Word: cypress
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...their first week, the Vancouver Olympic Games looked well on their way to a gold medal in winter calamity--tragedy on the luge track, slush on the downhill course at Whistler and drenching rain on Cypress Mountain that eventually washed away the standing-room spectator zone, costing organizers around $1.4 million in refunded ticket sales. The signature snafu may be this: the Canadians couldn't make ice. A men's speed-skating final had to be halted for more than an hour because two ice-resurfacing machines were in various degrees of breakdown--sort of like the Games themselves. Still...
...White, meanwhile, reached into his deep bag of snowboarding tricks during his gold-medal run at Cypress Mountain on Wednesday night. On the routine that clinched his second straight Olympic half-pipe gold, his amplitude - the term snowboarders use to describe the aerial distance they fly off the 22-ft. half-pipe - far exceeded that of the other competitors. He executed back-to-back double corks (two flips and three body revolutions, like a corkscrew) on his winning run. Although he had already clinched the title, on his second run White still went all out and landed the Double McTwist...
...weather, according to the racers, was at the root of the problem. During the early qualification runs, fog mucked with visibility. And all the well-publicized rain and warm temperatures that descended upon Cypress Mountain, which sits about 30 minutes from downtown Vancouver, added to the course's difficulty. "It's challenging because the snow is so slushy," said Simona Meiler from Switzerland, who fell twice during her first qualification run and got a fat, bloody lip. "It's hard to keep your balance. You're not allowed to make any mistakes." (See 25 Olympic athletes to watch...
Weather has also been one of the big stories here. Cypress Mountain, which hosts the half-pipe and mogul skiing events, is so barren of snow the white stuff had to be trucked in from the colder reaches of the Great White North. At Whistler, it's been raining at the bottom of the mountain, which washed away the schedules for the men's downhill and the women's super combined events. In Olympic events, you ski to the bottom of the hill, and the bottom was slushy. (See TIME's full coverage of Vancouver...