Ice is slippery...yes or no????

Well I am learning a lot about speedskating ice. Apparently, altitude, barometric pressure and humidity all play a role in how "fast" the ice is. Who knew? So when a speedskating oveal is at altitude (Salt Lake City) the ice tends to be much fast than at sea leavel (Vancouver). The amount of difference in time ranges from about .75 sec over 500 meters up to about 12 seconds for 5000 meters. What they have also found out here is that the purer the water the slower the ice so they have switched to using tapwater to make the ice faster. Because the sea level ice is stickier it tends to favor athletes that are "churners" rather than "gliders". So shorter athletes with a more rapid leg turnover seem to do better than longer legged athletes that tend to glide more and have a slower leg turnover. Bottom line, there will probably not be many speedskating records set here if any!

Right now as a medical staff our big focus during processing is to make sure that the athletes have all of their information entered properly in the electronic medical record and that they have properly filled out all of the "where abouts" information for the International Olympic Committee for drug testing. This is actually much more complex than you might think. Each athlete has to provide their absolute location for one hour each day and they absolutely have to be at that location in case they are chosen for random testing. They also have to provide where they are staying, training times and plane flight information. All this has to be entered electronically and be completely accurate. If they are not wheree they say they will be and the drug testing people come looking, it is considered a missed test!