Leaving it late to get ahead of the posse as conditions in Sochi go downhill fast

Tying those shoelaces
There's an old West Wing episode where Jed Bartlett is expected to wipe the floor with a gaffe-prone Republican candidate in a debate, making one of his aides uneasy about lowered expectations. "If the whole thing is that people think this guy can't tie his shoelaces and then it turns out he can, then that's the ball game."

The Irish Times is en route to Sochi and is mostly worried about not having learned the Russian for, "Can I sleep in your car?"

So horrific have the tales of hotel hell from the world’s media already at the Winter Olympics that all Sochi has to do at this stage is provide a bed and a shower and it will have tied its shoelaces. Okay, a bed. Okay, a mattress. A . . . pillow?

Turns out, The Irish Times had the jump on everyone. Your CNNs, your ESPNs, your Guardians – they decided a year ago that they were going to Sochi. Planned ahead. Booked rooms. The best rooms in the official media hotels. Magnificent palaces they are too.

They just could do with the odd door, the occasional toilet, perhaps a record of anyone having booked in, maybe even a wifi connection somewhere along the way.

If we are nothing else in The Irish Times , however, we are the living embodiment of Rudyard Kipling's 'If' boy. We keep our heads when all about us are losing theirs. We trust ourselves when all men doubt us. We decide to cover the Winter Olympics with three weeks to go until the opening ceremony.

All media hotels gone, we get our own spot downtown. And it’s not half-bad. Bed, check. Shower, check. Fully-functioning door, check. Jolly barman down in reception who wants to practice his English on you, check.

"I learn in Malta, " says Sergei. "Well, it's very good, fair play. What's the local beer?"

“No my friend, no drink local beer. Local beer is peeeeesss.”

Good man, Sergei. Shoelaces tied.

Snow Joke
It nearly feels unfair to note that the very first piece of Winter Olympics live action that passed before these eyes was the sight of an Irish athlete getting a mouthful of snow. Like it's a bit gratuitous or something. Our Winter Olympians get no love so they deserve no censure. They surely deserve no scorn.

Yet there he was, young Seamus O’Connor, coming soaring over the final hill of the snowboard slopestyle just as I came out from under the grandstand at Rosa Khutor Extreme Park. The PA guy was getting very excited by this 16-year-old, the youngest rider in the competition. But then he wiped out, the first of many green-tinged falls over the fortnight.

In time, skiers Conor Lyne and Florence Bell would similarly disappear in a cloud of white and a copse of skis and poles. Sean Greenwood would make the news in countless countries and whizz around the internet at a speed only rivalled by that at which he came off his skeleton.

By then end, the only Irish athlete who didn't suffer a fall was Jan Rossiter. The cross-country skier.

Again, no scorn intended here. Five athletes from Canada, USA and England trained for years, spent fortunes (theirs and their parents'), gave up jobs, missed schoolwork and put off college work, all to come to Sochi to walk behind the flag of a country their parents or grandparents handed down to them. They didn't do all that just to come here and fall on their ass.

The Winter Olympics is merciless that way.

California Dreaming
The first sun-bathers are out. They're stretched on the grass in front of the main press centre at lunchtime, hands behind their head, eyes closed against the midday sun. We knew it would be mild. We knew there'd be precious little snow. We didn't know there'd be a queue in the MPC pharmacy for suncream. At first, it's nothing but a source of jollity. Volunteers in oversized coats do the universal 'Brrrrr' action of hugging themselves and rubbing their upper arms to make people laugh as they go through security. Hacks Tweet suggestions for sports that will be thrown into the schedule at the last minute. Halfpipe canoeing. Short-track angling.

As the days pass though, it gradually turns into less and less of a giggle. Melted snow makes for soft snow which means unsafe snow in some cases and slow snow in others. Either way, it becomes an irritant. Practice runs get cancelled. Events get decided by the luck of the draw. Skiers DNF in greater numbers than would normally be the case.

And it only gets hotter as we go. Locals set up barbeques on the Black Sea’s stone-filled beaches. At the Laura Cross Country and Biathlon Centre, some skiers end up competing in shorts and tank tops. Up at the Alpine Centre, race-times are brought forward to early morning to give the skiers a better chance of competing on snow that isn’t melting.

Snowboarders have to compete in uniforms that are marginally less cumbersome than spacesuits and sweat far more standing talking to the press at the end of their runs than they did in actual competition. "Bloody boiling, innit!" laughs British boarder Zoe Gillings one of the days. "I had no idea it would be this hot."

When Vladimir Putin sold Sochi, he sold a place where you could ski in the morning and go for a swim in the evening. Good for a holiday resort, not exactly top of the list of requirements for a Winter Olympics.

But of course they took his money and looked the other way. No matter that it affected outcomes of some of the events. No matter that it meant sparse crowds for the Alpine events that were brought forward, making it almost impossible to get that high up the mountain in time to see the biggest stars who were sent off first. The train keeps rolling and tomorrow night in the Fischt Stadium Thomas Bach will declare it the best Games ever.

Oh Canada
Some of the sport was awesome. In the literal meaning of that word, where your jaw hangs open at what you're seeing. The night of the snowboard half-pipe final was incredible, rider after rider finding different ways to tweak gravity's nose. The sheer lottery of the short-track made it relentlessly entertaining, in much the same way as the snowboard-cross and ski-cross events never allowed you to look away.

The more you watched, the more it dawned that the one thing each sport shares is a search for balance and control on a surface whose main job appears to be depriving you of same. Doesn’t matter if you’re on ice or snow, the athlete or team with the greater mastery over what was going on in the slip-slide-skate-ski between their feet and the ground usually came out on top.

So it was that the Canadian women’s ice hockey team provided the highlight of the games on Thursday night. They scored three very different goals to come back from 2-0 down and beat the US in overtime but all of them came down to that tiny bit more control on the ice than the Americans who were getting more jittery and less composed the closer gold appeared.

Their golden goal came from patient power-play work – pass, pass, tap, tap, pass, move, pass, shot, goal. In the moment of greatest tension and drama, they were clear-eyed and icy-nerved and utterly steady on their feet. Do that at the Winter Olympics and you’ll win more than you lose.