Most winter Olympic sports are quite obscure. But that’s their charm.
Calgary hosted the Winter Olympics in 1988, and I have very fond memories of our city welcoming the world — or at least that small fraction of the world interested in winter sports. It was a great festival of goodwill, and we Calgarians gamely went to the Olympic Plaza to cheer the champions of some of the world’s most spectator-unfriendly sports.
I entered the lottery and “won” tickets to the luge. Nothing to see there, literally. Unless you are capable of distinguishing hundredths of a second with the naked eye, watching the luge is pointless. In 1988, the NHL had yet to join the Olympics and women’s hockey was not yet included, so there was little interest even in the only sport that has an actual popular following. Curling, too, came later, which does have a popular following in Canada, and is rather easy to follow with rudimentary instruction.
The Winter Olympics is admirably come-one, come-all, not fussy about its events. We now have the skeleton, which is luge upside-down. Snowboarding is now a featured event. Alpine skiing has become the swimming of the Winter Games, where it possible to win multiple medals for basically the same event. In addition to the straightforward downhill, there is slalom, giant slalom, super giant slalom and super combined. Why not super-duper giant slalom? Or perhaps halfway down the mountain on skis and then the rest on a snowboard? And why not plain old tobogganing, which surely is the most universal of winter sports?
The absurdity of the sports gives them a refreshing novelty, meaning that enjoying the Olympics does not require sophisticated knowledge. Aside from relatives of the participants, who knows the difference between Nordic combined and biathalon? (The former is cross-country skiing and ski jumping, the latter is, imaginatively, cross-country skiing with firearms.)
Back in 1988, figure skating was easy enough to follow — the Soviet judge voted one way, the American the other and it all depended on what deal the French judge had cut ahead of time. Now the procedure is rather more opaque, with nine judges, one referee, a technical specialist, an assistant technical specialist, a technical controller, and an ultra-secret computer. It would help to have an iPhone app to understand what is going on.
The whole spectacle is more than a bit ridiculous, with fans cheering madly for victories in unknown sports, presented by commentators who appear astonishingly well-informed as they expatiate on the sidecut radius in snowboarding.
Why then do we enjoy it so? In Calgary, we had Ralph Klein and Eddie the Eagle and the Jamaican bobsled team and a good time was had by all. The International Olympic Committee was terribly chagrined that such ridiculous figures could dominate the games, and so changed the rules to prevent marginal players from ever competing again.
Which was a shame, because the Winter Games celebrate precisely the marginal figures in sports. Vancouver does not prattle on like Toronto about being a world-class city, but it has a lot to offer. The usual practice is to hold the games far from the glamour capitals, in places such as Lillehammer and Lake Placid, Sapporo and Sarajevo and Sochi. The forgotten stepsister to the Summer Games, the Winter Olympics give a place in the sun to those places, those sports and those athletes who, absent the magic of the Olympics rings, would otherwise be left in the dark.
There is an innocent joy in taking a sudden interest in the men’s long-track team-pursuit speed-skating. Most of the competitors are ordinary people, far from the luxuries of celebrity athletics, who have mastered a rather obscure skill of great physical difficulty. Absent the Olympics, they might be otherwise considered eccentric hobbyists.
It’s odd, it’s simple, it’s pure. It gives an outlet for patriotism, though no one seriously thinks that “owning the podium” greatly affects our Canadian pride. It would be nice to win gold medals in short track or ski jumping, but those would be bonuses. There is only one medal that matters — the hockey gold — which means that the rest of time, the Olympics can simply be enjoyed as a great winter carnival. And in Vancouver, without the inconvenience of snow or ice.
Tags: National Post