Russian Bobsledder A Little Too Pleased By Canadian Wipeout

The dirty unspoken secret of the Olympics is that for every frightening, bone-rattling, face-scraping wipeout, there's a thrilled athlete whose road to glory just got a little bit smoother. The trick is to not seem too thrilled about it.

For example, Lyndon Rush, the Tim Tebow of Canadian bobsleigh, was crushed—literally and figuratively—when he flipped his ride on the second run of the two-man competition, knocking him out of medal contention. (More like bob-SLAY, am I right?) If only he could have looked on the bright side, like Russia's Aleksandr Zoubkov. Thanks to Rush's crash, he and teammate Alexey Voevoda were still in the hunt. (They eventually won bronze.) It was a great moment for them ... but maybe applauding while Rush and his brakeman slid head first down a frozen chute of death with a 400-pound weight on top of them was a little uncalled for.

To be fair, Zoubkov was just expressing what most athletes instinctively feel when an opponent goes down—sucks to be him, but at least he's out of my way. He quickly realized that showing that glee to the TV cameras is a little inappropriate and he gamely tried to recover, but that's danger (and beauty) of live television.*

Rush crashes out of contention in second run [CTV] Olympian says there's 'no atheist at the top of a bobsled run' [BP Sports]

* Not that NBC would know. We were only alerted to this five days after it happened, thanks to a Canadian who caught it on CTV. However, I will say that NBC's "Full Replays" are quite fascinating to watch online. Probably because they contain all of the action, but zero commentary or commercials.