Word: began
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Speak to enough good people from the Netherlands, however, and you begin to appreciate their love of the sport. Ice-skating began more than 1,000 years ago, on the frozen canals and waterways of Scandinavia and Holland. By the 1600s, speed skating became a useful form of transportation for the Dutch, who used their blades to travel between villages. The Netherlands doesn't get much snow, and there are no mountains, so skiing is out of the question. But it gets cold, and the county's frozen winter waterways offer ample opportunities for outdoor skating. "In Holland, kids learn...
...normal weekend day Whistler draws about 20,000 skiers. Barely 10,000 made it up the slopes the weekend before the Games began. It's an oddity known in the business as "Olympic aversion." Two million people are scheduled to descend on the Vancouver area to watch the Olympic Games over the next two weeks, but although the competition is staged at one of the world's great ski areas, very few visitors will actually ski. "The snow is spectacular. The town is Olympic ready, Games ready. The energy is off the charts," says Bill Jensen, CEO of Intrawest...
...ceremony began with a film of a snowboarder gliding down a high alpine peak - before he slid down a giant faux hill into the arena of 60,000 spectators. During the cultural portion of the evening, Canadian singer K.D. Lang gave a virtuoso performance (Nelly Furtado, not so much). Another highlight was the stadium's virtual floor, which transformed into a vast ice floe that appeared to break apart and disperse, revealing a virtual ocean across which whales swam in 3-D. (See 25 Winter Olympic athletes to watch...
Hours before the ceremony began, Nodar Kumaritashvili, a 21-year-old luger from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, died after a high-speed crash during a training run at the Whistler Sliding Center, north of Vancouver. On the final turn of the track, Kumaritashvili lost control of his sled, struck an inside wall and was catapulted over the low outer wall of the track, into an unpadded steel support column. His sled was traveling at 88 m.p.h. The ghastly replay of the accident was shown several times on Canadian national television. Viewers screamed when they saw the clip...
Before the ceremony began, the public-address announcer declared that the event would be dedicated to Kumaritashvili. The crowd gave the small clutch of Georgian athletes, clearly saddened and wearing black armbands in honor of their fallen teammate, a classy standing ovation as they entered the arena. Toward the end of the evening, International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said a few words in Kumaritashvili's honor before the torch was lit: he genuinely seemed to be struggling...