To get into the spirit of the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Town of Parker organized an Olympic-themed fact series. Through the duration of the Olympics, Feb. 9 to 25, the Town shared one fact per day referencing winter sports and their connections to life in Parker.
Day 1: The Pyeongchang Olympic Stadium, which hosts the opening and closing ceremonies, seats 35,000 spectators. That’s enough to fill the Mainstage Theater and its 535 seats at the PACE Center 65 times over.
Day 2: If it were an independent nation represented at the Winter Olympics, Parker’s 52,000 residents would make it the fourth-smallest country competing. Parker has a population larger than Monaco’s 38,695, Liechtenstein’s 37,922 and San Marino’s 33,400.
Parker itself is larger than Pyeongchang, which has 43,000 residents.
Day 3: The Town of Parker is 6,145 miles away from Pyeongchang, South Korea. To cover that distance, you’d have to run the entire Parker Parks and Recreation Run Series (Love ‘em or Leave ‘em Valentine’s Day 10K, Cattle Crossing 5K, So Long to Summer 10K and Turkey Day 5K) a total of 330 times.
Day 4: It would take 26 Olympic ice hockey rinks to cover the 11.725-acre Public Works Operation Center.
Day 5: The longest Olympic speed skating event is the 10,000 meters. To skate an equivalent distance, you would have to complete 73 laps along the 450-foot-long Ice Trail at Discovery Park.
And for the sake of comparison, you’d have to complete those 73 laps in 12 minutes and 44 seconds to break the Olympic record set by Jorrit Bergsma of the Nethlerlands in 2014.
Day 6: A typical 4-man bobsled reaches speeds of 93 miles per hour during competition. If the 5.7 miles of Mainstreet within Town boundaries were a bobsled track, a team traveling at 93 miles per hour would complete the track in about 3 and a half minutes, not accounting for stop lights or other traffic.
Day 7: The 2018 Winter Olympic alpine skiing downhill course measures 1.7 miles, about the same distance between the Parker Police Department facility and Parker Town Hall.
Day 8: The walls to the freestyle skiing and snowboarding halfpipe are just under 22 feet high. For comparison, the indoor climbing wall at the Parker Fieldhouse ascends to 25 feet.
Day 9: Pyeongchang’s Phoenix Snow Park, where freestyle skiing and snowboard events are taking place, has room for 18,000 spectators. Last year, an estimated 20,000 visitors attend the Town’s five major free special events — Bike to Work Day, Stars and Stripes Celebration, Mayor’s Holiday Lighting, Holiday Carriage Rides and the Christmas Carriage Parade.
Day 10: The 44-acre Alpensia Sliding Centre, the site for bobsled, skeleton and luge competitions, would take up about two-thirds of the recently-acquired 74-acre Harvie Open Space if it were moved from its current location.
Day 11: In the 15 kilometer individual biathlon event, which combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting, athletes ski a total of nine miles. The Parks and Recreation Department manages more than three times that length of concrete and soft surface trails in Town, presently 30 miles, or 48 kilometers.
Day 12: A luge athlete will cover 4,410 feet on the Olympic track. That’s about the same distance as going down one of the slides at H2O’Brien Pool 24 times.
Day 13: The Pyeongchang Olympic figure skating arena is 197 feet by 98 feet. Comparatively the inline sport court at the Parker Fieldhouse measures 184 feet by 85 feet.
Day 14: In cross country skiing’s skiathlon, athletes traverse a 30 kilometer, or 18.6 mile, course. A skier would have to complete the skiathlon course six and a half times to reach a distance equal to the 120 miles of storm pipe maintained by the Town’s Stormwater Utility Division.
Day 15: If lined up end to end, it would take 108 and a half Olympic-sized curling sheets (146 feet long) to cover the three-mile S. Twenty Mile Road.
Day 16: Athletes soar up to 20 feet in the air during freestyle skiing aerials competitions, roughly the same height as two trademark Parker five-globe lampposts stacked atop each other.
Day 17: From peak to base, the Olympic ski jumping hill is 466 feet, or the height of 23 of the Town’s 20-foot traffic signals.