In February, though it’s sunny here in northern California, the wind blows down from Alaska and it’s deceptively cold. The dim sun is still low on the horizon and hazy, not the true sun punch that we’ll get in a few months. We wimpy west-coasters need hot food as well as anyone else in the winter. It’s taken me decades, but I have finally learned how to coax magic out of the crock pot, and this seems a good time to share a recipe or two, maybe to brag a little about my carnitas.
Lest I get too full of my own self, I will point out that we have had a lot crock pot failures in this house, so expertise has been hard won. I have made a lot of dried out pork loin and undercooked stew. So I will share what I have learned about equipment and the perils of misunderstanding collagen.
The Context of the Carnitas
The local mice also seem to know that it’s cold. We’ve had a decades-long battle with them, fiddling with traps and bait to figure out how to make them go away without having to cope with hairy details. They’re a reminder that the lovely suburban woods stretching outside our backyard, with the impudent turkeys and sneaky deer, only seem bucolic. Once critters invade the garage and nest in your car– chewing through brake cables to cause damage that was breathtakingly expensive but fortunately covered by insurance–well, it takes a shine off the bucolous, that’s for sure. Continue reading “Adventures in Carnitas”
Congratulations to our latest Olympic medalists! I have to provide one more shout out to the amazing athletes, who provided an outstanding sixteen days of competition and success for Team USA, from Red Gerard’s and Jamie Anderson’s acrobatics in snowboarding to John Shuster and the curling team’s miracurlllll. Other memorable moments the women’s cross-country ski relay team who picked up the first gold medal in USA cross-country skiing EVER — Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall.
And, of course, the women’s hockey team finally getting that elusive gold medal in hockey (again!) through a hard-fought battle in regulation time. (What about the men’s team? Didn’t crack the semi-finals. Oh, because they’re not professionals? How much do the women get paid to play again? OK, moving on…)
Just one more time here is the list of all the U.S. medal winners, courtesy of Wikipedia:
Medal Count Analysis–Bogus and Real
Since it’s the Olympics and there are, well, numbers, then I can’t resist commenting on the data behind the tag line I keep hearing from the media: the US had its worst showing in medal performance since Nagano. Medal count summaries tend to be gobbledygook anyway, as I mentioned in a previous essay, but this offhand dismissal of the athlete’s accomplishments is particularly heinous hornswaggle.
While the 28 medals achieved was lower than in recent Games, that is out of context. Here’s a chart of all the U.S. winter medal results since the 1924 Games in Chamonix:
Notice that in 1988 Nagano and prior years, the U.S. was barely in double digits, and, in fact, was barely cracking the low teens. When all the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events were added, starting in Salt Lake City, the U.S. medal counts started to double and triple. The phenomenal medal total for Team USA in Pyeongchang is nearly twice the average prior to 1998. So, it’s not as if this 28 medals is some tiny number.
Also, our high numbers in recent games were partly due to those new extreme sports and due to the “home court” advantage of Salt Lake City and Vancouver. If you take those new sports out of the totals, our Pyeongchang result were better than many of those prior years and in line with the strong showings since 1992. In other words, those medals in curling, cross-country, and bobsled really are in line with prior Games.
I can’t wait to see a new generation of curlers and cross-country skiiers come through in Beijing 2022, inspired by the John Shusters and Kikkan Randalls of these Games. U-S-A Slay all day!
The word that gets thrown around a lot at the Olympics is ‘redemption.’ I think it’s ‘resilience’ or ‘resetting’ – we all know what it’s like to have to pick yourself up, get over it, and continue on. …the one instance that gets me more than anything is what the speed skater Dan Jansen was able to do. It took him four Olympic Games, and he was a magnificent skater. We all knew how hard he had to work…those are the stories that get me more than just about anything, that you’re gutsy enough to try again.
–Mary Carillo, NBC Olympics commentator
Redemption is about the story. Resilience is about the athlete.
People who write about sports like to turn competitions into stories–myself included. Descriptions are thrown around loosely like Cinderella Story, King of the Half-pipe, Queen of the Slopes. It shows how closely viewers liken these events to fairy tales and hope for fairy tale outcomes.
Those who remember Dan Jansen’s story probably still think of it as the quintessential happy ending. Jansen was the best speed skater in the world, but suffered one calamity after another in his Olympic quest for a medal. In 1994, in his third Olympics, he finally won the gold medal to his relief and the relief of the whole world.
In Pyeongchang, viewers saw that same kind of resilient spirit in the pairs figure skating. Aliona Savchenko and partner Bruno Massot of Germany were in fourth place after the short program. Two bronze medals for Savchenko in five Olympics were a great achievement, and a reflection of being oh so close. Trying for a win was beyond difficult, given that the quad salchows and twists being executed by the Chinese and other younger pairs were out of reach for Savchenko at 34. Still, the German pair skated a perfect free program then watched the other pairs make mistake after mistake. When her gold medal was announced, Savchenko broke down and tears of redemption streamed down her face.
Yet, redemption isn’t just about winning, and bouncing back isn’t only about the top of the podium.
Resilience vs. Expectations
Mikaela Shiffrin has been the best slalom skier in the world for the past five years. With four slaloms among the five races on her list, the media started casually commenting about multiple medal chances. Given the athletic performances of people named Bolt and Phelps (or Bjorgen or Fourcade) in our collective memory, we start assuming that everyone can just rip off two or three golds, as if it’s just become commonplace. Talk about fairy tales! Expectations become the monster under the bed.
Shiffrin, 22, still has one more event to participate in after capturing a gold medal in the giant slalom last week. She’s expected to participate in Friday’s combined event after deciding to withdraw from Wednesday’s downhill race due to scheduling issues. These Games haven’t gone according to plan for Shiffrin as she failed to medal in her signature event – the slalom (30 career World Cup wins) – and now comes the distraction of her boyfriend getting bounced out of South Korea.
–Brett Bodner, New York Daily News
Even a gold medal in the Giant slalom wasn’t enough for some writers. The next day, best-slalomer-in-the-world Shiffrin threw down outstanding runs but then so did Hansdotter, Holdener, and Gallhuber, the ones who literally grew up in the Alps. They shushed by Shiffrin to take the gold, silver, and bronze. One day earlier, Shiffrin lay encrusted in the snow, sobbing with joy over a medal; now she could only shrug. Fourth best out of 78 skiers in the world is no crime. Only 23 years old, she laid her heart bare on Twitter to reveal a deep understanding of what it’s like to train and win, to fall short and fail, and to keep trying.
That is real. That is life. It’s amazing and terrifying and wonderful and brutal and exciting and nerve racking and beautiful. And honestly, I’m just so grateful to be part of that. That is so much greater than Gold, Silver, or Bronze. We all want a medal, but not everyone will get one. Some are going to leave here feeling like heroes, some will leave heartbroken, and some will have had moments when they felt both– because we care.
–Mikaela Shiffrin on her 4th place in the slalom
Because heavy winds in Pyeongchang caused schedule changes that stacked the races up, Shiffrin pulled out of two events to focus on one last try in the alpine combined–today. Maybe she’ll win; maybe she’ll come in fourth; maybe she’ll miss a gate and DNF. Whatever happens will be fun to watch. Whatever happens, she’s won already.
Resilience and Bounce-back Within the Race Iself
Norway has blitzed other countries in the Olympic medal count, as they typically do. But in their “Super Bowl” race, the men’s 4×10 cross country relay, they’d only won in three of the last 10 Games, and not since 2002. The relay is grueling–well, it’s cross country skiing, which is always backbreaking– but the 4×10 is like watching four elite runners do 5ks runs back-to-back. (Imagine the Olympic Cycling Road Race was a relay, who wouldn’t want to see that?) As a relay, the team has to strategize about who skis the anchor leg and whether to hang with a group or go out fast.
Norway yearned for a win but had been upended by the Swedes and the Italians several times. And the OAR Not Russian* team had 21-year-old speedster Denis Spitsov in its final leg. They also had cagey Andrey Larkov as their opener who immediately showed the OAR strategy because, as the race started, Larkov took off and built up a huge minute plus advantage before the first leg was done. Building up big leads can demoralize the other teams. It requires resilience for the other teams to respond. They have to work together. That’s what Norway, Italy, and France did; they chased down the Not Russian team by leg three.
Arguably, the racer that gets passed might also be done for the day. It requires resilience–if you’re the one chased down–to bounce back. That’s what OAR then did. The gap wasn’t much by the time leg four had started, and, by then, team Italy was out of gas. Spitsov, the anchor, pushed himself and his team back in contention by catching up to and tucking himself in behind Norway’s Johannes Klaebo. Both had young, speedy legs–what Americans would probably call hot dogs–both had already won medals in the Games. Norway had bounced back in the race at least once, but so had OAR. As the two played cat and mouse around the three final laps, leaving the other countries to duke it out for third place, they slashed up the hills and zipped down the curves. Until, with about a kilometer to go, Klaebo said See ya to Spitsov and put his legs into another gear. Gold for Norway, and silver for OAR. No remorse for either.
Falling Holds the Seeds of Success
We joke about the skaters missing jumps, but when competitions are built on executing athletic spins and swirls flawlessly, then bigger scores require bigger tricks. Winning means doing something harder. Trying to win raises the likelihood of falling.
More big air and half pipe snowboarding and skiing events in these Games have allowed us to see incredible acrobatics. Imagine how many times these athletes had to fall in practice just to learn a trick, then perform it landing upright. Then, try to fly higher to gain more points, and still land on your feet. In the men’s ski aerials, the tricks got progressively harder and the falls got more … let’s call them spectacular. Ukraine’s Oleksandr Abramenko’s gold was for performing a quadruple-twisting triple back flip. Perfectly. With a perfect landing. How many times did he fall during training?
In late 2016, US Figure Skating launched a campaign to celebrate vigor in moment’s of adversity, called #Getup. Gold medal figure skater Scott Hamilton was the perfect spokesman, a survivor of cancer and brain tumors. He put it into clear perspective.
If you didn’t fall, you didn’t try. I fell 41,600 times. What do you do? Well, you get up 41,600 times.
–Scott Hamilton
Resilience & Redemption Have Many Definitions
There’s falling and getting up. There’s bouncing back from adversity and injury. That also carries different meanings for different people. The men’s figure skating competition had it all on display. Yuzuru Hanyu won the first back-to-back gold medals in the sport in seventy years. Hanyu was so severely injured back in November, he missed his country’s Trials. He hadn’t skated much over the winter and didn’t participate in the Olympic team skating event. As he took the ice for the short program, however, he demonstrated why he’s broken figure skating point records. He was sublime. When the last skater finished the long program, and Hanyu realized he had won the medal that all of Japan expected him to win, his tears of redemption–of resilience–were as genuine as anyone’s.
High expectations also sat on 18-year-old Nathan Chen’s shoulders in the competition on the opening weekend. After being labeled by U.S. media as the Quad King (fairy tale words again!), he faltered. Again in the individual short program, he fell in all three of his quad jumps. Seventeenth place. Out of it. No chance for a medal. Knowing he would have four years to chew over what happened, he bounced back out on the ice for the men’s long program and hit six quads–one more than was in his program–and a new Olympic record. He won the long program and finished in a respectable fifth place. Better thoughts for the next four years.
Then, there’s Adam Rippon, who finished in tenth place. Rippon had been a middle of the pack skater for a dozen years, named as an alternate for Vancouver in 2010, but missing the cut for Sochi in 2014. He had talked openly to the media about struggles with money, with training, with having enough food. He was the first openly gay athlete to be named to the U.S. Olympic team and had pre-Games media spats with homophobic politicians.
Despite the distractions, he took the ice for Team USA after Chen missed his jumps and helped scrabble out a bronze medal with a beautifully artistic, if not quad-filled, program. On the interview circuit in the days following, he entertained interviewers with a quick wit and a sharp tongue. (“How do you explain your success?” “I can’t explain witchcraft.”) TIME magazine declared that he won the Olympics. In the grand scheme of twenty years of skating, traveling, falling, arguing, starving, bitching, missing out, and squeaking by, Adam Rippon’s tenth place was one of the greatest tenth place finishes ever.
At the end of the day, a gold medal is an outstanding achievement among the best in the world. So is a medal. So is finishing just off the podium, or in the top ten. Or gaining a record or a new personal best. Or finishing the race. Starting an Olympic competition. Racing to qualify for the Olympics. Training to try to qualify.
Or just training and falling down and getting up, one more time.
*OAR, the Olympic Athletes from Russia, are competing under the Olympic flag due to their country’s massive doping scandal. However, many commentators continue to call them “the Russians.” My solution has been to label them the Not Russians.