Vancouver 2010: maybe too fast?

Yesterday night, I planned to blog on Vancouver 2010. Now I am blogging it with a totally different mood.

NYT has been providing outstanding coverage even before the Games starts. I found this photo (on left) especially touching.

There are some commercials on Youtube. I am not particularly interested in CAN, but I found this one inspiring. For God's sake, it has been played on CBC since Beijing 2008!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x675GbJOxg

Hope and dynamics.

And I just knew yesterday, there is a super-handsome Chinese Canadian figure skater.
Enjoy one of his perfect showdown here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc2jXafZZws

But just hours ago, another young man's dream and hope ended abruptly and brutally, on the fastest luge track in the world, Whistler, especially built for this winter Games.

The details can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/12/sports/olympics/LUGEDEATH.html
And here (GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING!):
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/35373302#35373302

Now, this photo--I hesitate whether to put it on, because this is not sth you want to see in Chinese New Year's Eve--leads us to the main discussion.

The Olympic motto reads "faster, higher, stronger". Are we going too fast?

I hung out with CK and TJ this evening and missed most of the opening ceremony. But I can feel from the words of the President of the Vancouver Games Organizing Committee that this tragedy casts pall over the Games.

Many winter sports greatly depends on "technology". The technologies can satisfy the human nature of winning, erecting new monuments of human spirit. But the way the technologies work--MORE (steroids, used for gaining muscles/strength/stamina), FASTER (many equipments in various sports, and field/track/swimming suits), HARSHER, naturally expose us, sexy, fit, yet so tender human bodies, to greater and more horrified dangers.

As ESPN headline reads "the Games must moves on", people tend to forget too easily, there will be newer, more frictionless luges developed after this accident; there will be faster tracks built just so that a Games can be remembered for "an event of record books"....Human lives, even in thousands (1989) or hundreds of thousands (1960-62), are often negligible under the name "FORWARD". The "FORWARD" onrush is always unstoppable, but maybe sometimes we should stop to think: whether we have the rights to choose, to choose not to go too fast.