Soooooo Close!

We missed a top seeding by one miserable point! We ended up right behind Italy, and a few points ahead of the Dutch. This is quite a change from being the whipping boys for North America just 15 years ago. I'm quite impressed with the job Bruce Arena has done, we're up there with pretty elite company. A top seeding may have placed undue stress on them, however, and lately they've been playing pretty terribly (granted, Arena's been playing reserves). Here's hoping they get an easy draw.

In other sporting news, I'm pretty stoked for Torino '06 - in particular I'll be watching the qualifying proceedings for the snowboard events pretty closely, especially the Chevrolet Grand Prix. I'd like to see Shaun White win something in the pipe but he sometimes crumples under pressure. Usually, somebody who either doesn't give a crap about anything (Danny Kass) or has little pressure from being unknown (Steve Fisher) steps it up and wins. I hope Kass takes a gold since he cut his snowboarding teeth at the Creek in Jersey and has such sweet style.

This is the first year they are including snowboardcross - for the uninitiated this is basically a free for all race of 4 snowboarders navigating an obstacle course at high speed. This begs the question: when are they going to add slopestyle to the Olympics? I love that event. That's where you really get to see a snowboarder's style. Pipe's good, but so restricted. Nothing like a terrain park run to see the creativity and technical prowess of a rider.