Reasons to Love the Winter Olympics

The Summer Olympics is a grand spectacle, the World Cup glues more eyeballs, the Super Bowl provides the most gambling opportunities, and March Madness has the single best opening day of any competition. But I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the Winter Olympics. Who is this odd creature that appears among us only once every 4 years only to recede in our memory just as quickly, like a groundhog that already knows he’s going to see his shadow before he’s halfway out the hole? The fact that we barely understand her is part of the attraction. Here is a valentine message to this ice jewel of an event: Reasons to Love the Winter Olympics.

Unfair geographic advantages. In the summer, the countries that excel are either rich (can find and train athletes), populous (the best archer out of a billion people should be better than the best archer out of a million people), or contain some sort of genetic advantage even though Bob Costas will try to make only glancing allusions to the fact that the 10,000 finals seems stacked with east Africans while the 100 finals has west Africans and Carribeans. In the winter, these 3 criteria mostly go out the window. Winter Olympic domination has only 2 factors – both of which avoid the stink of economics, sociology, and biochemistry. Winter is about cold hard obvious geography. Does your country lie above 45 degrees latitude? Does your country have mountains? If so, you win the jackpot! Come mine your gold at the Olympics! It's no coincidence the 9 best winter Olympics countries meet both criteria. #10 is South Korea, which meet neither. Note that they excel in one event, short track speed skating, which only requires the ability to refrigerate a room. Which brings us to the next reason:

Underdogs. Everyone loves a good underdog. Winter Olympics have them in spades. In fact, winter brings underdogs to a new level. The geographic advantage is so strong that any attempts to overcome this become a bubbly mix of comedy and after-school-special life lessons. Case in point: Jamaican bobsled. No one knows who actually won that year, but we recall those 4 little green helmets grating the icy track with the sled upside down. John Candy even got a movie gig out of the deal. Winter underdogs usually are memorable for losing, not winning (USA hockey being the exception). British ski jumper Eddie the Eagle Edwards and the Kenyan cross country skier Philip Boit are the other notables in this category. In the winter, there is honor in losing, there is fame. The monologue from Jim McKay on Wide World of Sports talks of the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” Anyone here remember who flashed by the screen during the thrill of victory part of the speech? Me neither. But I bet you’re already thinking about that agony of defeat guy flipping sideways off the ski jump…

The visuals. Speaking of Wide World of Sports, there are only 2 images that I remember from that opening sequence: the ski jump dude and a cross country skier with this hoary long beard that is covered in ice and snow as he pushes endlessly down the course with grim determination. No images of bicycle kicks, badminton slams, or even Acapulco cliff diving can compare to winter sports. Between the speed of the events and the surrounding scenery, there is nothing like it. I will be there at the start of each night’s coverage, because they’ll play the BOM bum bum BOM bum music with flybys of Vancouver at sunset, a sole climber on a knife edge near the summit of some mountain near Banff, and reindeer scattering from the helicopter in the oil-soaked McKenzie delta. Forget that dumb wall in China, this will be sweet in HD.

The outfits. Neoprene and sequins! Most sports uniforms are a non-issue. Of the summer sports, only fencing and wrestling allow the contestant to look like an alien. In winter, it happens all the time. Speed skaters, luge riders, skeleton riders, and alpine skiers are encased in plastic wrap from head to toe. And then there’s ice dancing. NBC cornered the male demographic last Olympics simply by posting this picture before every commercial break:

 “What? Did you want to switch channels to Two and a Half Men reruns? You wanted to make a quick trip to the store? I didn’t think so.”

Keeping up with the times. In 1967, figure skating had 2 components. 40 % of the final score came from the free skate exercise that we still see today. The other 60% came from compulsory figures. “What are compulsory figures,” you ask? The skaters would move in slow motion to draw 6 stupid drawings in the ice. Drawings with names like Circle Eight, Three, Double Three, and the always-tricky Paragraph Double Three. Then a judge would look at the marks with all the concentration of this guy:

 to give scores. Thank goodness the powers that be realized that television audiences didn’t have the stomach to watch this. (“Holy crap, did you just see that Paragraph Double 3 he slapped down? That was gnarly!”) It took a while (until 1990) but finally the origins of figure skating were finally purged completely from the routine in favor of more athletic and interesting stuff. Purists may cry foul, but they would be wrong. Summer sports are painfully rigid in this respect. Swimmers found that dolphin kicking underwater was faster than almost any stroke on top of the water, so they started staying underwater longer and longer. The mean old rule-makers of swimming stepped in and forged a 25 meter berlin wall past which no underwater swimming is allowed. Hey swimming rules committee: how do you like your outhouse, silent films, and smallpox? Personally, I want to see just how far these guys can go underwater – 75 meters? 100? Will they pass out?

Biathlon, the real multi-discipline sport. Summer boasts four “multi-discipline” sports, but all are fakes. Decathlon is done over the course of 2 days, one event at a time, and 8 of the 10 events take less than 15 seconds to complete. Any sport where a good night’s sleep at your hotel is part of the schedule is not 1 continuous sport (that goes for the ladies in the heptathlon too). Pentathlon is also 1 event at a time and also throws in the fact that a horse does all the work for you in one event. Triathlon is better as the events are continuous, but the fatal flaw there is that in the Olympics drafting is allowed on the bike. The result is that all top competitors come in together after the bike stage, making the triathlon really just a running race where everyone starts out tired, wet, and with a sore butt. Might as well just host a 10k that starts after the Log Flume at Six Flags. In the winter biathlon, real men and women come to play. You must ski fast around a course with a gun on your back, then go up a small hill (deviously planted to get your heart rate up) and shoot a bunch of quarter-sized targets while your heavy breath is puffing clouds in front of your view and your main competition is firing a similar gun inches from your face. You missed a shot? Oops. Why don’t you go ski some more!

Curling. The game of Go is centuries old. The rules are quite simple: alternate placing stones on a board with your opponent and don’t let your stones be surrounded. Can’t get any easier right? Wrong. There are more possible ways a game of Go can be played than there are atoms in the universe. (Go ahead and google it, it’s true!) While an off-the-shelf laptop running chess software can now routinely beat the best chess grandmasters, no computer can beat even an average professional Go player. Curling is the same. The rules? Whip that stone down a sheet of ice. Closest to the bull’s eye gets points. Use some brooms if the mood hits you. That’s it. Yet as I watch curling being played, someone will slide their rock and make it stop a good 15 feet in front of the bull’s eye and nowhere near the center, yet the crowd and the announcers will go bonkers at how nicely that rock was played. Really? The last dude hit like 4 rocks in one toss and no one batted an eye about it. Now I’m intrigued! Simple rules, complicated strategy – it can’t be beat.

The Winter Olympics are not perfect (please see Harding, Tonya) but they give a glimpse of how the world can be -- a respite from common knowledge and conventional wisdom. Gravity is not a heavy burden to try in vain to overcome, it is an ally used to gain unholy speeds. Precipitation doesn’t cancel the event, it makes the event. Pressure doesn’t overwhelm you, it frees you. Skaters move so fast because the weight put on the blade actually melts the ice underneath for a fraction of a second as the skater passes. Just imagine if we all could –under the greatest of pressure – simply sail away on our own pencil-thin ocean.