Learn Vocabulary: Sports of the Winter Olympics

What’s your favourite winter sport? Is it figure skating or luge? Do you know what luge is? In preparation for this year’s Olympic Games in South Korea, watch this English vocabulary lesson on Olympic winter sports. In this lesson, you will learn about hockey, skiing, snowboarding, curling, and more. Do you know all the different types of sledding? The Olympic Games take place every four years. Watch the video to ensure that this year, you are ready to talk sports. More of my videos about sports: Learn English: Basketball Vocabulary 10 English Expressions from Sports TRANSCRIPT Hi. Welcome to . I’m Adam. In today’s lesson we’re going to talk about the Winter Olympics. They’re just around the corner, and I figured it’s a good idea that you know what’s going on if you’re interested in winter sports. I’m going to tell you about the different events that you can watch, and what the different words are that they’re talking about on TV. Okay? Because this year the Olympics are in Pyeongchang, South Korea, which is the northern part of South Korea, but not North Korea. It’s a little bit confusing. The northern part of South Korea. And all the regular events are there, so I’m going to walk you through them and make sure you know which ones you like, which ones you want to watch, adjust your calendars, your timetables because if you live in a different part of the world, you may have to watch them during the night. So, we’re going to start with the events and then I’ll give you some general Olympics’ vocabulary. Let’s start with skating. Okay? We’re going to... There’re different events for skating. There’s speed skating which happens around a long track, an oval track, and people basically race each other; then there’s short track speed skating-sorry-and basically this is like a very short... It’s almost like a little circle, and you have five or six guys, and they just basically have a race and they’re trying to finish first; and whoever finished first, second, etc., they go on and they have a few rounds of this. Okay? They have different rounds, and the winner of each one or the top two of each race go to the next round, the next round until you have a final round, and then the winner gets gold, second place gets silver, etc., or in bronze. So, this is a very exciting event because there’re always crashes, and they go around really, really fast, and they’re like... Basically almost sideways because they’re on their skates going around in a circle all the time, very exciting to watch. Then, of course, there’s figure skating, which is one of the more... One of the most popular events during the Winter Olympics. There are men’s, women’s, and pairs figure skating, and I think there’s also a dance figure skating, it’s a little bit different. And basically they’re on the rink, so the ice surface, or the... The building they’re in is the arena and the actual ice surface is called a rink. And there they do all kinds of performances. It’s very acrobatic. Now, you might hear all the different names of the movements they make, like double axel and cow something, these I don’t actually know because you have to actually know something about figure skating, but you can just watch it. It’s very beautiful to watch, beautiful music and they wear their costumes. Their costumes are just basically they create for themselves, they’re custom-made costumes you can call them, and they go around, they do all these acrobatic things. There’re two components to it, there’s the technical and then there’s the artistic. So they do this on two occasions, and they get a scaled score, basically up to six or five, 5.2, 5.5, etc., and whoever has the best score, obviously gets the gold medal. And the one component is the technical where they have to do certain number of routines, certain number of movements. And the second one is artistic where they have to basically involve those movements, but also according to the music, according to the style, etc. Okay? Very popular. And of course they’re wearing figure skates. That’s the only real equipment they need, except for their costumes. Speed skaters, they wear a different type of skate. It’s a much longer blade, okay? So they’re basically on blade. They’re basically on, like, two or three milli-... Or three or four millimetres of metal, that’s all that’s holding them up. Very sharp edges to the blades, and that’s what they go around on, etc. Okay? So, figure skating. Skiing, that’s another common and very popular sport in the Olympics. All types of different events that involve skiing. Alpine skiing is basically coming down a mountain, and there’s a slalom, basically it’s a very long... They’re on the slope of the mountain, and it’s a very long course. Okay? And they come down and whoever has the best time... […]