How did the Winter Olympics change Sports?

to spot the carpet baggers. The carpet baggers. Yeah, I mean, you know, you see it in the Olympics, but especially in the Winter Olympics, Like at Sochi, there was this couple from Long Island in their late forties who thought would be fun to compete in the Olympics for Dominica, which is this tiny island nation the Caribbean. And you'd obviously have to be super fit to be in your late forties and make the US ski team, but in Dominica you kind of just have to have a pair

of skis and a passport. So, I mean, how prevalent is this carpet bagger and how do they get away with this? I mean it is discouraged, but sometimes it's like elite athletes who couldn't make cut in their country where they live, but then you know they want to compete for their country of origin, and sometimes it's athletic mercenaries, like Bahrain is notorious for buying Kenyans to long distance

for their nation. And then there are these wealthy crazies who could just buy their way in, like Germany has this prince named Hubertus who was born in Mexico but has competed for Mexico and uh Slalom six times. I believe at Sochi he was fifty five years old. When you're doing this, Yeah, and you might remember him from wearing this outrageous spandex Mariachi out I'm gonna look him up. I don't remember this, he said. If he wasn't gonna win,

at least he could aim for best dressed. Getting excited to spot these Olympic outcasts made me wonder about all the other things that the Winter Olympics, like when did the Winter Olympics start? And why does Norway dominate the games? And why does curling get to be a sport. So let's stay again Aither podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius.

I'm Will Pearson and it's always I'm joined by my good friend man guest Ticketer and on the other side of the soundproof glass, showing off his brand new Winter Olympics stuffed animal pal. I don't know how I got ahold of that. That's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. Look over there, mano at Sue Harang, you know, the white tiger mascot for the upcoming Games. Yeah, I'd recognize them anywhere. So I love that the Winter Olympics get

their own mascots. It's actually one of my favorite things about the Olympics. Well, you know, the Winner Games might play second fiddle in terms of scale and viewership, but I feel like the mascots, those things can go toe to toe with their summer cousins. In fact, one thing I learned while preparing for today's show is that we actually have the Winner Games to thank for this whole idea of these Olympic mascots. You know, they didn't start out as this cute and cuddly animal like Sue Harang

might be. Just look at it over there in Tristan's lap. But the very first one was this creepy caricature of this arm less skier I don't know why, with his

manic red face. His name was shuss after after the term for the straight downhill ski run and then he popped up as this unofficial mascot of the nineteen Winner Games that were in France, and even though his simple, big headed design led to most fans calling him the skiing sperm, was a big hit with attendees, and so he kind of paved the way for the first official mascot four years later, and that was that multicolored dotsu named Waldy who appeared at the Summer Olympics in Munich.

So she is great, but if we're talking unnerving mascots, I'm gonna go with Schneman. Shush, and Schneeman. Sniman was the first official mascot of the Winter Games, and this was back in ninety six, and he was basically just a snowman head on tiny legs wearing this big, floppy red hat. It's almost like a kid started building Schneman and then gave up after realizing there was an atarian

side where it was warmer. I'm done with view Schneman. Well, obviously today's show is all about the Winter Olympics and we're getting pretty excited around here for next month's Games and Pyeong Cheng, so we wanted to take the opportunity to dig into some of that weird history and the surprising controversies that surround these lesser known Olympics. So, Mega, where do you feel like we should start? Well, you know, I always like starting at the beginning, which actually wasn't

that long ago for the Winter Olympics. So the first official Winter Games were held in France back which was only twenty eight years after the first modern Summer Olympics in Athens. But the Winter Olympics were known by a different name originally. So the first event was actually called Winter Sports Week, and it was this twelve day program consisting of six sports and sixteen events. Such a weird name, like it sounds like something you'd participated in college or something,

So why did they call it this? Was it like a test run for the winter version of the Olympics or what? Yeah, exactly right. So, figure skating and ice hockey were actually part of the Summer Games already at that point, and the idea of getting cold weather sports their own showcase was first floated by the IOC. So, I mean it seems like the interest was there, So why did this first event get such a like a

watered down name? Well, I mean some Scandinavian countries balked at the idea of a separate event because they already took part in their own competition called the Nordic Games, and they didn't want an official Winner Olympics to steal their thunder. So, you know, the committee made this Winter

Sports Week. But the games were this huge success. There were ten thousand paying attendees who turned up to watch sixteen countries compete in sports like speed skating and Bob's lead and curling, and the events were such a smash hit that just one year later, the IOC retroactively declared it the first Olympic Winner Games. All right, so who were like, you know, like the Michael Phelps of the

first Winter Olympics. Were there any standouts or the athletes still trying to kind of figure out what they were doing in the competition. Yeah, So, you know, the skin and even countries like I mentioned, had this leg up because they've been holding their own competitions for over twenty years at this point. So Norway in particular has always dominated the Winner Games, and the first one was no exception. They had this incredible athlete, Thor leaf Haw, which is

about as Nordic a name as you can have. And he was this legendary skier who won three gold medals in three different events that year, and he also took home a bronze medal for the ski jump competition. But this is super weird. Fifty years later, it was discovered that a scoring mistake had actually happened and the medal actually belonged to this US athlete named Andrews Hogen. Wow, fifty years later, I mean, I guess better late than never, but still that is a long time. So were there

any other US victories that year? Yeah? Actually, the very first gold medal awarded went to this American speed skater named Charles Jutra, and he was this underdog, but in the end he beat out all twenty six other skaters by completing the five event in just forty four seconds. And my favorite underdog, though, is is this Norwegian ice skater who's named Sonja Henny. And not only was she only one of eleven female athletes competing that year, she

was also only eleven years old. Eleven years old? Wow? So did she win? No? She came in dead last, but games were actually just the start of her career. She won a gold medal at each of the next three Winter Olympics, and she grew up to be this Norwegian movie star. I mean, Norwegan just really do kind of own the Winter Games, don't they. I was reading that Norway has actually won more gold medals in the competition than any other country after soci their record stands.

I think it's a hundred and eighteen gold medals and and something like three hundred and twenty nine total. Yeah, and they're actually one of only three countries the other two being Austrian Lichtenstein, that have actually won more medals in the Winter Olympics than in the Summer Ones. I mean, it makes a lot of sense given their geography and the climate. But you know, that cold weather advantage is actually kind of at the root of one of the

Winter Olympics biggest controversies. You know, put things in perspective. There are ninety countries that are set to compete in pyong Chang this year, which is a far cry from the more than two hundred countries that participated in the two thousand sixteen Games that were in Rio. You know, the reason for that disparity isn't so much a lack of interest as it is a lack of resources, you know, being able to compete in events like losing and figure

skating and Bob's letting. I mean, all of that requires this practice in these very expensive facilities. And his Olympic historian David Wallechinsky puts it, if you want to run a hundred meters or even a marathon, you can just step outside your door and go do it. If you want to play soccer, you can do that anywhere. But if you want to compete in the loge, I don't

think so. So obviously, you know, something like the alpine skiing is it's an expensive hobby and if you're trying to compete, just think about all the equipment and training and also just the regular access to these facilities that

you need to have. Yeah, so, I I know in tennis they say if you don't play for two days, you lose some of your muscle memory and you're basically relearning your strokes, which is crazy, right, But if you think about something like that for skiing, I mean, the climate dependent nature of the events definitely hurts your chances if you're from a tropical place, and the Winter Olympics

have also developed this. You know, elitist stigma because the cold of countries also tend to be richer and wider, which is probably one of the reasons that they still aren't as popular as the summer counterparts. Which isn't to say that more temperate or even downright tropical countries don't get a chance to shine. I mean, everyone remembers cool runnings, right and the Jamaican Bob's led team from the Calgary Games,

but this is still a long way ago. If the winner Olympics want to be an event that's truly representative of international athletes, yeah, you know. And since we're talking about controversies and you mentioned the ad eight Olympics, I just have to take a second to talk about Eddie the Eagle. So I'm not sure I know that mascot. I know it sounds very cuddly, but Eddie the Eagle

is actually one of the nicknames for Michael Edwards. And he was this British plaster who always dreamed of competing as a downhill skier in the Olympics, and after determining that ski jumping would be cheaper and less competitive, in order to be able to prepare, Michael became the first in British history to participate in the event. Now, there was only one little problem, and that was the fact

that he was terrible at ski jumping. In fact, he crashed at the World Championship up six, kind of became the laughing stock of the press and not so lovingly referred to him as Mr Magoo. But you know, Edwards was undeterred and he managed to fulfill his dream by competing at the Calgary Olympics just two years later. Although he successfully landed his jobby, he didn't score even like half the total points as any of the other competitors.

But nonetheless Eddie the Eagle, as he was called by the president of the IOC, became this national star and you know, an unexpected point of pride for England. So I'm guessing where the story is going, right, It's just like that little Norwegian girl who rallied and came back to clean house at the next Olympics. Uh definitely not. Edwards competed for a spot I think in the next three Winner Games, but the Olympic community had raised the qualifying standards at that point and that was really to

box him out. And you know, still he claims about seventy percent of his income now comes from speaking engagement, so it wasn't a total loss for the guy. Yeah, and as far as controversy's going, that one's pretty innocent. Like most Olympics scandals are a little more tingshch same definitely.

And so I was reading about Orton Enderland. She was this East German luge champion who wound up forfeiting her gold from the sixty eight Games when it was discovered that she and her teammates had actually heated the rails that are sled just prior to the race. I mean I didn't realize the physics of this, but the extra warmth had reduced the sleds friction with the ice, which gave them a much faster run time. And so the three women were disqualified, but the East German Olympic Committee

never took responsibility. Instead, they blamed it all on a capitalist revenge plot. Yeah, that must have been a capitalist revenge plot. You know. It's funny because I know about like corking your bad or deflating a football, but honestly have no idea how to cheat and winter store me either. I mean, it wouldn't even occur to me to heat the metal under your luge. That's also a sentence I

never thought I would say. But all right, well, speaking of East Germany, there's one interesting thing I came across, and that was that West and East Germany actually reached across the Iron Curtain and they decided to compete together as this unified team of Germany. This happened in three Olympics. It was in fifty six and sixty and sixty four. But that's when the truce came to an end because this alternate for an East German team, I think on the toboggan team. They used the games as a way

to make a break for freedom. And so her name was Uta Galler and apparently she fled for West Germany while her teammates were celebrating during a reception one night. That's crazy. Did she make it? She actually did, And you know, she actually wasn't even the only one. According to the Associated Press, there were thirteen fans from Eastern European communist countries that also escaped under the cover of the Olympics. That's amazing and you kind of have to

admire people who saw an opportunity and seized it. So one of my favorite Olympic controversies centers on this guy named Stephen Bradbury, who depressed dub the accidental gold medalist. He was on the Australian speed skating team that won the country its first medal at the Winter Olympics back but his most triumphant moment came at the two thousand two Games in Salt Lake City, and by that point Bradbury had suffered a number of debilitating injuries and was

no longer at the top of his game. In fact, he only made it through the quarterfinals that year because another athlete was disqualified, and he made it through the semis because a number of his competitors fell down on the track, and that fall actually gave him this great idea for what would turn out to be a winning strategy when it came time for the big race. Bradbury figured his best shot was just to hang back, you know, on the off chance that another fall might clear the

field for him. And amazingly, the plan worked like in spades. As he was racing, there was this disastrous wall that caused all four of his competitors to collapse in him. He yeah, it was just before the finish line, and Bradbury kind of just skated slowly around them, claiming his cold medal. You know, the craziest part was like the crowd was booing and jeering. I mean, I kind of love that story. It might not be like a glorious win,

but a win is a win exactly. And Bradbury's sort of admitted that he won by sheer luck, and he used to sort of be upset about it and conflicted about it, but now he kind of considers his reward for you know, this entire career hard work. I mean, you know, like we were saying earlier, the Winter Olympics don't always favor these warmer weather countries, and Australia certainly being one of those, so you have to take what

you can get. I think there's actually one other long running controversy I do want to mention, But before we get to that, let's take a quick break. You're listening to Part Time Genius and we're talking about the little known origins and shocking scandals of the Winter Olympics. All right, magus, So the last controversy I wanted to mention is just how long it took for a British curling team to

receive its gold medals and why is that. Well, Great Britain won the curling competition way back in the inaugural Winter Games of nineteen twenty four, but the winner actually didn't get their gold until a whopping eighty two years later. So what was the hold of Well, the delay stem from some confusion over weather curling had been an official event at the first Games, or whether it was what

they called a demonstration sport. You know, these are the events that are mostly there for promotional purposes and kind of build interest in these niche sports. Yeah. So, my friend Dave was a ski archer, and he was like tenth in the world and number one in the U S when we were in college. It's not a big sport here, but it is in Europe. And I was always hoping they'd make ski archery is sport just so I could watch him in the Olympics. But it never happened.

You know, I've met Dave before and he never bragged about this. I feel like I would start every conversation with I was number one in the world at the ski archery thing. But you know, it's weird to think about things that have been these demonstrations sports, like, you know, everything from pigeon racing and ballooning, to even volleyball and tennis, but at some point those were outsider sports. And also there was a sport called I think courfball. I don't know what that is, but I am a big fan

just because of the name. Anyway, some of the demonstration sports wind up becoming official events, but until they do, they actually don't give the winners of these the proper Olympic medals. So even though curling was played at the first Winter Olympics, it didn't reappear in the Games until nine and its first appearance became excepted, as you know, just being a demonstration event. So what changed over the

course of those eighties some years. Well, for some reason, the IOC did this deep dive into its records and they ruled that curling had actually been intended as part of the official program back in nine four. So even though the original team members were long gone by this point, they were given the long overdue honor of being upgraded

to these full Olympic gold medals. Well, I'm glad you brought up demo sports because I actually spent some time looking at old Winter Olympics and have you ever heard of skee during no is that like cor fall. It's exactly like cor falled skis. So this comes from the Games, but basically competitors on skis were pulled over jumps and

other obstacles by riderless horses. It was this one off event that never returned to the Olympics, but it actually still has a following and there's a World skee during Championship that's how in Whitefish, Montana every single year. I mean, I have to admit that sounds like a sport that happened by accident where somebody like fell off a horse and was still attached to it. But I've never heard of that. I mean, I did know that dogs made

an appearance. I think it was in the nineteen thirty two Winter Olympics that were like Placid, but this was just part of a demonstration for this sled dog racing, and so the sport re emerged at the fifty two Games in Oslo, but you surprisingly it never quite made it to official event status. Yeah, it's kind of crazy because sled dog racing seems like a natural fit. Yeah, I mean, I guess they always have the I did a odd but sadly for like a lot of other

sports that they don't have like their own championships. So so there's one called ski ballet or a cross ski and it was pretty much what the name suggests. So competitors take to a smooth slope and they performed these highly choreographed ski maneuvers. It's all set to music, which sounds awesome, right. It cropped off at two Winter Olympics.

It was shown in Calgary and eight eight, and then again in France and ninety two, but it never really found an audience, and in fact, the International Ski Federation for some reason stopped holding formal competition for the sport in two thousand and that's kind of when the dream of ski bellet died. I mean, it's kind of weird, but I'd probably watch it. In fact, I think i'd be really good at it. All right. Well, one of the weirdest official sports of the Winner Games was called

the Winter pent Tathlon. So in addition to cross country skiing and shooting, the event also featured get this, skiing, horseback riding, and of course fencing. How did this not catch on? Skis, horses, guns, swords, something for everyone? You're not kidding. I mean, I feel like everybody can find something awesome in this. But I suppose it was deemed a little too complicated for the Olympics. But it actually is still held every year as part of the Military

World Games. So here's an event that, despite fan outcry, was also deemed too complicated for the Winter Olympics. Chicken sled racing. All right, that can't be a real thing, No way, I know it's it's only sort of a thing. So a few years ago, KFC and this ad agency hired two members of the Team USA bobsled team to help promote their new chicken strips, and the brakeman for

the team is this guy. Jim Carriell was filmed eating chicken from the KFC Go Cup while racing down the track at seventy miles per hour with a fourth of five geese. So apparbably this is some sort of feat. According to carry All, no other bobsled team out there is pulling five g's while eating chicken, and more casual fans of chicken sled racing may not know the physical demands five geese puts on an athlete. Do you know how much an extra crispy strip weighs at five g's?

It's almost a half pound. Seriously, don't try this at home. I serious, he is with that. That's pretty great. Yeah, I am guessing the sport never made it to the demo phase though. Yeah, so, I mean, the company started this social media campaign that include this petition to make it an official event at the two eighteen Games, but as far as I know, it won't be debuting there. That's probably for the best. But all right, well, speaking of Bob's ledding, did you ever hear off of the

sport got its start? So there's actually kind of a three for here because there were two other winter sports that involved the icy track. You've got the luge the skeleton, and those can also be traced back to the same source. So, I mean, I know what loses. It's when there's like a single person on a sled face up and feet first. But remind me what skeleton again, it's pretty much the reverse, like you sled face down and face first, which is

just terrifying. It just made me like nervous thinking about it. I know me too, But the story is pretty strange as well. So apparently lose skeleton and Bob's letting all oh, this huge debt to a Swiss hotel owner. His name was Casper Badred and in the eighteen sixties Casper hit upon the idea of a winter resort and this was kind of a way to fill empty rooms during the

freezing winter months in St. Maren's. So he convinced English tourists that there was plenty of fun to be had by speeding through the town streets on kind of a modified sled that that happened to be popular at the time among local delivery boys. There was only one problem to this, and that's an mature sletters were routinely smacking into unsuspecting pedestrians. They were just trying to walk down the street, and I guess in some ways that wasn't

great for business. So Casper came up with a solution, and that was to construct this icy half pipe and so people could, you know, no longer have to reak havoc in the streets. And they started experimenting with new configurations.

They might, you know, strap two sleds together to make somewhat of a bob sled, and within a decade this recreational sledding had morphed into a few distinct competitive sports, and by the time the Winter Olympics rolled around in nineteen four bob sled or bob slay as they used to call it. It was kind of a natural inclusion on the program. That's kind of funny because it's actually

a similar thing that happened with the snowboard. So the basic idea of snowboards first cropped up in the eighteen hundreds, but they didn't become a commercial product. And I didn't realize this but until the nineteen sixties. And that's when a Michigan man named Sherman Poppins strapped two skis together to make a new kind of ride for his daughter, and you love this. He dubbed the invention the snurfer snurfer, and he's sold over a million of them in the

next decade. And then athletes made their own adjustments and improvements, just like what the bobs led, and then the sport became a full blown craze in the eighties and nineties. Also, I really do wish we could keep calling it snurfing. Man. Let's try to bring that back if we can. But it's wild to think about her recent a breakthrough something as familiar as snowboarding really is, and what's weird. It's

kind of the same with figure skating too. I mean, ice skating has been around for hundreds of years, but you know, the expressive acrobatic version that we think of with figure skaters, that didn't come around until the mid nineteenth century. And believe it or not, it was an

American who actually popularized it. The guy's name was Jackson Haynes, and he was looking for a way to combine his ballet dance training with ice skating at a time when most of the skaters were focusing on just doing these complex patterns in the ice and so moving gracefully to music and all the spinning and jumping. That was something that no ice skater was doing at the time, and it all seemed too theatrical, I guess for some people.

So this restrictor you frustrated Haynes, and so he left for Europe and this international style, as they started to describe it, it began to know thrill these audiences in London and Paris and other places that they were taking it, and so we cris crossed the European continent as this skating celebrity for over a decade and so today people remember him as the father of figure skating. I love

that anyway. I know there are plenty of other innovations connected to the Winter Olympics like we should probably talk about, but first let's take a little break. So Dave Burgart is a dear friend of mine. This is how far we go back. So I was on the studio abroad trip to Tibet, and I knew no one on the program. And as I was walking onto this bus as a total dork. I mean, I think I had a sketch pad in one hand and a ukulele and my other and I had this like ridiculous little suitcase while everyone

had these awesome hiking backpacks. And I by Dave and he was on this bus just playing with the Rubik's cube and he was wearing a coffields T shirt which was a little band from Delaware, and I thought, another cool dork. I found my people. But then, uh later, Dave was so humble about this, and I was shocked to learn he was number one in the country and ski archery and and the fact that it was a real athlete just blew me away. But that's what I

wanted to talk about today. So Dave Berger, welcome to the program. Thanks, we can we can debate real athlete with ski archery. So I'm always interested in these like fringe sports, and I'm so curious, like how did you even learn about ski archery and how do you get into it? Yeah, that's a good question. Um, So you know, obviously I grew up as a competitive archer. I was just like I think I was one of those kids.

I just went to summer camp and uh, you know picked up archery and you know, just fell in love with it. And it just happened like the camp counselor like lived down the street for me and he shot archery year round, and so he invited me to you know, start shooting with him, and so like in I don't know, elementary school, middle school, like I was kind of going around the East Coast doing all these archery tournaments. And

then like I hit high school and like archery is fun. Um, I learned a lot from it, but it was like a little bit too mellow, and all my friends are doing Nordic skiing and so I just picked it up and then like learned about it and I'm like, wait, I can combine these two things, and this really obscure sport like that sounds awesome and the most amazing then

diagram of things I'd never put together totally. Um and so yeah, and I just started racing in the the archery archery Bathron and like I just was at the right time, like it was starting to get bigger internationally and had some opportunities to start traveling and racing, and uh I did that from like to like two thousand and seven ish or so, I raced all over Europe in Russia, and uh yeah, it was it was a good experience. That's amazing. So when you started, how many

people were you competing against in the US? Like pretty small? I mean, you know, Nordic skiing is a pretty small niche. And then like if you add like biathlon, which is the sort of the cousin sport which just uses you know, my full instead of a bow and arrow, um, that's even smaller. And then if you like take it's like

even a smaller piece of that. And chess boxing, which you know is that where they're like rounds of chess and followed by boxing, Like it has to be an okay chess player, but it helps to be a really great boxer, like Mike Tryson would destroy Gary Kasparov. But do you have to be a better skier or archer and ski archery? Yeah, that's a good question. Um, I would probably say skier. You have to be good at both for sure. Um, but fast gears tended to do

better I think than just straight archers. Yeah. And and so I I know when you traveled abroad to competitions, families would put you up. Could you tell us about your Russian host family and how they welcomed you and you're computing there, man, Yeah, this crashed me up because you know, there's this one race I did in like

a Siberian outpost and uh there's like no hotel. So yeah, I was put up my host family, and uh, you know, I was like in shape and like kind of living a monk lifestyle, like eating pretty healthy, and they were so tipled to have like an American in their house.

They wanted to give me like the best hospitality possible, and they, like the night before the race, like insisted that I just take like vodka shot after vodka shot, and like then they're like heating up there like wood fired sauna, and like you know, like wouldn't accept like no for an answer. So I went out there and like kind of craziness just ensued with like a local policeman coming and all of a sudden that we were firing his gun that like pepsi cans in the backyard. Uh,

I was not in tip top race shape the next day. Um, but I didn't know if that was part of like my competitor's plan or what. But uh, you know, years later, like I don't think it mattered how it did in the race. It was a pretty fun story and cool cultural experience and uh yeah I felt really lucky. That's pretty awesome. So, um, we want to put you to a quiz because we always put our favorite guest to a quick So this is called real discontinued Olympic event

or something we made up? I love it? Okay, So so the first one is Tug of War? Is this a real discontinued event or something we made up? Oh? I am going to go real event. I bet. I bet in the old like you know, early, I can see this in early nineteen hundreds, I can see I can see Tug of War. Yeah, absolutely right. They had eight men team and England was particularly good at it, and it was from all right, one for one solo

synchronized swimming. I'm gonna have to go made up. I don't know if we so I thought it was it was fake too, but it's a real event. This is from and despite the name, apparently the synchronized is actually with the music and not with other people. Oh that is so good. Isn't that crazy? We missed our calling? Yeah, tandem horse dancing. Oh god, I want to say false, but after that last one threw me for a loop

tandem horse dancing, it's I have to say false. Yeah, it's false, but I wanted to be a real event for two men snow man construction. Uh two man, I'm gonna go false. I hope this is false. Yeah, a false and number five swimming obstacle. Course. Well, we've only had one true one so far. I don't know if that's too hm true. Yeah, that's right, so a corner guardian.

The discipline required swimmers to clamber over a poll hovering just above the surface of the water, scramble over a row of parked boats, and then swim under another row of little ships. And apparently people who grew up in Harbor's would tend to win this competition. That's amazing. Yeah, so Dave when astounding four for five, which entitles him to our top prize. A handwritten note to his wife for boss singing his praises Dave Burgart, thanks for being

on Part Time Genius. That's awesome, Thanks so much. Welcome back to Part Time Genius. So one thing I noticed while prepping for this episode is just many breakthrough innovations happened to coincide with the nineteen six winner Olympics, and it's not an exaggeration to say that the games would never be the same again after that year. It's a big statement, all right. So what kind of stuff are you thinking about? Well, for starters, nineteen sixty was the

year of the zamboni. The zambony, so like the thing on the hockey rinks and stuff. Yeah, so Frank Zamboni invented in nine and he used it at his family owned rank, and then it started to catch on with the public in the fifties, especially after Sonia Henny bought one to take along on her travels. And you remember Sonia Henny as the Norwegian young kid. I do remember her, and it was his name, really, Frank Zamboni. That's awesome. Yeah,

it was. And when it came time for the nineteen sixty Games, Zambonis were finally ready to make their Olympic debut, so they used Frank's patented method. The machine actually shaves the surface of the ice and then sweeps away the shavings and then it washes the ice though it's nice and slick for skaters, and all these years later, Zamboni's are still the gold standard. Yeah, it's an interesting fact. I'm still not a hundred percent convinced you didn't sneak that,

and just so you say, Zamboni. But anyway, what else was big for the NT six Games? Well, Zamboni, Well, the biggest game changer that year was that the Olympics were televised for the first time. And it's kind of hard to imagine today when you can watch round the clock live coverage of every single event, But until the nineteen sixties, or in the nineteen sixty Games in particular, the only people who could watch the Olympics were those who attended them. And that changed when CBS paid this tiny,

paltry some of fifty dollars for exclusive broadcasting. Yeah, I mean it's so little money, right, but it totally paid off for the network and they saw a record setting ratings that year, but the athletes and organizers actually benefited from it as well. So all right, so how's that well? I mean, there was some confusion during the men's slow and skiing event that year, and officials were unsure whether one of the skiers had actually missed a gate during

his run. But thanks to this new deal with the TV network, the officials actually had this chance to resolve the matter, and they asked members of the CBS team they could review the tape to confirm what had happened. CBS obliged, and in doing so, they actually came up with something that became indispensable in all sports, the instant replay. So that all started from the Winter Olympics. That's pretty cool. I guess you're accurate. So nineteen sixty was a pretty

big year for the Winter Games. But you know, actually one of my favorite innovations didn't come along until almost thirty years later. It was in the eighty eight Games in Calgary, and that was the year when the National Research Council of Canada devised a special all weather Olympic torch.

This was to be used in the traditional relay before the games and Onlike previous torches, this one was designed to be especially lightweight and it was powered by this special fuel that allowed the flame to stay lit during its eighty eight day, eleven thousand mile trip across the

Canadian tundra. That's amazing across the tundra, And actually it reminds me of something I read about this year's Olympic Torch relay, which is going on right now, but apparently in December, there was one leg where the torch was carried by the South Korean robot named Hubo. Wait is that allowed? I think it all had to be people, No, it can friendly And the best part was that Hubo used a power drill to cut a hole in the wall and then he passed the torch over to the

inventor who created him. That is a little bit ridiculous, but I mean also a good reminder that the Olympics can be, you know, pretty entertaining sometimes, especially when you add robots to the mix, which is something South Korea is going all in on this year. Yeah, you know, I was reading about how their Ministry of Science is working with these local companies and so they're rolling out

new technologies all through the games. Like apparently they've been testing these multi lingual and autonomous robots at the airports so they can guide visitors to correct gates or provide information about flight times. And then when they aren't busy with guests, they just roam around and clean things up. That's awesome, and so the hope is that the bots can be put to work in pyeong Chang as a

way to get visitors around this language barrier there. That's pretty neat, and from everything I read, this year's games are gonna be like this true Techi paradise. So aside from the full on robots, Huntai has these self driving buses that whisk visitors around the host city, and they've got a fleet of aerial drones they'll be watching over the proceedings. And that's not just to help broadcast events, but also for security purposes and maybe also part of

the entertainment offerings. I don't know, we'll find out. But the thing that will catch most nerds attention is that the Winner Olympics will be the test site for the new five G mobile network, and so most of us won't be able to connect to this new platform until but for those in attendance, the network will actually provide data speeds up to a thousand times faster than the current networks. I mean that's fast enough to download almost a gig of data in a single second. That's pretty well.

All right. Well, we we've talked about some of these very you know, tech heavy innovations that we should be seen, but there are also some non tech based first that we should look forward to as well. There was one of I was reading about. You know, for example, Adam Rippen will compete in figure skating as the first openly gay mail athlete to represent the US and the Winter Olympics, which is kind of hard to believe that it's not

until this year that that's happening. But you know, all the next activity aimed at homosexual athletes during the two thousand fourteen Games and so chi Adams performance and hopefully will be an uplifting moment for many people at this year's event. Yeah, and one of the first I'm most looking forward to this year is Nigeria's debut at the Winter Olympics. The African nation will become the latest warm weather country to buck the cold climate trend. And that's

all thanks to its women's bobsled team. Oh wow, so it's kind of like Cool Runnings all over again. Yeah, definitely. And and just like with the famous Jamaican bobsled team, Nigeria's team is a total labor of love. So they actually crowdsourced the seventy dollars they needed on go fund me for like sleds and equipment and fees. And according to the sled driver, her name is um Sean Ottagon

and anyway, this is her quote. I was inspired to start the Nigerian women's bobsled team in hopes of being the first ever African representative men or women to qualify for the Winter Olympic Games. And the sport of bob

sled mission accomplished on that one. That's pretty neat and I can't wait to see how they do, you know, this year more than others, I'm really looking forward to the Games, and you know, things feel pretty divided these days, so it does seem extra important to have this event where people from all different regions and all different cultures they can come together and kind of celebrate what humanity is capable of and and to do so in this

friendly spirit of competition that the Olympics is really all about I know, and in South Korea, you know that's yeah, no kidding. But well, I know the opening ceremonies are still a few weeks away, but what do you say we kick things off early with the men's freestyle fact off event? You know what, mega, I say, let the games begin. H So did you know that only one person has one gold at both the Winter and Summer

Olympics and that honor goes to American Eddie Egan. He won the light heavyweight boxing event in the nineteen twenty Olympics, and over a decade later, he was part of the four man bob's led team that took gold at Lake Placid. There are three other athletes that have won men alls in winter and Summer, but again, it is the only

one to take gold at both. So I know, we were just talking about the Jamaican bobsled team that got so much attention for the Calgary Olympics and cool runnings, and you know, the team was kind of a punchline for a while, but they eventually won their fans over because of their hard work and determination. But what I didn't remember, and what most people probably don't remember, is that the team still competes and they've actually gotten much better.

In fact, only six years after those games, the Jamaican team actually beat both US teams in the event. Wow. I didn't know that either, all right, So, which country is most dominant in a single sport? I was looking into this and you may remember that four years ago and Sochy, the long track speed skaters from the Netherlands, took home something like se of the medals in that sport.

I mean, just completely dominant. But the Atlantic was looking back at medals over the past eleven Olympics and they found that the most dominant country in a single sport those would be Germany's losers, and they took home something like thirty seven percent of medals over that period of time. I should note this would include East and West Germany as well as the unified Germany, so they did get to have more competitors over that period of time. But

that's still pretty remarkable. Yeah, that's amazing. So the only winter sport where an American athlete has never meddled is the biathlon. Um, but you know, I have a feeling that they're going to pull it off this year. But I mean, the truth is I'm saying that, like I know anyone who competes. I don't even know exactly who does that, but I hope that we win one there. So all right, Well, earlier we mentioned Norway being a powerhouse in the Winter Olympics, and it's even more impressive

if you look at their performance per capita. But approximately five million citizens, they're roughly the same size as my home state of Alabama, and they've won approximately one Winter Olympic medal for every seventeen thousand residents. Now that made I don't know if that sounds like much or not, but compare that to the U S where it's one for every one point two million. So I like the fact, but I can actually top it. And that's because everyone

forgets about Lichtenstein. I forgot about Lichtenstein. So they've won a total of nine medals, all in alpine skiing, and that's actually close to one for every people there. That is pretty crazy that one out of every people that live there has won a medal. That is, it's on all the recruiting materials. Well, man, go, I have to admit it. You you have won it. You win this week's fact Off Trophy. Thank you so much. Well, thank

you guys for listening. That's it for today. If we forgot any great facts about the Winter Olympics or just the Olympics in general, we'd love to hear from you. It's Part Time Genius at how stuff Works dot Com. You can always call us on our seven fact hotline. It is still seven mangoes. That's awesome one eight four four pt Genius. You can also hit us up on Facebook or Twitter. Thanks so much for listening, Thanks again

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