In the 2018 Winter Olympics, there are a total of 15 sports. These include variations of skiing, skating, snowboarding, curling, hockey, luge, bobsled and skeleton. Although a lot of these sports have been seen before, there are a few that are not as well known.
Skiing is a common winter sport in the Olympics. There is alpine skiing, the biathlon, cross-country skiing, freestyle skiing, Nordic combined and the ski jump. Some of these ski events are described in their name, like the ski jump where a skier does a jump on a slope with his or her skis. Som, however, may not be as obvious. For example, what is Nordic combined?
Nordic combined is a sport combining ski jumping and cross-country skiing. It starts with a jump, and then the athletes who complete the jump move onto the cross-country part of the competition. This is an all-male sport, and the only Olympic sport to exclude women from competing.
Another well-known winter sport is snowboarding. People all around the world snowboard at ski resorts just for a fun winter activity.
One Olympic sport that a lot of people are still baffled by is curling. “Curling is a team sport played by two teams of four players on a rectangular sheet of ice. Its nickname, ‘The Roaring Game,’ originates from the rumbling sound the 44-pound granite stones make when they travel across the ice,” Olympic.org said. The sport is played by pushing the large stone down the ice and “sweeping” it with a broom to get it to land on a target that is stationed at the end of the ice track.
A newer winter sport is the skeleton. In a sense, this sport is kind of like the bobsled and luge, except instead of a team it is only one person. It is known as a winter sliding sport, where one person will ride a small sled known as a “skeleton” bobsled down a frozen track. The rider is lying down on the board and is fully exposed to the outside track.
There is also skating, which comes in the form of figure skating. This is like a dance competition, but on the ice. There is also the speed skating competition, which is like a running race, but again on ice and with skates.
Many of these sports are wrapping up. However, there are still competitions to look forward to as the action in Pyeongchang continues and medals are still being handed out.
