Top Ten Tips Winter Olympics 2010

82 countries are participating in Olympic Winter Games and there are 5,500 Olympic athletes and officials.

South Korea dominate the short-track speed skating event winning 29 of their 31 Winter Olympic medals on the short track.

Long-track speeding; Skaters compete in pairs, racing around a 400m oval ice rink with two lanes 4m wide, with the two racers swapping between the inner and outer lanes during races, racing each other and the clock.

Yevgeny Plushenko (Russian) quit figure skating in 2006, then then returned with a win at the European Championship last month and is now hoping to become the first man in more than 50 years to successfully defend the gold medal in the sport.

Olympic chiefs gave Australia's women two-man bobsleigh team of Astrid Loch-Wilkinson and Cecilia McIntosh the final green light to compete in the Winter Games on February 10^th after a successful appeal against their exclusion from the Olympics.

Snowboarding rules in the halfpipe, one snowboarder at a time performs a routine of acrobatic jumps, twists and tricks on the inside of a half-cylinder-shaped snow tube or ramp while moving from one side of the halfpipe to the other. The riders are judged on the height and style of their tricks.

The game of curling is more than 500 years old. The game has two teams play against each other at a time. The game is played on ice, and the two teams take turns pushing 19.1-kilogram stones towards a series of concentric rings or circles. The object is to get the stones as close to the centre of the rings as possible.

Common terms used in Ice Hockey

Assist - The last two players to handle the puck prior to the scoring of that team’s goal are credited for assisting the goal scorer.

Blue-line(s) - Two foot-wide lines marking the separation of the zones of play. The area from a blue line to the boards behind the goal is the “defensive end” for the team defending that goal, and the “offensive zone” for the team trying to score on that goal. The blue line is used to determine offside calls.

Boards - Hard plastic walls and glass that surround the rink to keep the puck and players contained.

The first world championships in biathlon were held in 1958 at Saalfelden, Austria. Biathlon became an Olympic sport (for men only) at the Squaw Valley 1960 Olympic Winter Games. Women’s biathlon joined the Olympic Games 30 years later, in 1992, at the Albertville Games, in France.

Two athletes — Peter Minsch of Switzerland and George Robertson of Australia — tied for first place in the Lurge event in of February 12, 1883 what was called “The Great International Sled Race”. Their time: 9 minutes and 15 seconds, to slide down a four kilometre track joining the Swiss villages of Klosters and Davos.