Snow day Olympic update

I am sitting here on my couch near the end of a dead end road in the Lakes Region on a Monday morning. Usually, I would be in the kitchen at the Yum Yum Shop, cooking up donuts and other baked goods, but with the snowstorm coming through on Sunday afternoon into this morning, the boss decided to keep the bakery closed, so I got a day off and in that, got a little time to sit down and put together some thoughts as we get closer and closer to Milan-Cortina.

In the last few weeks I have spent some time watching World Cup alpine racing, the speed skating Olympic trials and some freestyle skiing, even hitting up moguls World Cup in person when the circuit came to Waterville Valley in mid-January. The Winter Olympics are always my favorite because I really enjoy the sports that take place and seeing some of the spectacular venues that the World Cup races go through has me ready to see some of the impressive locations that I will get to see in northern Italy in the coming weeks.

But there is a lot that goes in to just getting ready to make the trip. Last week I spent lots of time working on my master schedules for the weeks that I will be gone. I put high school schedules into the papers every week and to do that, I extract each paper's schedule from one of my seven master schedules and format it for the paper. I got all the schedules extracted and put them in respective folders for the weeks that I will be away so I don't have to worry about dealing with that while I am in Italy. I am in the process of reaching out to coaches and ADs to let them know I will be out of the country, but there shouldn't be anything different on their end except they may not see me for a few weeks. 

I am missing the championships for alpine skiing, ski jumping, wrestling and indoor track, which is always a bummer, but I know that there are some folks who will help me out with pictures and/or information from those championships (plus many of those results are online).

As a note, I have also created a Facebook page (Joshua Spaulding - Olympics) to go along with the traditional Instagram and Twitter or X pages (SalmonSportsGuy) where you should be able to see my photos and other updates from Italy.

Until then, I have another week of covering high school games before I head off to Italy on Feb. 3. Plus I have some packing to do and some last-minute things to get together I am sure. And there's a few more donuts to make too.


Had the chance to cover the moguls World Cup when the circuit came to Waterville Valley in mid-January.

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