Is Atlanta IceAgeddon Our Hope for Olympic Gold?
The Olympics and Atlanta IceAgeddon 2014
Every four years I look forward to the opportunity to relax and watch others exercise. The Sochi 2014 Olympic Games offer just this opportunity. The Winter Olympics provide immense entertainment with the wide range of winter sport, and I can enjoy these sports from the comfort of my warm house and comfortable couch.
I’ll be honest, winter sports are not my favorite activities in which to participate. I’m just not a fan of the cold. I do ski occasionally, but my idea of the ideal vacation is a beach towel, a cold drink, and lots of sun. But I digress. In preparation for each Olympics I like to do a little research of the athletes in order to know who I want to cheer for the most loudly. The Athletes I select are not always the favorites for a given event, but rather someone I can either relate to or root for as an underdog.
So one obvious connection to the athletes is where they live. Rooting for the hometown hero is always fun, so I went about seeing which athletes were from the Atlanta area. Admittedly I didn’t anticipate finding a lot of athletes from Atlanta, or even the state of Georgia. After all we are lucky to get snow once a year, and then it is unlikely to stick. But with all of the sports, there must be a couple athletes from Atlanta. I went onto the official Team USA Site to narrow down my list of athletes. After a rather extensive review of roughly 1000 team members from today and years gone by, I was disappointed to not find a single Georgia winter games athlete. Seriously? I saw members from Florida, Alabama, and even Arkansas… but no Georgia. While I still hold out hope that some athlete will still be identified as coming from the Atlanta or having lived here at some stage in their life, but I have still not identified who that might be.
As I am writing this post Atlanta is hunkering down for an impeding ice storm. While I would typically not join in on what is often perceived as a paranoid fear of anything related to winter precipitation; my view in the topic has changed a bit after last month’s virtual shutdown of the city with a total of two inches of snow. So as I await the impending Atlanta IceAgeddon, I can’t help but muse if this might prove to be a motivation for someone to take up a winter sport. If we get the inch of ice predicted it might be the perfect time to break out the ice skates. Then again, unless you are from the north, it’s unlikely you have a pair sitting around. So what about skiing? Well, ice isn’t ideal for that sport (although downhill racers might argue this point with me), but again, we still have the equipment issue to contend with. Not that many people have skis in their closet, although I have no doubt the number is higher than those with skates. Snowboarding might be a possibility. Ice is common to a degree in the half pipe, but I can’t think of the perfect open canal that would provide the open space and concave walls. For Luge or Bobsledding you need hills, and those are equally hard to come by in Atlanta. Although I might hold out some hope for those who live near Stone Mountain.
Then it dawned on me…curling! Everyone in Atlanta has a broom, and with all of the cars sliding around the streets of Atlanta, perhaps a huge benefit could be provided by sweeping a path to the nearby parking space. With a little practice over the next few days; who knows, we might inspire the next gold medal team for the 2018 Olympic games.
Watch out Pyeongchang!! Here comes Atlanta.
