!! He’s suddenly a little boy without a self-conscious bone in his body. I love him!
I’m sorry to go on and ON — you’re asleep, I’m sure. (And rightly so!) But I just watched this …. beauty … unfold.
I LOVE THE OLYMPICS!!
Yeah, the dancing for joy for the silver really got me … You so rarely see that. It was so touching.
And the crying dad? Fuggedaboutit.
I can remember a couple of interviews with NFL guys, defensive guys usually (Ray Lewis comes to mind) who’ve said something close to that. That in the course of a play, there were some players they knew how to cover not by the way they ran, or even by their body language. They knew how to cover them because they saw not only where their eyes were looking in a play, but also HOW their eyes looked.
I enjoy that, somehow. In the middle of a play, with bodies flying everywhere, mud and dirt in the air, these guys are able to focus on the eyes, and not even where they’re looking, but HOW they’re looking. To make some manner of split second aesthetic judgment in the midst of that ruckus. I like that.
Maybe not the same thing, but very similar.
tommy – wow. Yeah, stuff like that just amazes me!!!
The slalom just BOGGLES me. How do they know where to go? Those gates/sticks look so random — is there a pattern we don’t see from our view?
Why does he not have to hit all of them?
It’s confusing — and I’ve never once heard an explanation from the commentators, who OF COURSE, have to explain ad nauseum how LUGE works, which, um, DUH. Explain the hard stuff, people!
Oh, yeah, did you see the Cheek guy’s gold medal ceremony. He won the gold in the 500m speed-skating. He was grinning and trying SO HARD to just stand there and smile, but he would look up at the flag and his eyes would fill and then his chin would quiver. . .
:sob:
I am also confused about the slalom. Help, someone?? Explain the placement of the gates and how they know what to do …
Great stuff – I love the really FAST sports. Exhilarating.
Sheila and Lisa,
I’ll try and put together a good explaination about the slalom gates for you, but I have a bit of work to knock out. I raced for many years and there IS a pattern, but very hard to see from anywhere except “in” the course or from directly above. More soon I PROMISE!!
Rude1 – you rock!!!!
Awww, you’re just buttering me up! ;)
Yay! Thank you, Rude1.
I’ve always thought that you’d see whatever pattern there was in slalom if you were looking down from above. Why don’t they show us that shot? They do on downhill.
I was actually going to say that I find it EXTREMELY selfish that you would put a little thing like WORK ahead of something this important – you know, explaining the slalom to a blogger you have never met.
Very very selfish.
What … you have a LIFE? How dare you.
:)
Bwahahahaha! Okay okay! I’m forsaking work (only because I’m gonna quit soon anyway :) and try and explain it without visuals. It may wind up being pretty long. If it’s too long, I’ll post it at my site and let you know when it’s up. Stay tuned ladies; I’m here to serve!
Okay, here’s what I have so far… :)
The placement of the gates in ski racing can be very confusing to most non-racers because of the seemingly random patter of poles down the slope. Even skiers who dont race have a hard time understanding them; in fact, I had skied for about 12 years before I started racing and didnt get it until then. The course always looked chaotic from down the slope. First, the difference between the courses is basically the distance between the gates. Downhill has gates spread VERY far apart, Super G has them a bit closer together, Giant Slalom is closer still and Slalom has the tightest gat placement. Each race is designed to test different skills above and beyond the basic turns.
Each gate is a set of two same-colored poles that the skier must pass through (Miller was DQd because he straddled a gate, which means one ski went outside the pole; BOTH must pass through). They are usually set in such a way that you only see or focus on the one pole that is on the inside of your turn, since the fastest line is as close to the pole as possible. The gates can be positioned either vertical or horizontal to the slope, depending on the terrain. A flush is used in Slalom and is made up of several gates, vertically oriented, right next to each other. It looks like a bunch of poles stacked right in a straight line. Man, this is hard to explain without drawing it! Anyway, Ill try and figure out a way to draw it or explain it better. Feel free to ask any questions!
So even though it looks to us at home as though they are just random poles sticking up – they are actually organized in pairs? And the skiers can obviously understand which pole goes with which pole?
Because it looks like the skier could just as easily swoop over to the left as to the right – you know? Like … it’s obvious to them which poles “go together”??
Yeah, each skier will spend several hours before each race slowly “shadowing” the course to memorize where each gate is, and then visualize the entire race over and over, so that when the gun goes, they know EXACTLY wwhat to expect. The course will look something like this (if it works!) The numbers are the gates, and the x is the skiers path. They MUST follow the pattern or get DQd. If you miss a gate, you can stop and hike back up to go through it, but obviously loss lots of time.
1 x1
x
x
2x 2
x
x
3 x3
x
x
x
4x 4
x
x
x
5 x5
x
x
x 6
x
x
6x
7x
x
x
x7
x8
x
x
8x
9x
x
x
x 9
x
10 x10
x
x
11 x 11
x
x
12 x 12
x
Gates 6 – 9 are a flush. I hope it makes sense!
Well, that didn’t work! I’ll figure something out for ya
Damn – Rude1 – I get my comments emailed to me and it looks GREAT in the emailed version – I can see EXACTLY what you mean. Hm.
Thank you, Rude1. You served us well, and I don’t even mean that dirty.
At the start of the downhill qualifying, the announcers showed the course from above, identifying the jumps and curves — basically walking us skiing ‘tards through it.
That was great, thank you very much.
Why don’t they do this with slalom? All of a sudden you have skiiers flying through this forest of STICKS being whapped all willy-nilly — no obvious “track” or “course” and it is NEVER explained what they’re doing.
Gah.
I posted that before I saw your diagram. You know, the “flush” is the easiest one to understand, to me. Maybe that’s because it’s easier to visualize standing at the bottom.
I think the reason they don’t do that with the Slalom is because it’s so tight that it would be very hard to see on TV, but still, they could have someone explain it, heck, I did and it wasn’t TOO hard lol!
I’s my pleasure to serve you; ;) ummm, not dirty either LOL
ANy other skiing questions, just ask! I’ve been a skiier for 30+ years (yeah, I’m old!) and raced for 10, still do on occasion for fun. Living in SLC was a dream come true last Olymipics let me tell ya!
BTW, Lisa, your “…skiiers flying through this forest of STICKS being whapped all willy-nilly –” made me laugh out loud! thanks!
Oh, and by the time a skier gets “to” the gate, in his mind, he’s already past it. I generally look one gate ahead so I know just where I need to start my turn to clear that gate. The gate I’m “whapping all willy nilly” I don’t even see because in my minds eye, I’m already past it. Very cool when finally are able to reach that level.
Well, you’d better be looking! What if one whapped you in the head?
LOL, that has happened; it knocked my goggles all off kilter, so I just reached up, pulled them off and kept going. The same thing happened to Steve Mahre when he won Olympic Silver. Would have been gold if not for the slap (I mean whap!) You generally punch them out of the way with your hands tho to keep them out of your face. :)
It must be so cool to get to a level of expertise when you can really own what you’re doing – you’re conscious enough – as you are whizzing down a mountain at a gazillion miles an hour – to make choices, and stuff. Amazing!!!
Yeah…high-level athletes (world-class amateurs and pros) can do that regularly, by dint of extraordinarily hard work.
The weekend warriors/sandlotters among us, with luck and practice, get to experience those moments once in a (great) while. The game slows down…the floor (court, diamond, field) spreads out…and for one brief shining moment, you’re a Jedi. You’re better than you really are.
The weekend warriors/sandlotters among us, with luck and practice, get to experience those moments once in a (great) while. The game slows down…the floor (court, diamond, field) spreads out…and for one brief shining moment, you’re a Jedi. You’re better than you really are.
Damn! Ken, have you been reading through my PC behind my back?
“‘You ever have dreams where you could fly, or do magic, or saw absurd things like talking fish with scarves and top hats?’
‘Are you saying you see these things?’
‘Stay on topic,’ he said gruffly. ‘The point is, you wake up and say, Oh, it was just a dream. Now, when I was a boy I used to have dreams about sports, just like I always played. In real life I wasn’t so good, but in the dream I was always unstoppable… and I’d wake up with the roar of the crowd still in my ears, and it didn’t feel like other dreams… It felt real, it felt possible. For a second I’d be convinced that I was capable of doing that while I was awake, if I could only remember how.’ He leaned back again and closed his eyes. ‘I think this guy can remember. To him, it’s all a dream.'”
THAT is the description I wrote for a civilian talking with his disbelieving friends after a run-in with a Jedi Knight. Apparently the Force is also with you, because until this moment that part of the story hasn’t been shown to anyone else. But I begin to think that I’d better finish it before you keep going!
Miss Red,
I just want to know how this Ted Ligety person can do his shalom thing and not get nervous when there is so much trouble in the mid-east and everyone is fighting everyone else. And why is he so interested in competition if he believes in shalom why doesn’t he just practice what he preaches and forget about fast balls and slo mo and…., WHAT? What? what do you mean, SLALOM, not SHALOM?? oh, NEVER MIND!
Emily Litella
( I just LOVED Gilda Radner and after 17 years, I still miss her; for some reason your post just made me think of her….sherril)