Site maintenance notice

Hey everyone... working on upgrading the Movable Type software that powers OZ. Just wanted to let you know that things may look and behave oddly for a bit as this takes place. Apologies for any inconvenience!

For now old comments aren't showing up, but they should come back when the process is complete (they better)! Posting will be light for the time being. I will try to wait for the upgrade to take effect before posting new content. Also, any new comments made may not make it over.

Thanks once again for your patience!

Apolo sweeps up, in this Sweden photo courtesy of SusanG:

Korean Short Track Team in Colorado Springs

The Korean national team is training in Colorado Springs at the moment. They've been there nearly two weeks and are expected to stay till the end of the month.

Word is that at least half the Korean skaters are new this season. Returning skaters for the women are Chun-sa Byun and reigning world champion Eun-kyung Choi. Men's world champ Hyun-soo Ahn as well as Suk-woo Song and human bumpercar Seung-jae Lee are back for the men (which seems to put to rest speculation that Lee was suspended for this season).

Both the U.S. and Korean teams are training at the World Arena with practices open to the public as usual. Unlike a couple seasons ago when the Japanese national team visited, no joint training sessions have taken place so far, and none were planned at this writing.

The Korean team is staying at a local hotel (not at the Olympic Training Center).

Wisconsin State Journal | Madison likes big, one-shot sports events

The World Cup meet is the latest in a run of prominent international athletic events to be staged in Madison, a city which evidently has a reputation as a hot destination for world-class competitions:

The latest assignment on that front came Monday when it was announced a World Cup short-track speedskating meet will be held Nov. 26 to 28 at the Coliseum.

Every medal winner from the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City is expected to compete in the event, including American gold medalist Apolo Anton Ohno and bronze medalist Rusty Smith. Approximately 125 athletes from 22 countries are expected to spend the Thanksgiving holiday weekend with us.

The Madison World Cup is the third in a series of six meets that will be used to determine the overall point leaders in four distances for men and women. The competitions are a prelude to the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, and are such a big deal they will be televised live to Asia and will be tape-delayed in Europe and Canada.

New Video: Cleveland 500m Men's Heat

The latest Cleveland video clip, courtesy of Sue, Maggie and Sonia.

Skaters in this race: Apolo Anton Ohno, Anthony Lobello Jr., Kreg Greer and Zack Goldberg.

Ohno Zone outage

Apologies to everyone for the loooong outage today!

The hosting company data center whose computer servers house OZ is located near downtown Baltimore, where an underground electrical fire resulted in widespread power outages late last night through this evening. Thousands of web sites were knocked offline today because of this incident!

Some of you may remember that a year ago, OZ went down for a day or so, due to -- yep, a fire! It was Sept. 18, 2003 - how eerie is that?

Unfortunately there is little to be done in such situations except wait... and find a new web host. So, if anyone out there knows of a good, reliable web host who offers at least 1GB of storage and at least 15GB of bandwidth a month, please let me know! We were outgrowing the current host anyway...

Thanks everyone for your patience!