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Yep. I watched about 20 minutes of it last night and saw the stacks on the NBC coverage. At least the one closest to the hill had a cheerful 2022 Olympics logo on the side of it.

I tuned in to see the first run of the women's slalom. Wanted to watch Mikaela Shiffrin in her best event. And I'll be darned if she didn't lose an edge and slide off the course in the first six or so seconds of her first run. Again! Then she just sat at the side fencing where she ended up and stayed there for a very long time; her mother even came up and sat with her. I can't imagine being an athlete and having the pinnacle competition of your sport come around only once every four years and in 2022, when you're 26 and in your prime, the Chinese Olympic Committee basically tells you you'll be skiing on Airsoft pellets instead of snow. Get over it.

That isn't the ski jumping "hill," but it is the "Shougang Big Air Venue" where they hold the freestyle and snowboarding big air events. Welcome to China...




And my bet is that NBC, who is covering the games, will show not one single shot from an angle that shows the stacks, and will never mention them once.

Oh, and a follow-up thought. If you watched some of the early news or commentary from the games, another thing you're aware of is that every bit of "snow" on all venues is manmade. Not a bit of it is natural snow. Has there ever been a winter Olympics where all the snow is manufactured? It's one of the reasons the ski slopes have been unusually treacherous: the manmade snow isn't like a powder; it's hard and icy. We saw that when Miss Consistency Mikaela Shiffrin went down on her very first run of the games at the giant slalom.