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Vancouver, Canada (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland’s Christoph Kunz won the gold medal Friday 19 March for the Men’s downhill at the 2010 Winter Paralympics in Vancouver, to add to the silver medal the 27-year-old from Bern won earlier in the week for the super-G event. Second place also went to the Swiss, thanks to Michael Brugger, 27, from Fribourg.
Links to other sites: TSR (Fre), Yahoo France
Swiss chocolate, to help celebrate Canadian gold at the Olympics
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Canadians may have loved their Olympic Games primarily for the sports, but the Winter Games 2010 also brought other great things to town. These included four tons of Swiss cheese and two tons of Swiss chocolate, consumed at the two Swiss Houses that were opened for the event.
Presence Switzerland says 60,000 guests visited the two locations between the opening ceremony 5 February and the closing ceremony 28 February. Some 1,700 fans registered on the Facebook account.
The two locations where a hub for the Swiss Olympic team, sponsors and partners and were also a meeting point for fans.
Swiss Emmental cheese
The Swiss House project was sponsored by Presence Swiss, which promotes Switzerland abroad. The project was subsidized by the federal government to the tune of CHF1.5 million.
The Vancouver Winter Olympic Games are over and it’s back to business as usual in British Columbia, Canada, starting with the budget. Finance Minister Colin Hansen presents the new budget 2 March. He said during a photo opportunity where he played wheelchair rugby to draw attention to upcoming Paralympic Games that it will be a belt-tightening budget, with little room to maneuver and stimulus spending coming to an end.
Link: Globe & Mail
Rapidly changing winter weather, Swiss Alps
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – “And now the mountain weather forecast for the next two minutes!” Such extremely short-term weather forecasting might be a thing of the future, but scientists are gathering and studying data in Vancouver, Canada to help them reach that point. The 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Canada are hosting one group of experts whose specialty is not a sport, but very short term weather forecasts, called “nowcasting”, which make predictions up to six hours before an event.
A team of scientists from nine countries assembled by the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization and Environment Canada is conducting a weather research and development project called the Science and Nowcasting of Olympic Weather for Vancouver 2010, aka Snow-V10.
Nowcasting has already been used for Olympic Games, but in summer, at the Sydney 2000 Games and the Beijing 2008 Games. The prediction of winter weather in mountains is more difficult because conditions change rapidly with time and altitude.
Vancouver, BC, Canada (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland held its own against Canada in ice hockey 18 February in the Winter Games, giving Canada a 3-2 victory, but in a penalty shootout. The Canadians were widely expected to win easily: they have a strong young team, are skating on home territory and they were still bruised from their 2006 Winter Games loss to underdog Switzerland in Torino.
Background, Washington Post
Lindsey Vonn’s win in the Women’s Downhill and Shani Davis’s in the Men’s 1,000m Speedskating pushed the US to the top of the gold medals list at the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver with four, while Germany, Korea and Switzerland each have three. Vonn is the first American to win the downhill, reports Reuters, and Davis the first man to win the 1,000 at successive Olympics.
Lindsey Vonn puts on fine show
Dominique Gisin's crash affected other skiers (photo: Olivier Morin/AFP/Getty Images)
Gold winner Lindsey Vonn (sstock photo: ©2009 US ski team)
Vancouver, BC, Canada (GenevaLunch) – American Lindsey Vonn took gold in the Women’s Downhill at Whistler mountain, in a race marked by her excellent performance, four crashes on the undulating course and wide gaps between skiers’ times. Vonn, with a time of 1:44.19, finished an impressive .056 ahead of fellow American Julia Mancuso, who won silver. The bronze medal went to Austrian Elisabeth Goergl, a full 1.46 behind Vonn. The best performance by a Swiss skier was Fabienne Suter’s. She came in nearly two seconds behind the winner, for fifth place, a remarkable performance considering that she came close to crashing and managed to right herself dramatically.
Racers appeared affected by the series of crashes that started with Swiss skier Dominique Gisin. Her spectacular wipeout left the crowd silent while they waited, then cheered when she sat up: she walked away from the course, in tears, but on her own.
Dario Cologna in Diableret, October 2009 (photo: ©2010 Swiss Ski)
Dario Cologna accepts Credit Suisse sports award in December 2009 in Basel
Vancouver, BC, Canada (GenevaLunch) - Dario Cologna captured a third gold medal for Switzerland, in the 1,500m men’s free in cross-country skiing, with a time of 33:36.3. Cologna’s wine makes Switzerland the country with the most gold medals in the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. Italian Pietro Piller Cottrer took silver, with a time of 34:00.9 and Lukas Bauer won bronze for the Czech Republic, finishing in 34:12.0.
The 23-year-old Cologna, from canton Graubuenden, has already made it clear, according to the Swiss Olympic Committee, that this race was just serving as a warmup for him to next Saturday’s 30km pursuit event.
Links to other site: dariocologna, Swiss Olympic Committee
© Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
Update 13 February 09:15 Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Georgia’s athletes, wearing black armbands and with a black ribbon on their flag, received a sombre standing ovation from the 60,000 people attending the opening ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver. Their countryman, luge athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili, died Friday 12 February while training for the Olympic Winter Games. The death of the 21-year-old is reportedly the first during a Winter Games. The IOC (International Olympic Committee) in Lausanne issued a statement saying that he died at the Whistler Sliding Centre and that the circumstances of the accident are being investigated. “Mr Kumaritashvili died after crashing on the last corner of the course during training. Doctors were unable to revive the athlete, who died in hospital.”
Early news agency reports say that he hit a beam after flying out of the luge at 144kph, but Olympics organizers have not officially confirmed this, although the IOC footage as a reposted video is publicly available on YouTube, showing the official clock.
The luge event will still take place as planned Saturday, Vancouver Games officials say, but the course is closed until then for a police investigation into the accident.
© Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
The Vancouver, Canada police department announced the arrest of 14 people related to the city’s gangs, and said up to 125 charges were being filed against them. Police Inspector Brad Desmarais spoke of a “cancer” on Vancouver’s streets, but that the arrests had crippled a gang led by “men who have a sociopathic disregard for morals, right and wrong, and common decency.” The arrested men included reputed gang leader Manny Buttar along with many of his associates. A woman was also arrested and charged with hiring a gang member to kill her ex-husband.
Links to other sites: Globe & Mail, Vancouver Sun
Kitzbuehel, Austria (GenevaLunch) - Swiss veteran Didier Cuche completed a rare double when he won the downhill on the classic Streif course Saturday 23 January, perhaps the most prestigious of the World Cup skiing circuit. The 35-year-old Neuchatel racer had won the Super G the day before. Cuche beat Slovenian slalom specialist Andrej Sporn by 0.28 seconds with Italian Werner Heel next. It was his third downhill victory at Kitzbuehel, following on from 1998 and 2008. The other Swiss stars, Carlo Janka and Didier Defago were well back. The race was the last before the Vancouver Olympics, which start 12 February.
Links to other sites: Swissinfo
Lara Gut, skier, out with injuries for much of the 2009-2010 season
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Skier Lara Gut, the new young sensation of the 2008-09 ski season, will not be part of the Swiss team skiing at the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. She has been recuperating from hip surgery following an accident during training in October. Her recovery and intensive “dry” training has gone well, Swiss Ski reports, but she will not be able to start training on skis until the end of January, too late to be in shape for the Games.
Barbara Ann Scott, a diminutive 81-year-old with a girlish smile, carried the large Olympic torch into Canada’s Houses of Parliament in Ottawa Thursday 10 December, to warm applause. Scott was Canada’s sweetheart when she won the Olympic figure skating gold medal in St Moritz, Switzerland in 1948. The torch is wending its way to Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.
Links to other sites: The Globe & Mail, Olympics Vancouver 2010
Stewart Butterfield and friends and friends in Vancouver, Canada who had a failing online gaming startup in 2003 turned their attention instead to photo-sharing, and the company, Flickr, that they created was so successful that Yahoo paid $30 million for it just months later. Now Butterfield is turning his attention – and money – back to the gaming business, to create a massive multiplayer game under the name Tiny Speck. Details are secret but the Globe & Mail in Canada notes that “Tiny Speck, started by a quartet of the original Game Neverending /Flickr team, including Mr Butterfield, wants to do for online gaming what Nintendo Co Ltd’s Wii did for video game consoles.” Gambling? apparently not. Global bridge? not exactly.
Links to other sites: Globe & Mail, Tech Vibes, Tiny Speck
London, England (Economist Intelligence Unit) – The annual Economist liveability survey of 140 cities worldwide ranks Vancouver in first place with an almost perfect 98 score out of 100. There are four European cities among the top 10. Vienna is in second place, Helsinki in seventh, just ahead of eighth-tied Geneva, Sydney and Zurich.
Vancouver and British Columbia in Canada have had a too-large dose of winter in the past two weeks, with heavy snow and ice that have resulted in blocked roads, power outages and major transport headaches, including hundreds of stranded airline passengers. Officials say the lessons from this winter are being kept in mind as planning for the 2010 Olympics continues. The Globe & Mail
