Two Days Until The Winter Olympics

I'm starting to get excited. Only two days from now, the 2010 Winter Olympics will begin in Vancouver, Canada. This is a good thing for those fans like myself here in the United States. It means we will get to see the events in real time, rather than on some kind of tape delay.

And the U.S. team is a good one, with chances to win medals in events that we don't normally do well in (like Nordic combined, biathlon, bobsledding and cross-country). In the last three Winter Olympics the U.S. Has gotten 13 medals (1998), 34 (2002) and 25 (2006).

Canada is also expected to do well. They got 24 medals in 2006, and as the "home team" they could do even better this year. Germany is probably the team to beat, as they finished with the most medals in the last couple of Winter Olympics.

The only fly-in-the-ointment so far, is the unseasonably warm weather the Vancouver area has been having. While much of the United States has been getting record snows, Vancouver has not, and some of the venues closest to the city are even showing brown patches of earth where snow should be.

But Canada is doing its best to remedy that. They have been trucking snow in each day and will probably add man-made snow to that. It won't be the best conditions, but I expect it will be adequate to have a very good competition. After all, the conditions will be the same for every competitor.

I dearly love the Winter Olympics, even though I've spent most of my life in a warmer climate (Texas is certainly not a prime location for winter sports). I consider it to be one of the five top sports competitions in the world. Just to provoke a little consternation among my readers, I will list my top five sports competitions:

1. Football season (all levels)

2. Summer Olympics

3. World Cup soccer

4. Winter Olympics

5. Tour de France bike race

Feel free to use the comment section to argue with my top five. By the way, the picture above shows the gold medal that will be given out in Vancouver.