Winter Olympics Made Simple: A Guide for Spectators & Television Viewers

Rating:
Summary: Makes watching the Olympics on TV 10 times more enjoyable.
Review: I stumbled onto Bartges' previous book prior to the 1994 Winter Olympics. It's amazing how much more fun it is to watch an event on TV when you know what the rules are and what strategies the contestants are employing to win. One can easily imagine how this would help in those esoteric events such as biathalon, cross-country skiing and the like. However, he does a great job in clarifying the rules of more familiar sports such as ice hockey and ski-jumping. His illustrations in the chapter on figure skating finally solved for me the mystery of what the differences are between the axel, the lutz, the toe-loop, etc -- all of those jumps which used to look the same to me. His new book repeats much of the same information and includes even better illustrations. More significantly, it adds chapters on events which are new to the Winter Olympics in 1998, including curling, snowboarding and others. For less than the price of a pizza, the whole family can enhance their enjoyment of the entire Winter Olympics -- you don't find many bargains like that!!!