There have been reports out of Sochi that the Russian government hired a company to kill all of the stray dogs ahead of the Olympics.
While journalists have seen dead dogs laying in the streets, some of the strays are still around, and one wandered on to the cross country skiing course and started barking at the athletes (video via Sport Express):
U.S. skier Bode Miller told the Associated Press that construction work where the ski team is staying isn't finished yet.
Unlike the vast majority of athletes in Sochi, the ski team made its own accommodations for the Olympics rather than staying in the athletes' village.
While the village is 100% built, many of the hotels aren't, and it's leading to some horror stories.
"My experience so far has been good. I mean, our area is not quite finished, I wouldn't say,"he said.
He continued by saying the work going on "was very rushed, is what you get the impression of; that everything isn't quite done; they could use a little bit more time."
Miller also mentioned that late-stage construction work was going on in Salt Lake City in 2002. He doesn't seem too up in arms.
Heidi Kloser, a medal contender for moguls skiing, will not be able to compete in the Olympics after fully tearing her ACL and fracturing her femur during a practice run before qualifications on Thursday, according to ESPN.
21-year-old Kloser, who was ready to compete in her first Olympics, and her parents rode in the ambulance off the mountain to the hospital together. Mike Kloser, her father, wrote about the heartbreaking ride on Facebook (via Deadspin):
"When she was in the ambulance, she asked Emily and me if she was still an Olympian.... We said of course she is!"
Just devastating.
Kloser placed fourth at the World Cup and was a serious medal contender, just second in line for the U.S. behind Hannah Kearney. Kloser's father told the Vail Daily that his daughter hopes to walk with her teammates in today's opening ceremony.
Here's Mike Kloser's ful Facebook post:
Heidi also shared the news on her own Facebook page:
UPDATE: It looks like Kloser is walking in the opening ceremony:
Heading to Opening Ceremonies! Excited that I will still get to walk! #Olympics#TeamUSA#Sochi2014#icepic.twitter.com/84UyT8akSa
— Heidi Kloser (@HeidiKloser) February 7, 2014In ski jumping, it's all about how far you fly.
Skiers initially hold their bodies in a position that reduces air drag in order to gain as much speed as possible coming down the take-off ramp, or in-run. But once in the air, athletes change their posture and the position of their skis to maximize air lift, which increases the length of their jump.
Ski jumpers used to hold their skis parallel to each other, but learned that they could catch more of the air pushing up underneath them if they separated their skis, with the tails pointing toward each other. This V shape has been the standard style since the 1990s.
"Skiers are trying to play glider," Louis Bloomfield, a physicist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, told Inside Science back in 2010. "You push the air down, the air pushes back, pushes you upward."
Ski jumping techniques have changed dramatically over the last 200 years, but all Olympic medalists use the V Style today.
A Brief History
In the beginning, skiers used an "upright style." Skiers stood straight up during the jump and "would sail down the hill upright," Wayne Johnson writes in his book "White Heat: The Extreme Skiing Life." In 1860, Norwegian Sondre Norheim, widely-known as the father of ski jumping, set the world distance record at 99 feet using this method.
The Kongsberger technique, developed by Norwegians Jacob Thulin Thams and Sigmund Ruud, replaced the upright style after World War I. The skier's upper body is bent at the hips with an extreme forward lean, the arms are extended in front (as if the athlete is diving over his or her skis), and the skis are parallel to each other. The technique improved the jumping distance from around 150 feet to more than 300 feet.
The next big improvement came in the mid-1950s from Andreas Daescher of Switzerland. In the Daescher style the arms were placed backward next to the body. The skis were still parallel. This held on as the standard in ski jumping for at least three decades.
Changing The Game
The turning point came in 1985 when Swedish jumper Jan Bokloev introduced the "V Style." The skis are placed in a "V" shape, rather than parallel, and the head is placed down between the skis. The modification led to greater jumping distances. It also enabled the skier to land at a safer speed, reducing the chances of injury.
According to Johnson, wind tunnel tests showed that the V Style improved air lift by 28 percent, meaning the jumper can remain in the air for a longer period of time. "Now skiers were routinely jumping well over distances of five hundred feet on 'ski-flying' hills such as Suicide in Michigan," he wrote.
Computer simulations by Japanese researchers show that during early flight phase, the lift is much higher when the skis are splayed in a V than when the skis are parallel (called classic style in the chart).
However, during the later phase of flight, the V produces a larger drag, helping the athlete to slow down on the landing.
The V Style was not immediately embraced. It resulted in longer jumps, but fewer style points since it broke the standard of parallel skis. (Polish jumper Miroslaw Graf was first to experiment with the V Style in 1969, but it went unrecognized since it wandered from what was considered the ideal style of the time.)
According to the official Olympic website: "Initially ridiculed, this technique proved so successful that by 1992 all Olympic medalists were using this style."
This post is part of a continuing series that answers all of your "why" questions related to science. Have your own question? Email dspector@buisnessinsider with the subject line "Q&A" or tweet @BI_Science or post to our Facebook page.
SEE ALSO: Why We Grunt At The Gym
Before competing in his fifth Winter Olympics, 36-year-old Bode Miller dropped 20 pounds by eating a low-carb diet and doing intense conditioning workouts on the beach in San Diego, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Miller wanted to drop the weight so that he could be more agile and quick on the technical slalom competitions. He explained to the WSJ, while weight is good for downhill events, being thinner is better for the more technically difficult runs:
"We're not going in a straight line. If we were just speed skiing then definitely being heavier would certainly help but you are changing direction the whole way down, and in Sochi fitness is going to be a huge component."
So far, Miller's plan is working. At a practice run in Sochi, Miller had the fastest time of all the downhill skiers finishing in 2 minutes and 7.75 seconds, according to the L.A. Times. The decorated Olympian told the Times:
“I was psyched to show up to see the course in such good shape after all the speculative talk about marginal snow conditions, or the changes that were going to have to be made. I think the hill is the toughest we’ve seen this year.”
Miller has already won five Olympic gold medals and, at a lighter weight, he is looking to add more to his collection in Sochi.
Here's the finish line after Saturday's women's cross-country skiing event, the skiathlon 7.5 km classic + 7.5 km free.
The three medalists, Norway's Marit Bjoergen, Sweden's Charlotte Kalla, and Norway's Heidi Weng, are all in there, as well as the athletes who finished fourth and fifth.
Cross-country is so physically grueling that athletes traditionally collapse the second they cross the finish line.
It makes for some surreal photos:
SEE ALSO: The Gold Medal Favorites In Every Single Olympic Event
After posting the fastest time of any competitor in training, American skier Bode Miller missed the podium in what was likely the last Olympic downhill race of his career.
Miller got off to a dream start, leading the gold-medal pace by 0.31 seconds through the upper part of the course.
But he faded in the lower part of the course, and finished 8th.
Things began to go wrong for the 36-year-old when he smashed into a gate panel at 1 minute, 25 seconds into his run.
He's known for his aggressiveness, but he may have taken too tight a line here:
Cut it too close (via the BBC):
From there he steadily lost speed, and finished well outside medal position.
"One gate and the speed was gone ... that's racing,"said American skier Julia Mancuso, who was analyzing the event on Twitter.
Mattius Mayer of Austria took gold, Italy's Christof Innerhofer won silver, and Kjetil Jansrud of Norway won bronze. Aksel Lund Svindal, the heavy favorite, finished fourth. The final standings:
Miller, one of the most decorated American ski racers ever, will almost certainly finish his career with one medal in the downhill, a bronze in 2010.
He looked devastated at the finish line:
SEE ALSO: The Gold Medal Favorites In Every Single Olympic Event
The Dufour-Lapointe family won as many Olympic medals as the entire United States on the first day of competition in Sochi.
Canadian sisters Justine Dufour-Lapointe (age 19) and Chloe Dufour-Lapointe (22) won gold and silver, respectively, in women's moguls, upsetting the defending champion Hannah Kearney.
There's actually a third Dufour-Lapointe sister, Maxime, who finished 12th in the event.
They shared a beautiful moment on the medal podium, holding hands as they took the stage.
"I saw Chloe and I took her hand," Justine told the Toronto Star. "We’ll live that moment together."
What a photo, from Getty:
These two are great.
Justine after winning:
SEE ALSO: The Gold Medal Favorites In Every Single Olympic Event
Graham Bell, a former Olympic skier who now works for the BBC, went down the Olympic downhill skiing course in Sochi and took a crazy first-person video.
The downhill course is intense this year.
On Saturday, American skier Bode Miller said the course "could kill you."
"The top is aggressive, speeds are so high and the turns are so swingy and bumpy ... It's very treacherous ... This course has teeth everywhere,"he told the BBC.
The first-person video is terrifying if you're not an Olympic-level skier. He's absolutely flying down the hill:
SEE ALSO: The Gold Medal Favorites In Every Single Olympic Event
American skier Julia Mancuso won bronze in the women's super combined on Monday, and she was very excited.
The super combined consists of one downhill run and one slalom run. Mancuso was a huge underdog because she never competes in slalom. Since 2012 she has participated in one World Cup slalom event, and failed to qualify for the final.
Despite all that, she gave herself a shot at a medal in Sochi with a blistering downhill run Monday morning. She was much slower than her competitors in the slalom, but hung on to win bronze.
She was PUMPED. Winning a bronze medal is an exercise in adjusting expectations. The disparity between winning a medal and not winning a medal in the Olympics is larger than the disparity between the medals themselves.
You always want to come in first, but there's a unique joy in the bronze. Proof:
Nothing like a bronze:
Canadian freestyle skier Yuki Tsubota crashed and had to be carried from the Rosa Khutor course on a stretcher during the women's slopestyle on Tuesday.
The slopestyle course has been a source of criticism throughout the Olympics. Snowboarders called it "sketchy" and dangerous" in training, with "obnoxiously tall" kickers that push it over the edge. Shaun White dropped out of the event of safety concerns. We've seen a number of snowboarders take hard falls in competition, and now a skier has as well.
During her final run in the skiing slopestyle finals, Tsubota didn't get enough length on her last jump, and landed on the "knuckle"— the flat part of the hill right above the landing area.
She hit feet-first, one of her skis popped off, and it appeared that her knee hit her in the face, knocking off her goggles.
She is being examined for a broken jaw, the Canadian ski federation told Will Graves of the Associated Press.
The crash (via BBC):
Safety personnel immediately rushed to her side:
The moment right after the fall:
The medical team got her off the mountain quickly:
Awful:
Canada's Alex Bilodeau immediately ran over to his brother Frederic to celebrate his gold medal in men's moguls on Monday.
The two-time Olympic champion had some profound things to say about his brother, who has cerebral palsy, after the competition.
We'll just let the quotes speak for themselves (via Phillip O'Connor of Reuters):
"The motivation that he has, if he had had the chances like I did, he would have been four times Olympic champion. He's a great inspiration, a great person and he's going to be an inspiration for me after my career also."
"Every little thing in life is hard for him, whether it's going from his seat to go and see me here, walking in the snow, it takes so much energy, it's very hard. I always complain, and he has every reason in the world to complain and he never does. And why is that? He enjoys life, he takes the best out of it."
Alex called it a "perfect run."
He yanked his brother out of the crowd after winning gold. Great moment:
Regardless of whether they win gold, athletes at this year's Winter Olympics will no doubt expend a significant number of calories as they try to ski, jump and skate their way past the competition.
But which winter sport burns the most calories?
According to the Compendium of Physical Activities, a standardized list of the calories burned during many different types of activities, the title goes to cross-country skiing. An elite racer who weighs 220 lbs. (100 kilograms) would burn about 260 calories during 10 minutes of cross-country skiing at a pace of at least 8 mph (13 km/h), according to the Compendium. [Infographic: Calories Burned by Winter Sports Activities]
Other winter sports near the top of the list include figure skating, which burns 245 calories in 10 minutes, and competitive speed skating, which burns about 230 calories in 10 minutes.
Lower down on the list are downhill skiing, which burns about 140 calories per 10 minutes, bobsledding/luge, which burns about 122 calories, and curling, which burns 70 calories.
In comparison, excited spectators will burn about 60 calories in 10 minutes just watching the action, according to the list.
Cross-country skiing, figure skating and speed skating are aerobic activities that require a significant amount of oxygen consumption, so they burn more calories, said Richard Cotton, an exercise physiologist and national director of certification at the American College of Sports Medicine.
Other sports, such as sledding and curling, require less oxygen consumption and thus burn fewer calories, Cotton told Live Science. But these latter sports rely more on other aspects of athleticism, such as coordination, he said.
During competition, Olympic athletes likely burn more calories than what's listed in the Compendium, because their high level of fitness means they have the ability to consume more oxygen than the average person, Cotton said. "They have an eight cylinder, whereas most of us have six," he said.
But during practice, an Olympic athlete would likely burn fewer calories than an average athlete doing the same activity, because Olympic-level athletes likely have more efficient techniques, and can do the same activity with less effort, Cotton said.
Follow Rachael Rettner @RachaelRettner. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.
Copyright 2014 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
SEE ALSO: Why Ski Jumpers Fly In A "V" Shape
This is everything that's great about the Olympics.
In the finals of the men's cross country skiing sprint, Russia's Anton Gafarov crashed but still managed to finish the race thanks to Canadian coach Justin Wadsworth, who ran onto the course to help him.
Garafov finished nearly three minutes behind the leaders, but the Russian crowd gave him a standing ovation as he crossed the finish line.
Here's how it went down.
Wadsworth explained why he ran onto the course in an interview with the Toronto Star:
"It was like watching an animal stuck in a trap. You can’t just sit there and do nothing about it. ... I wanted him to have dignity as he crossed the finish line."
DON'T MISS: What 19 Olympic Athletes Do For A Living
SEE ALSO: The Gold Medal Favorites In Every Single Olympic Event
For the first time ever, women will compete in ski jumping will be an event at the Winter Olympics.
In years past, the International Olympic Committee has refused to add the sport to the games, saying that it was too small, with too few competitors.
It's true. Women's ski jumping has been a small sport with limited infrastructure for regular high-level competition.
But a big reason for that is an outrageously antiquated misconception of women's reproductive health.
To put it more bluntly, people thought ski jumping would mess up your uterus.
"Don't forget, it's like jumping down from, let's say, about two meters on the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view," Gian Franco Kasper, president of the International Ski Federation, told NPR in 2005.
This theory — that physical activity can make women infertile — has been around since the Victorian era.
In her book Playing The Game: Sport and Physical Emancipation of English Women, Kathleen E. McCrone talks about Donald Walker, who wrote a book called Physical Exercises for Ladies in 1836.
Walker argued that women should engage in "restrained and non-violent" exercise to protect their "peculiar function of multiplying the species."
McCrone says this typifies the dominant view of the period:
"Because all women's parts, tissues, and fibres were finer and more delicate than men's, because their grace, beauty, and gentleness had to be preserved and because overly fatiguing activities tended to produce rheumatism, muscle inflammation, nervous exhaustion, and premature ageing, and worst of all, endangered their 'peculiar function of multiplying the species,' Walker insisted that exercise must be restrained and non-violent."
Women were banned from things like running marathons until fairly recently for exactly this reason.
Lindsey Van, a U.S. ski jumper who has been outspoken on this issue for almost a decade, told NBC last year that it sickened her to hear Kasper (one of the highest-ranking ski officials in the sport) say that letting women ski jump is a health hazard:
"It just makes me nauseous. Like, I kind of want to vomit. Like, really? Like, I'm sorry, but my baby-making organs are on the inside. Men have an organ on the outside. So if it's not safe for me jumping down, then my uterus is going to fall out, what about the organ on the outside of the body?"
The IOC has (obviously) never cited this as an official excuse to bar women's ski jumping from the Olympics.
"To be very honest, at least at the moment, very few ladies who are really good in jumping," Kasper told NPR in 2005.
Before the 2010 Olympics, IOC president Jacque Rogge said that there just weren't enough women ski jumpers to make it an Olympic sport:
"If you have three medals, with 80 athletes competing on a regular basis, internationally, the percentage of medal winners is extremely high. In any other sport, you are speaking about hundreds of thousands, if not tens of millions of athletes, at a very high level, competing for one single medal.
"We do not want the medals to be diluted and watered down. That is the bottom line."
This is changing.
The FIS (Kasper's organization) finally allowed women in the world championships until 2011. And now, 90 years after men's ski jumping about its Olympic debut, women will compete in Sochi.
SEE ALSO: The Gold Medal Favorites In Every Single Olympic Event
By going first in Tuesday's first-ever women's Olympic ski jumping event, American Sarah Hendrickson became the first woman to ever attempt a ski jump at the Olympics.
It's also personal triumph for the 19-year-old. Last August she mangled her knee, tearing her ACL and MCL off the bone in training. While she's not 100% in Sochi, that fact that she made it onto the hill at all is a remarkable achievement.
She was one of the best ski jumpers in the world before her injury, and should return to that form when she fully recovers.
Her score was only 17th-best in the first run, but she was still excited:
Her historic moment:
Stretching seems like a standard thing to do before any form of exercise, especially hardcore athletic events like those in the Winter Olympics.
On Tuesday, American luger Kate Hansen was criticized by NBC commentator Duncan Kennedy for her unusual warmup routine of dancing to Beyoncé.
"I would like to see something a little more sport-specific from her," Kennedy said. "What you see out of the top runners, the real heavy-hitters, is they're working the start muscles. They're working the low back. They're working the arms and shoulders, and getting the power out of them because the start has to be a powerful, explosive movement."
Stretching works by raising the temperature of your body before more rigorous exercise. Warm muscles are more stretchy. The widely-held belief is that stretching increases flexibility, gives you more strength and power during the activity, and reduces muscle soreness afterward.
But, according to a video released by AsapScience, the benefits of stretching may depend on the activity. Stretching too much can be a bad thing for power sports like speedskating and bobsledding because it may "cause a temporary decrease in muscle strength," the video says. "The overstretched muscle becomes less responsive and can stay weakened for up to 30 minutes."
In other words, overstretched muscles are actually less flexible and won't pack the same amount of power. This is obviously a bigger concern for competitive athletes. In general, warming up your muscles before a workout is a good way to get the blood flowing.
For more on the science of stretching, check out the video below:
SEE ALSO: Why Skiers Fly In A "V" Shape
For the first time in Olympics history, we have a tie for gold in an alpine skiing event.
Switzerland's Dominique Gisin and Slovenia's Tina Maze both finished with a time of 1:47.57 in Wednesday's women's downhill.
With the length of the race and the speeds at which they're moving down the mountain, you almost never see ties in the downhill.
There have been three ties for silver and one tie for bronze in alpine skiing at the Olympics, according to OlympStats, but this is the first time that two gold medals will be given out because of a dead heat.
After the race, Maze and Gisin looked downright giddy to be sharing the podium. Switzerland's Lara Gut, the unfortunate bronze medalist, wasn't so enthused.
The perfect photo from Reuters:
Here's the remarkable final standings:
Two gold medals have only been given out seven other times in Winter Olympic history. Most of those were in speed skating, which now uses a clock that goes to the thousandth of a second.
Maze and Gisin are fine with skiing sticking to the hundredth of a second rule:
SEE ALSO: Why They Gave Out Two Medals Instead Of Breaking The Time Down To 1/1000th Of A Second
Switzerland's Dominique Gisin and Slovenia's Tina Maze tied for gold in the women's downhill on Wednesday, the first time in Olympics history that an alpine skiing event awarded two gold medals.
They each finished with a final time of 1:47.57.
While a tie seems fair in that situation, the technology is there to break down the times another decimal place (1/1000th of a second) to determine a winner.
Skiing chooses to round times to the 1/100th place instead of the seemingly more accurate 1/1000th place. Why?
There's a pretty interesting explanation.
Olympic historian Bill Mallon wrote a post about the race on OlympStats. He says that 1/1000th of a second equates to a distance of 1 inch at downhill speeds.
While that's a large enough distance to measure with modern timing technology, it's within the margin of error in the grand scheme of things.
The example he uses is that the finish line might not be perfectly straight. If one side of the line is 1.1 inches further down or up the hill, it's the difference between winning and losing.
"How accurate is the finish line? If Maze finished on the left side of the finish, and Gisin on the right side, is that accurate enough to measure to 1/1000th, especially when the start line is 3,000 metres away. So if you measure to 1/1000th would you be penalizing one skier for finishing on one side of the course and not the other, without them really knowing which side is shorter? You could be."
It makes intuitive sense to measure times to the smallest possible decimal place. But in practice, there is a point at which the margins are so small that any tiny disparity in external variables renders that precision useless. Mallon tells the story of a swimming race that would have produced a different outcome if a single coat of paint was added to one of the lanes, for instance.
Many Olympic sports only measure to the 1/100th of a second, despite the technology for more accurate times, for precisely this reason.
Earlier this week, 1/1000ths were used to decide the men's 500m speed skating race. But the standard for the majority sports that are contested over a significant distance is to use the 1/100th place, and call it a tie.
Cross country skiing is arguably the most physically draining sport at the Olympics. For up to 30 km (18.6 miles), cross country athletes sprint on their skis, often uphill. By the end of the race they are so exhausted, most people immediately collapse at the finish line.
The top finishers of the 7.5 km classic + 7.5 km free women's race from day one:
Dario Cologna of Switzerland falls after winning gold in the 15 km Classic + 15 km Free:
Ida Ingemarsdotter of Sweden collapses just past the finish line of the women's sprint free:
Ola Vigen Hattestad flops over after winning bronze in the cross country men's & women's sprint:
Eric Frenzel is exhausted after winning gold in the Nordic Combined Individual Gundersen Normal Hill and 10km cross country:
And he collapses on his back:
But everyone regains their energy for the gold medal stand:
