It's good news for sunbathers in Canada this week, but bad news for the Winter Olympics as temperatures in Vancouver soared into double figures. With a day time high of 12ºC and sunny weather forecast throughout the games, visitors have been trading skis for swimwear.
Obviously this has had a detrimental effect on the winter games that require snow and cold weather. However, the plucky Canadians are soldiering on by slightly amending the games.
The skeleton bob will remain on the same course, but instead of a tea-tray, the participants will hurtle down the course on a rubber ring with running melt-water providing the lubricant. The bob sled events will now take place down the same course, but on a log flume instead of in the usual tin cans.
Competitors now have a greater incentive to do well in the ski jump as there were only enough mattresses in the local hotels to provide a soft landing for between seventy and eighty metres from the end of the ramp, making this event more of an accuracy event than distance.
The biathlon will now be a running and shooting event, whilst competitors in the snowboarding will instead chase a large circular cheese down the hill.
The ice-hockey and skating events have been largely unaffected, though the Barbados hockey team are expected to do better than previously thought.
