CORIN NGUYEN's trackSpace

If you asked me four years ago which match up I would love to see the most, I would have said Eun-Kyung Choi vs. Yang Yang.  Yang was at her prime and Choi was the up and comer trying for Yang's crown.

Four years later and both aren't at the top of their game anymore.  Choi and Yang still win medals but they aren't the dominant skaters they were four years ago.  Tomorrow, they'll be racing the 1000m and I hope they meet in the quarters or semis.  I just still love seeing them race but they aren't the two best skaters anymore.  Who knows maybe Wang vs. Jin will turn out to be as exciting but I doubt it.

There was real magic seeing Choi and Yang raced.  Lots of grace and lots of strategy.  Wang and Jin are just pure power, huge starts and a monster pass on the outside with 3 laps to go.  It wasn't like when Yang Yang use to pass to the front, slow ever so slightly to bunch up the skaters behind her and then just accelerate to a big lead.

Since the Olympics, our site logs have gone from 3MB/day to 30MB/day.  A 30 meg text file is ridiculously huge for a personal site.  And I still do consider World Short Track a personal site.

However, being in the web business for so long, I don't really consider traffic a sign of success.  About 90% of our traffic comes from search engines.  Google like all the websites have a set of rules which determines your search ranking.  If your website is playing in those rules then getting first or 2nd in such a relatively small niche as short track is pretty easy.  Being on top for a "short track" search during the Winter Olympics pretty much guarantees traffic but that just makes WST a successfully ranked site, it doesn't necessarily mean that WST is a successful short track site.

My rule for World Short Track is pretty simple.  Do it at least 10% better than what's out there or don't do it at all.  All the information on our site is elsewhere on the web, if you can find it.  That's the catch.  I remember at the last Olympics trying to find short track information and the only site out there was PackStyle.  Even PackStyle didn't have all the information I wanted, like the history of short track or personal records.  I kept thinking I wish someone would get it all organized.  I never thought that someone would be me.

WST is bigger than I originally intended but the more I learned about short track the more information I thought other people would find useful.  I've tried things that haven't worked on the site and have scrapped those sections.  Other sections like the skater profiles become much more successful than I thought they would be considering CyberScoreboard has the same information.

For a while, no one else has put up a short track site. Then NBCOlympics.com put up their site.  Their short track section is good, one of the best I've seen.  However, their target is a general viewing audience which makes me breath a sigh of relief since I don't have the budget or resources to match them if they decided they wanted to put up a complete short track site.  However, even going to their site has made me realized that there are still serious holes in the information I do have up.

My goal four years ago when I started the site was to attend a Winter Olympics as press.  So is World Short Track successful?  Ask me again in Vancouver four years from now.

 Men's 1500m final is done and if you go to news.google.com and type in "short track" skating, you'll see the dozens and dozens of articles detailing the event.  Here are my favorites:

The problem with all the news articles, is that there's not alot of information in them.  Ahn won. Apolo fell.  And that's pretty much what all the news is reporting.  The hard part with reporting news to World Short Track is trying to find anything new to add to what's already out there.

In the 2nd article, Hamelin says that Ye Li did a classic little team skating maneuver where Li bumped him so Jiajun Li could pass into third. Team skating happens.  Did it happen in this instance?  There's no way of really knowing for sure.

The other thing to be noted is that I've been told the ice was very soft today.  That's always bad for power skaters like Apolo because all that pressure on ice leads to the ice giving way.  Even if it's a little slip, a skater is pretty much out of the race.

For that reason, I expect to see Jiajun Li on the 500m medal stand unless he DQs.  Jiajun skates awesome on bad ice since he rarely falls.  He won't be skating conservatively because of the ice so that will either lead him to the medal stand or to a DQ.  I figure he's cut down his DQs significantly over the last year so that will mean another medal.

As for the women, Allison beat Erika and Kalyna beat Arianna.  NBC won't be showing those races so I'll have to wait  a while in order to see if those were easy wins or not.  So why are these two matchups so significant.  It's an easy guess to which Chinese and Koreans will make the final.  It's much harder to figure out which US vs. European vs. Canadian women will have the best shot in the final.

 All the media has been telling you who to watch for over the last few weeks.  Apolo Ohno, Hyun-Soo Ahn, Meng Wang and Sun-yu Jin will mostly like win gold. Honestly, I've seen them win before and seeing them win yet again even at the Olympics isn't as compelling as watching certain match ups.

For those that don't know short track here's what to watch for during day one. First off, the ladies race the 500m and the men race the 1500m.  It's completely different strategy to win those.

For the women, it's going to be first person off the line and around the first turn is going to have an advantage over those behind her.  Even the favorites will have problems if they're in the 4th starting position and can't get a good start.  Passing from last place to first in 4.5 laps when all the skaters go all out from the get go is almost impossible.

There's going be lot's of false starts.  And there's going to be some pushing and some falls before the first turn.  If someone falls before the turn then the judges will call it back and start the race again. 

NBC's coverage in America stinks compared to CBC in Canada or Eurosport in Europe.  If you see the heats, here's what I'm looking forward to:

Race 6 - Allison vs. Erika.  Allison Baver has much better in the last year.  But then so has Erika.  Hungary spent a lot of money on their program and it shows.

Race 7 - Arianna vs. Kalyna.  It's the battle of the young all-stars.  Italy's up-and-comer vs. Canada's up-and-comer.  Ariana got 2nd at the European Championships last month and Kalyna has won bronze 3 times at the World Cups.

For the men in the 1500m, it's all about positioning.  The favorites do not want to be first. They want to draft and conserve energy for that winning pass during the last 4 laps.  What you should be watching for is all the jockeying for position around 7 laps to go as skaters at the end try to move to 2nd or 3rd to inorder to make their move at the end.

Here's what I will be watching for during the heats:

Race 1 - Maxime Chataignier vs. Jon Eley.  I think these two will have a very long an exciting rivalry.

Race 2 - Wim De Deyne.  He's fast but not a passer.  I'm expecting him to get in front and stay in front and make Ho-Suk Lee and Setaro Terao work really hard to pass him to make the next round.

Race 3 - Fabio Carta.  He's 7 time European championship at his last Olympic appearance.  Torino is his hometown and everyone is going to go crazy when he skates.

Race 5 - Jiajun Li.  Also retiring and still winning medals at the World Cups.  He's just great to watch.

Race 6 - Apolo in hard races isn't as much fun to watch as in his easy races because it's harder for him to charge to blocks (make an inside pass) in his hard races.  This is going to be an easy race for Apolo.  He's going to putter near the end to avoid any of the bumping and make a bunch of amazing inside passes at the turn that's going to look effortless around 4 laps to go.  He's going to stay in front till the finish and no one will catch him. 

 If you do a search on Google today, you'll find a hundred newspapers reprinting a blurb that says Yang Yang is the first female flag bearer in the  Chinese Olympic history.  All the news briefs say the same thing:  that Yang Yang was the first Chinese Winter Olympics gold medal winner; that she's the winningest female short tracker in history; and that she'll mostly likely medal again.

As a casual reader, one would just gloss over the significance of the news because there's no context.  If I didn't know anything about China, I would just nod my head and say good for her and go on to the next Olympic story.

I love China.  Of all the Asian countries and cultures, I find the richness and depth of Chinese history and people the most interesting.  China isn't one homogenous mass of Chinese people, but a diverse culture of different dialects, tastes and attitudes.  Just like the US where we have  California culture, The South, New Yorkers, etc., China's people are just as different from province to province.

Like anything you love, you have to take the good with the bad.  It's not a matter of passing judgement about the culture.  It's about accepting that this is the way they are for better or worse.  Cultures like people can't be changed from the outside.  You can't change people.  They have to change on their own.  So like the people in our lives with faults we wish we can change, China will have to effect those changes from the inside. 

One of the things that I wish I could change about China is their attitudes toward women.  Women are second class citizen and boys are more desirable than girls.  It's the boys that carry on the family name and that is a significant part of Chinese culture. 

Because of this prevalent attitude and China's one child policy, this means that of the 100,000 babies that get abandoned every year, most of them are girls.  If you go to any Chinese school, you can see the disparity in gender balance as you see a few girls among the sea of boys.

This disparity is leading to a steady erosion in China's culture. Kidnapping of women continue to climb as the victims are being shipped to rural provinces to serve as wives for as little as $100 US dollars. University educated men are beginning to realize the lack of eligible mates.  Duh.  How educated can you be when you don't see any other women in at your university and it never crossed your mind that you might have problems finding a wife.

Girls do not have the opportunities that boys do.  There's little money to go around and what money a family has will be spent on the son's education while the daughters are usually expected to labor at home and learn to be wife to someone's son with an education.

The fact that Yang Yang has not only grown up in this enviroment, but has found a way to excel in it is simply amazing.  Unlike Western cultures, where the successful individual is praised, China regards teamwork and society above individual accomplishments.  There's a  Chinese proverb that sums this up:  The nail that stands out most is the first to get hammered down.

In her amazing career, Yang Yang has become a role model for the girls in China.  She's as close to a celebrity as China would allow though you would never know it meeting her.  Even a celebrity only exists at the Chinese government's goodwill and forebearance.  No one person is ever indispensible, especially a girl.

Yang Yang is flag bearer at the Olympics.  She had to be the first to win Winter Olympic gold to be chosen.  I think if any other male Chinese athlete had won gold at Salt Lake, Yang Yang would have been passed over.  That's just the way China is.  China isn't going to change over night, but Yang Yang has at least introduce the idea the girls can be important--important enough to make national history.

If you love something or someone enough, then you wait out the bad parts and hope that they'll change.  In the meanwhile, you do the small things within your power to help.

I have a 3 year old daughter that my wife and I adopted from China in 2004.  We are in the process of adopting a second from China.

I guess the question on my mind about Apolo is whether he'll skip out on the World Championships after the Olympics.

Before I get lambasted by the diehard Apolo fans with short memories for even thinking such a thought, I need to remind everyone that Apolo didn't attend the 2002 World Championships after the last Olympics.  He was busy doing interviews.  If he medals, I have no doubt that he'll have a ton of interviews after this Olympics though he might be sharing alot of air time with Shani this time around.

It seemed like everyone was griping the last time that Apolo should have skated the World Championships and that short track should have been a priority over his press tour.  I remember the commentators for ABC, saying Apolo should have made an appearance.  Honestly, I don't see what the big deal was.  So Apolo decided not to go to the World Championships in Calgary.  I think he contributed more to short track by being in the media here in the US then he would have by competing.

This time, it's a little different since the World Championships is on home turf in Minneapolis.  On the one hand, Apolo will have alot of disappointed fans if he doesn't show.  On the other hand, the media has a very short attention span.  The World Championships is 5 weeks after the Olympics and the general public is much more interested in a short track skater who's won an Olympic medal than a skater who won a World Championship.  Also, Apolo has obligations to his sponsors who might be more interested in him being on the Today Show than being in training.