These 5 things actually happened at the Olympics
Much of the talk about Sochi has turned from the weird problems visitors have experienced to the athletes themselves.
That doesn’t mean crazy things aren’t happening in the Olympic venues, though. Here are five weird things to be aware of from over the weekend:
Bobsledder goes Kool-Aid man on door, gets trapped in elevator
U.S. Olympic bobsledder Johnny Quinn keeps getting stuck.
Quinn, who famously busted his way out of a locked bathroom at the athlete’s village earlier at the Sochi Games, has apparently gotten himself into another jam, this time in an elevator.
Quinn posted a photo on his Twitter account showing him, wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and U.S.A. baseball cap, trying to pry open the elevator doors. He wrote, “No one is going to believe this but we just got stuck in an elevator.”
A team spokesperson verified that Quinn did indeed get caught stuck in an elevator before dinner, but got out without having to destroy anything.
Interpreters, be warned: “Stoked” means “drunk” in Russian
Volunteer interpreters scrambling to communicate while transcribing quotes for the Olympic News Service. Journalists fighting over which language athletes should speak when they answer questions. And the jargon of youth — how the heck do you say “stoked” in Russian?
One of the interpreters told Al Jazeera the problem with stoked is that “we used the word for ‘under the influence of alcohol,’ which is kind of like ‘under the fly.’”
American gold medalist snowboarder Sage Kotsenburg forced interpreters to translate that seven times on Monday, in seven languages besides English for those listening on headsets in tongues they could understand.
The 20-year-old from Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, who trains in Park City, Utah also dropped a “sick” while approving Great Britain’s women’s slopestyle bronze. The word became “slick” in a transcript later distributed to journalists.
Russian athlete forgets she isn’t wearing a shirt under her suit
Speed skater Olga Graf won Russia’s first medal Sunday when she took a surprising bronze in the women’s 3,000 meters.
When Graf’s time flashed on the scoreboard, she whooped it up on her warm-down lap, then unzipped her skin-tight suit right down to the belly button.
She was wearing nothing underneath.
“I totally forgot,” Graf said sheepishly through a translator. “We have very good suits and they are very tight. … You just want to breathe and you want to take off your suit.”
When she realized her faux pas, Graf quickly zipped the suit back up with a mortified smile.
“Only afterward,” she said, “did I realize that maybe this video will appear on YouTube. But I don’t think it will be so bad.”
Russian snowboarder puts phone number on helmet, phone crashes
Alexey Sobolev failed to make the slopestyle finals Saturday morning, but his performance wasn’t the reason everyone was talking about him.
The 22-year-old Russian put his phone number on his helmet before his qualifying run on Thursday. The onslaught of incoming messages — many of them photos of naked women — was so intense it crashed his iPhone.
“I’ve got a collection of pictures,” he told a USA Today reporter. “It’s really boring in the Olympic Village, you know?”
The brand police are out
Olympic workers are swooping on reporters sitting in competition venues with Apple laptops, and hastily taping over the iconic logo with duct tape.
In fact, any laptop that isn’t made by official sponsor Samsung is likely to face an Olympic cover-up. Apple iPads escape the tape treatment only if they are lying flat on the media tables in the venues.
Outside, the three-cornered star on the front grille of a Mercedes van is also masked by packing tape. Volkswagen is the official supplier of vehicles to Sochi 2014.
Olympic organizers go to great lengths to prevent ambush marketing, and have covered non-sponsor emblems at previous games. In London, even toilet logos were taped over by Olympic workers, despite the fact there was no competing cistern sponsor.
Reviewjournal.com contributed to this report.
