Not your grandfather's Olympics

Freestyle skiing and snowboarding events have been around since Nagano, so only the most curmudgeonly old-timer would shake their head at events with tricks called the McTwist or the YOLO or the fakey. Slopestyle is new, but it's not new, you know? I'm fine with new events. I'd watch speed skate team laser tag if they put it together. The Poolmaster (besides referring to himself in the third person nickname style) is not interested in the half-baked nostalgia that forgets the downside to hockey without helmets or opening ceremonies without LED. Forward progress!

However, Sochi has issues. Oh yes. Not talking about the baby journalists who can't take a joke with the falling doorknobs and no-flush toilet paper. The issue is that it is not a winter town. It is not cold. Today, of the 22 cities that have hosted the SUMMER Olympics, Sochi was warmer than 15 of them. Sochi at night was warmer than mid-afternoon Atlanta. Don't believe me? Here's the chart:




What do the fine locals of Sochi do for fun? Relax under their palm trees, play a little tennis, and get in some sailing. No ski jumping. No curling. Ever.

The men's normal hill ski jump was earlier this week. Here's a shot of the crowd:

Now, here's a photo of the same event in Oslo 1952:

Look at that. Imagine the people in the far upper left of the photo: Mr. and Mrs. Otto Oslo. It's a cold day in their hometown. They put on their best black coat and some sensible shoes and went to stand for hours to watch tiny specks launch themselves into the air. They couldn't even see them land, relying instead on the crowd noise to tell them if it was a good landing, a bad one, or a reallly bad one.

For Mr. and Mrs. Oslo, this was a world event, but a local one too. The atmosphere was certainly great because the excitement of the tourists was surpassed only by the locals who are just bananas for their event and are glad you came. How many of those exist anymore? Boston Marathon, Kentucky Derby, and that bizarro tomato fight day in some Spanish town. That's about it. We'll mourn the loss of those days, dulling the pain with great camera angles in HD and twitter updates about pinkeye (these Bob Costas jokes are getting cornea and cornea). And we'll embrace the fact that a Slovenian pop star can tie for gold in women's downhill with an old-school racer from a skiing family in a town of 4000 in the Swiss Alps. A place with no palm trees and where they don't go sailing. Ever.