The Olympics!!!

I love the Olympics. Summer, Winter, it doesn't really matter to me: there's something special about seeing the best athletes in the world representing their countries and competing against the best to really become the best.

The last Winter Olympics that took place was in 2014, back when I was still a senior in high school. I remember coming back from school and planting myself down in front of the TV after kung fu practice to watch NBC primetime and cheer on the U.S.A and China (my native country). However, in college, watching the Winter Olympics has been noticeably more difficult: because of classes, midterms, and other responsibilities to life, I haven't been able to have the luxury of spending 6-7 hours watching sports with no other real objectives to be completed. 

As such, I haven't been able to see many sports live: slalom, curling, luge, bobsled, speed skating, and such. However, one indulgence that I did allow myself to make this Olympics season was watching the women's snowboarding halfpipe, and all the figure skating events that took place these past two weeks. 

Why snowboarding halfpipe, and figure skating? First and foremost, I am a fan of both sports: particularly the latter, as I used to be a figure skater for a very short period in my life (around 7 months). I used to train at the San Jose Sharks practice facility, with many other skaters: many considerably more advanced than me. It was through this that I briefly got to meet a girl who is currently competing on the U.S. Olympic team as an individual female skater. Having a personal reason to cheer for U.S. figure skating was more than enough incentive for me to ignore all my emails and reschedule meetings with other people so I could sit in front of my laptop and stress eat ice cream while hoping that the figure skaters I was supporting would have clean skates.

The second reason as to why I watched those two sports specifically was due to the presence of Asian Americans competing in those sports. On the U.S. figure skating team, more than half of the U.S. skaters were Asian American: Madison Chock, Alex Shibutani, Maia Shibutani, Nathan Chen, Karen Chen, Vincent Zhou, and Mirai Nagasu. In addition, the biggest storyline of the women's halfpipe competition was whether or not Chloe Kim would make Olympics history by landing back to back 1080s in one run. This was particularly significant to me, because growing up, I had little to no Asian American athletes, actors, actresses, or big figures that I could view as role models and inspirations: so to see a group of people that I so strongly identify with currently dominating the news cycle and competing first and foremost as Americans was really impactful.

I really enjoyed one quote by Bobby Hundreds on Twitter: 

"For us Asian-Americans, the Olympics has been our Black Panther." 

Representation is extremely important, and it really makes me happy that future generations of Asian-American youth will now be able to have role models in every aspect of society to look up to. While I'm sad that the Olympics will be concluding soon, I'm happy to have been able to witness Olympic and Asian-American history and am looking forward to the next big sporting event: FIFA's World Cup 2018!