Read This Now - The Winter Games

Ok people, that Canada - US prelim round hockey game that just finished (and I managed to miss) wasn't even a medal game so lay off the exclamations about how exciting it was. Actually scratch that, all of you who thought it was so exciting need to start watching hockey regularly.

Everyone though, should be reading Nick Paumgarten's dispatches from Vancouver and environs. All of them have been fantastic. His latest is on skeleton racing, which I hold to be the most insane of the winter sports (hey I know how we could make this luge thing more dynamic, let's strip the sled down some and go head first, yeah!)...

At the sled track, the skeletons (sorry, I’m calling them that) zipped by like mail canisters in a pneumatic tube, and it was easy to get distracted by the socializing along the edge of the track. If you are standing at a turn, you hear a rumble—the sled approaching—and then a streak of color shoots past, so fast you’re hardly sure you saw it. You can get really close. If you’re used to luge (and who isn’t, by now?), the fact that the skeleton sledders are face down and face first (as opposed to face up and foot first) is disorienting; they look like mannequins being flung down the course in a Letterman segment—their feet are all floppy.

I've been reading them through the New Yorker's News Desk feed, but they appear to be gathered under The Sporting Scene, which has no links or site. Wherever you find them, enjoy.