Ben Clatworthy's Blog

With the main Olympic games over attention turns to the Paralympic games in the host city. The Vancouver Olympic Centre has become The Vancouver Paralympic Centre and the medals have Braille on them; it’s a brilliant competition shining with equality. We have a video report too.

Having a disabled brother who is skiing crazy and uses a sit-ski himself the Paralympic games highlight how accepting the world can be when it wants. It’s a lovely sight to see disabled athletes competing on the worlds highest sporting stage doing what they love.

Let the games begin...

But here in Britain the Paralympics aren’t exactly drawing the same exposure as the able-bodied games did last month. The BBC are lacking coverage, instead highlighting the two weeks competition in one hour at the end and the newspapers are writing supplements on these games. It’s a sad sight really but there is no doubt that our British represenatives out in Canada will have a brilliant time.

Sean Rose and Ben Clatworthy in October 2009.

We might just bring home another GBR medal; Sean Rose has already won gold in the Disabled Skiing World Cup this year and is on top form. Its a perfect chance for him to shine and boost coverage of Paralympic sports in the UK. I met Sean in October last year at the Metro Ski and Snowboard show and he is a truly inspirational skier – I’ve kept in contact with him since and written several articles this year as I followed his progress.

I wish all of Great Britain’s athletes at the games the very best of luck and really hope I’ll be able to write a blog on a medal sometime in the next fortnight.

If you’re interested in finding out more about skiing for the disabled why not check out these videos I made last season on Disabled skiing. It’s an inspirational sport! Click here to watch the videos.

If you are interested in using any of these videos please contact Ben Clatworthy through his website. Thank you.

It’s no doubt that the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics will go down in history for having a fair few problems, controversies and of course successes. It tends to be the same with most major sporting events, but Vancouver hasn’t half had it’s fair share.

Times were hard from the start of the season with unseasonably warm temperatures for Cypress Mountain leading to a distinct lack of snow (and again today the Helicopters a flying in new snow), and the treat of the resort of Whilster being auctioned off by Intrawest. Hundreds of tickets have been canceled too as spectator areas on Cypress are turned to mud.

The tragic death of 21 year old Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili just one day before the start of the games highlighted the dangers of the Whilster Sliding Center track with training postponed for the 2nd time in the run up to the games.

Bad weather and heavy snow put hold on both the male and female Downhill competitions and also messed up the entire Alpine Schedule; again a common occurrence at many FIS Alpine Ski Races.

But let’s not forget the successes; most notably so far for Great Britain, Amy Williams who won gold on Friday evening in the Skeleton event. Amy had led the field from the start of the competition. Didier Defago won the delayed Men’s Downhill and just yesterday Bode Miller won Gold in the Super Combined event meaning he takes home one of every kind of Medal from the games.

Britain’s Ed Drake has done very well too, he finished 29th in the Super Combined yesterday, 32nd in the Super-G and Chemmy Alcott finished a very creditable 13th in the Women’s Downhill last week.

It’s hard to summarize an Olympic Games in such a short blog, but I hope this have given you a taster of whats going on over the pond. I am helping to cover the games extensively for PlanetSKI.eu, where I act as their Racing and Sports Correspondent so do keep an eye there for all the latest from Vancouver.

See our special Olympic Section on PlanetSKI; as well as the latest news it is has some in-depth features and a few stories that you wont see elsewhere.

You can find all my Olympic Games Articles on Benclatworthy.com too.

As the UK starts to recover from the recent snowy weather Ben Clatworthy takes at look at the British reaction to snow.

Snow, neige, nevar, sneeuw, or however you say it is very much a factor of winter weather. In fact, each year 1.27 million Britons up-sticks and head to the mountains all in a quest to find snow.

In the past week the UK has been brought to a standstill as people battle with freezing temperatures, heavy snow and treacherous ice. More than 8,000 schools were closed across the country, including the whole of Clifton College, as a result of the extreme weather. The closures meant that around 230,000 pupils were given the day off school and the perfect opportunity to head out and play in the snow.

The snow really went to the heads of newspaper and television companies as pages and pages, or hours and hours of coverage were given to the snow. On Wednesday night the BBC were left with hours of blank schedule after the League Cup semi-final between Manchester United and Manchester City was called off. How did they fill it? Well half an hour was given to a ‘BBC News Special: The Big Freeze’ – anyone would have thought we were in for an ice age. Many would say they were trying just that bit too hard.

If you watched the BBC at all that day, I would totally forgive you if you were left, stranded indoors, scared, shaking and fearing for your life; they made out snow was the most dangerous, horrible, life-threatening thing that the UK had ever seen.

Supermarkets went without deliveries, thousands of pints of milk were reported to have gone to waste as milkmen and lorries were unable to provide houses and shops and there is no doubt about it that people went panic buying. On Saturday Waitrose was completely out of normal milk with dwindling supplies of bread and vegetables.

Fun for some

Snowy road in Bristol

Oblivious to the state of emergency scores of children happily played on every green-space with snowmen dotted across the Downs in Bristol and in front gardens everywhere. It’s been a very fun time for children and grown-ups alike who were unable to make it to work. 14% of the UK workforce was reported to have stayed at home on Wednesday 7 January costing the economy £0.5 billion per day.

But questions are being provoked as people ask whether schools were right or wrong to close and if they should have made more effort to stay open. An unnamed primary school teacher in Bristol told me over the weekend, “Bristol Local Authority wouldn’t execute a ‘blanket closure’ of schools and instead just gave schools a single-lined telephone number to call and give details of closure.”

With more snow expected in the coming days these unanswered questions could lead to further disruption.

Ben used information from the BBC, The Evening Standard, The Guardian and the Ski Club of Great Britain to compile this article