Saturday, February 15, 2014

Olympic Miracle on Ice in Sochi Thanks to Former UMass Hockey Goalie Jonathan Quick With Help from T.J. Oshie

This morning I have been working on the presentation that I will be giving at the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics  & Operations Research that will take place March 30-April 1 in Boston.  The speakers are to deliver their presentations in pdf format to INFORMS by February 24 and they will be distributed to the registrants.

But since the US was playing Russia in men's hockey this morning, live on television, I could not resist spending a few minutes watching the game which went into a thrilling overtime.

The US Olympic team goalie is none other than Jonathan Quick, who played on the UMass Amherst hockey team and we would enjoy watching him at our great Mullins Center.
 
And Jonathan Quick is not the only Olympian who was a student at UMass Amherst at these Winter Games in Sochi - Thomas Pock is as well and he is playing for the Austrian hockey team.  UMass produced the nice graphic above and you can read more about our former students in this nice press release.

Today's game against Russia was a thriller - it went into overtime and then, thanks to the former North Dakota student, T.J. Oshie, 4 of his 6 shots made it in!

Since my daughter was a competitive figure skater we spent a lot of time on various ice rinks, including the ones at Lake Placid, where the Miracle on Ice took place back at the 1980 Olympics with a relatively young US hockey team beating the Russians. 
 
My daughter even had a chance to skate with the Olympian Johnny Weir in an ice show at Lake Placid a few years ago and we met his mother. 
Weir is an announcer now at this Olympics in Sochi and is doing a great job (although the US men did not medal except for the bronze in the new team event (with women)).