DanceSport in #Sochi2014
DanceSport is slated to feature with hundreds of Russian dancers putting on a show during the Sochi 2014 Opening Ceremony on Friday 7 February (from 16:00 UTC/GMT).
It will be interesting to see whether and how certain sportswriters, who have all previously written about DanceSport and the Olympics, will take up on it this time.
One of these sportswriters is Alan Abrahamson of 3 Wire Sports. Here is what he published last year.
DanceSport
When: Dec. 11, 2000.
Where: the Palace Hotel, Lausanne, Switzerland.
What: a Standard and Latin DanceSport demonstration.
Who was there: then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, the entire IOC executive board, the IOC program commission and others, among them me. I walked out thinking, no way.
More than a dozen years later, and all I can say is, I was flat-out wrong, and I am here now to say it’s time to admit it.
One: it’s ridiculous to say the IOC doesn’t allow dancing in the Games. Look at ice dancing in the Winter Olympics.
Two: they’re real athletes. Ask Apolo Ohno, the eight-time U.S. short-track speed skating medalist, about how physically taxing it is to dance on “Dancing with the Stars.” Or Shawn Johnson, the U.S. gymnast who won gold on the balance beam in Beijing in 2008 and who, like Ohno, is a “Stars” winner.
Three: have you seen the ratings for “Dancing with the Stars”? Or the British version, “Strictly Come Dancing,” which started the entire thing? Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is not just a franchise but a worldwide phenomenon. And not just on TV. We’re talking crazy on social media.
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