2006 Olympics

2006 Olympics

February 18, 2006

Short Track

Torino, Italy

On Saturday, February 18th, we hopped aboard a 7:51 AM train to Torino for the Short Track competition at the 2006 Olympics. A week ago, I bought a non-refundable train ticket online. Acting like a typical mamaluke, I bought a train ticket for the wrong day. I wasn’t about to buy a new one for 32 Euro. So, I designed a good plan. You see, anyone can get onto the train, but eventually someone will come around to check your ticket. Well, I kept a good lookout for the ticket checker and when I saw him coming, I snuck past him real quick and hid out in the bathroom for like 20 minutes. It worked!

The train ride to Torino was horrible and you’ll see why in a few seconds. I’ll post two pictures which I feel best represent the conditions.

This was my seat for the five hour train ride:

This was my view from my seat:


Actually, apart from the seating arrangements it wasn’t that bad. For most of the ride, the train traveled adjacent the north western coast (near Genoa), the view of the ocean and hanging cliffs was magnificent. Unfortunately, I couldn’t take any good pictures while the train was moving.

We arrived in Torino at 1:00 PM and you can see the athlete village from the train station. It is a quad of brightly colored apartments with a big cafeteria in the middle. The train station was decorated with the infamous “Torino 2006” signs everywhere.

We made our way outside the train station and it was raining pretty hard. We didn’t know where to go, so, we just hopped on the first shuttle bus that came. We rode the shuttle until we saw some action. We walked down a few streets for awhile and grabbed a bite at a small pizza place. In Italy, most of the pizza is thin crust (I’m not a big fan of the thin crust), but this place had thick Sicilian slices. I had a sausage slice and a fresh mozzarella w/ tomato slice. I think it’d give V & J’s a run for its money.

We cruised around for awhile up and down the streets. We saw the Medal’s Plaza and found a few crazy fans.

The people with the drums were really annoying. I don’t know which country they were from, but they were yelling some stupid chant. After bearing witness to this, I stopped walking and put on the USA gear (face paint, headband, glowing earing, flags in head, etc.)


The Olympic sites are far in between so you have to take a shuttle from one to the other. Finally, the weather cleared up and we took the shuttle to the Olympic Stadium to see the torch.

Our event’s start time was 7:30 PM, but we heard from some people that security takes awhile to clear. We took another shuttle to the Palavela Arena at 6:00 PM. We entered the arena and found our seats, which were in the nosebleed section! We paid a lot of money for the B tickets (There were three price levels – A, B, and C), so I was pissed! Well, we went down to the lower tier and luckily found two empty seats.

I must have looked pretty cool because a bunch of people were taking pictures of me. We made a makeshift USA sign with some extra face paint that I had. The people behind us had a big O H N O sign for Apolo Ohno (USA).

It was really interesting seeing so many people representing different countries. Looking around and observing people of diverse cultures, with separate flags, colors, languages and customs - all merged into one place. It surely makes you proud to put on that red, white, and blue.

We saw the quarterfinal, semifinal, and final for the Women’s 1500 Meter and Men’s 1000 Meter. A bunch of Koreans ended up winning most of the medals, but Apolo Ohno (USA) finished in third with bronze!


We had no place to stay after the event ended at 11:00 PM. All of the hotels and hostels in Torino have been booked for months. The earliest train back to Florence was at 4:50 AM. Fortunately, there were no girls with us this time and I didn’t care about hanging out all night. I thought there’d be absolutely nothing to do, but it ended up being a lot of fun. It turns out that the 18th was Olympia Night and there were a bunch of events going on from dusk till dawn. There were thousands of people in the streets, it was crazy.

Here is a picture of one of the streets at 2:00 AM:


Here is a picture of a 6 foot cotton candy stick for 5 Euro:

To my surprise, the 4:50 AM train was packed. I guess a lot of kids studying in Florence had the same idea. We had to change trains in Milan at 7:00 AM. The train was running late and we got into Milan at 6:59 AM. So try to picture an all out sprint of 50 half-asleep American students running frantically through the train station. We made it with like 30 seconds to spare. I didn’t get much sleep because there were a lot of sketchy people on the train and I was worried they’d try to steal something. The Olympics were a blast and I got back to Florence at 10:00 AM on Sunday.