Hop Suisse

Travels

We just got back from Turin where we were showing our Olympic spirit. We didn’t show true American spirit because we didn’t actually buy a flag to wave around or paint our faces, but we did cheer for them and punch people from Norway. No, that’s a lie. No punching. It was an exhausting long weekend, but we got some good memories out of it.

We made the Olympic decision just a very short time ago and even Chiz (the vacation planning expert) had a tough time getting lodging arrangements. She ended up finding a woman willing to vacate her apartment for the weekend while we took over. We left Tolsty an extra bowl of grub and took off Thursday morning. 5 hours later and one train switch in Milan we were in downtown Turin. The neighborhood the apartment was in was a bit sketchy but it was only a 10 minute walk from the train station we just arrived at. There are three train stations in Turin and we didn’t realize how familiar we were about to become with each one of them. We will call this first station “train station 1”. The woman was super friendly and was fascinated that Americans were living in Europe. Canadians? Sure. Aussies? Of course. Americans? Never. Anywho, after we convinced her we were legit she rolled out of there and we had free reign of the place. It was pretty cozy place, but the shower was about as European as you could get, which is to say it was very very odd and the contortions necessary to clean yourself were not worth the effort. I missed a couple showers this weekend. Here’s a view off the ‘deck’.

We spent the remainder of that day running from place to place to try to get a hold of the tickets that we bought online. We didn’t buy them in a single order so they were all being tracked differently and we only had one set in our possession by the time we left Zurich. We never did find an open ticket office that night. For that matter, I’m not sure we found a single person who understood what we were even trying to do. English wasn’t as popular here as we have been used to. Thankfully, it didn’t end up being a big deal and we were able (with only a slight scare at ski jumping) to get the tickets at the venues. We did get to see a fair amount of the city that first day though. Pretty nice. Pretty nice.

They set up a large screen in Piazza San Carlo that was a big hit.

This was also the square where the Today Show set was at, but we never saw Roker. Just these nuts trying to get on camera in the background.

There were a ton of sidewalks like this.

On to the games. Our event schedule looked like this:

Women’s snowboard cross – Friday 10am-2:50pm
Men’s curling – Friday 7pm-10pm
Ski jump long hill finals – Saturday 6pm-8pm

Looks like a pretty laid back schedule, eh? We thought so too. But now imagine if Seattle claimed they were hosting the Winter Olympics and then held some of the events at Stevens and Crystal. You’ve just imagined the 2006 Winter Olympics from our perspective. We spent so much time on buses, trains, and shuttles that we seriously had to question the worthitude a couple times.

The first event was snowboard cross out in a far away magical place called Bardonecchia. We learned the night before that Bardonecchia was accessible from train station 2 so this meant we would need to bus it there or take a train from station number 1 in the wee hours of the morn. We opted for the bus and were out the door before 6 am. The train ride was about an hour and 15 minutes. After that, we were herded onto a bus and driven to the venue. Then for some reason, they drive right by the venue up the mountain a bit more and drop you off a good half mile away where you are then forced to walk down a slippery snow trail to get to the security area before entering. We only had time to throw back a couple hot dogs and settled into our seats right before the event started.

The event itself was super cool. We didn’t really even know what snowboard cross was before. I guess it is like motor-cross (or whatever) with dirt bikes but with snowboards. The qualification rounds are done solo, but the real fun starts when they put four ladies at a time on the trail and race to the bottom. There were a ton of spectacular crashes and impressive athleticism. We watched most of it from the huge screen they had mounted there because you could really only see the final few jumps of the run. But like any live sport, what you actually miss seeing is usually made up for by the enthusiasm of the crowd.

The Swiss were everywhere at these games.

So were the Italians.

Our view of the course.

Getting some air.

Getting some more air.

I don’t know if any of you have heard how this event turned out yet, but it really was something. Not even knowing what the sport was we obviously had no idea about any of the participants, but we did like that there was an American gal in the mix to cheer for. Her name is Linsday Jacobellis and she put in some pretty decent solo times and finished second in her semifinal heat to make it to the final four for the medal race. Pretty good odds with 4 peeps and 3 medals to be had. There was a Canadian gal named Maelle Ricker who was shaping up to be the one to beat though. She was easily whipping up everybody in the previous rounds. Then the race started and for some reason Ricker just decided to jump off the course near the top and go crashing through a barrier. Not sure I would have played it that way, but it seemed like a good sign for Ms. America so we were happy. Lindsay jumped out to a bit of a lead and then the other two gals kind of made some contact that slowed them down. Wow. It was all happening. Lindsay built a pretty decent lead now and everybody was screaming and cheering and getting all excited. And then instead of just coasting home to an easy gold, she decided to get all fancy and go for a board grab on the second to last jump and she completely eats it. Bad move. Arrogant move. The Swiss chick blew by her and took the gold. We were able to witness all of this live because it was so near the bottom, but in my excitement I didn’t really have the camera ready to catch the fall. I did get the little loser coasting in for a silver medal. She’s probably crying in her helmet here.

Little arrogant loser.

Good times, but the day wasn’t over. Curling was next on our list and we had about 4 hours to get there. No problem, you say? Well maybe you weren’t aware that the Curling venue was in a far away magical place called Pinerolo. I won’t go overboard here with the details from here, but just know “train station 3” came into play at this stage and we entered the arena at the exact moment the participants were being introduced.

Curling was a total blast. There were four games happening this night. Italy vs. New Zealand, Sweden vs. Great Briton, Finland vs. Canada, and USA vs. Switzerland. I think it was just the second day of a big round robin tournament so there were no medals at stake, but the crowd didn’t care and it was very interesting to watch. It isn’t too difficult a sport to understand, but the strategy can be pretty complex and we made up a couple rules as we followed along. Look at some of this insane Olympic action.

It is imperative that the dudes sweeping ahead of the stone are screamed at as loud as possible.

When things were looking bleak, team USA stripped off the blue jackets, called a timeout, and pointed at the stones with their brooms.

There was a fairly decent US fan contingent here. They got into it, too. Brought a tear to my eye.

And although I only caught them on film during a somber moment, the Swiss were actually very animated all evening. The Swiss chant is “Hop Suisse, Hop Suisse, Hop Suisse”. I think it just means “Go Switzerland”. The dude with the drum kept them on rhythm.

And what would a sporting event be without an overpriced Bud? Well, I suppose you could ask anybody else in this entire arena that question since only us and one Canadian dude were drinking any.

We were a bit upset though that Chizzy’s brother George never told us he was the captain of the US Curling team. Might have been able to score us some tickets.

Thanks for filling us in, bud.

“Hop Suisse” that.

So, we trained back to station 3, trained over to station 2, bused over to station 1, and got in the door about 11:30 that night. Thankfully we got to sleep in Saturday morning, but this was our only chance to try to see a bit more of the city and do some shopping so we forced ourselves to get going. We did see a bit more and ducked into a few shops, but we were feeling kind of bad about being in Italy for a couple days already and only eating potato chips and shrink wrapped sandwiches from train station kiosks. There is no possible way we could have known it, but we picked the wrong restaurant. The food was fine, but it took almost two hours to actually get it so we ate into the rest of our free time and ended up running to train station 2. Stress level was fairly high at this point. A two hour wait for food will do that to you.

The ski jumping venue was located at a far away and magical place called Pragelato. This also required a train station 2 to train station 3 hop before heading back out towards Pinerolo. Here though, we were herded onto a bus for an hour ride to Pragelato. Again, they figure the best place to drop you off is over a kilometer away from the seating and we finally plopped down in our seats having missed just the first two of the 75 jumps that evening. One of those was the American though. Guess it wasn’t very good, because we didn’t see him again.

Yeah, it’s pretty insane. The lines mark 110, 125, and 140 meters and that hill is STEEP. They clock the speed of the jumpers as well and they get going about 95 km/hr. Not bad.

This is a human being jumping down a snow covered mountain on two sticks.

This guy wasn’t landing at the 140 mark. Only one guy did that all night and that was the gold medal winner from Austria. The crowd really enjoyed that.

It was a quick two hours and knowing we still had a few hours of public transportation yet to endure, we concluded the ski jumping event was a major disappointment. This was compounded by the astronomical price of the tickets, which I am too embarrassed to disclose here.

After getting back to Turin, we found ourselves smack dab in the middle of “White Night”. It’s this once a year event where all the shops are open until 6am and many of the streets are closed to traffic. I can honestly say I have never seen so many people crowding the streets in my life. There was even a moment when we tried to get around a corner where it seemed conceivable crushing and stampedes were only one mistake away. It probably wasn’t nearly this bad in reality, but after a weekend of being packed into confined spaces for hours on end we were not in a crowded party mood. We stumbled in the door after midnight.

So anyway, I am writing this fresh off the 5 hour train ride back to Zurich so my mood is still a bit dour. The events themselves were really fun to watch and it is our own fault for not realizing how far away everything was. Our advice to anybody thinking of doing any Olympic games is to pick events that last all day so you can just park yourself somewhere and enjoy it. Personally, we probably won’t even think about going to the Winter Olympics for 4 more years.