The Voices of Reason: The Winter Olympics

The Voices of Reason: The Winter Olympics
by Various Authors

They may come around only every four years, but the Winter Olympics still are comprised of largely fringe sports that few people care about. Maybe that's why they seem to go on forever. There's really only one good solution...

Question: If you could get rid of one event from the Winter Olympics, which event would it be, and why?

Erik Sincoff—Short Track Speed Skating needs to be changed or removed. The track is not long enough and the racers just spend their time turning. Too many crashes occur that wipe out other competitors leading to challenges. Crashes are ok—they're even entertaining—if they just wipe out the person that crashes.

Curling - because it's not a sport.

Doubles Luge - Maybe they could replace this with two people in a giant inner tube sliding down the track. Or maybe they could pile eight people on a sled and see how they do. Otherwise, I just don't see enough of a difference between singles and doubles luge to make it worth having a separate event for it.

Jeff Lewis—Though I'm not terribly excited by the various sledding events, and the 10,000 meter isn't ready for prime time—especially when won by snipey Americans—I love the Winter Olympics, and if given a choice would watch it over March Madness or the Super Bowl every time (particularly since the 49ers are unlikely to be in the Super Bowl in the next decade).

The one event that I would like to see disappear, though, is freestyle aerials, which are a big waste of money and energy, given that the Olympic teams that compete in the event must build special mega-million dollar ski jump/swimming pool facilities just so a few thrill seekers can practice without hurting themselves during the off season—thus putting off the shredding of their knees by a few months. Though the sport is impressive, I don't think it's justifiable. I'd rather see Scandanavians skiing in big loops, stopping occasionally to shoot at targets.

Brenda McAlice—Curling. What the hell is curling doing in the Olympics?! It appears to be nothingmore than a glorified, ice version of a popular bar game called shuffleboard. Where is the athletic talent in this game? Where is the extensive physical training? Where are the large biceps, triceps, abs or quads? Has anyone ever had to get reconstructive
knee surgery from curling? Are there curling accidents? I doubt if anyone's ever even broken a nail "competing" in this "sport." If curling
is an Olympic game, what's next—ice bowling? Lame. (Sorry if you are from Minnesota or any other freezing cold place where boredom outweighs logic and curling happened to be a part of your regular after school or weekend activities as a wee child, eh.)

Vance Macdonald—Out of respect for Lynn, I am biting my tongue on figure skating and their "creative" scoring. And there will be a serious beat-down for anyone mentioning curling (the pacifist beat-down, that is: a huffy, exasperated sigh of displeasure). I have to give the boot to the biathlon. This franken-sport is as anachronistic as laces on a basketball, and as exciting as the flow of tree sap.

Side note: I've had three separate conversations this week regarding the exciting freestyle aerial ski jumping, with everyone feeling this sport is in serious trouble. There are just not enough ways you can combine only 2 basic tricks (flips and twists) to differentiate one jump from another. I can see a rapid descent into the world of the slam dunk contest where various novelties and artificial elements are added—blindfolds are surely right around the corner, followed by backwards landings, flaming skis, and, ultimately, an inner-ear removal.

Mark May—I would have answered this question the same even before the US men's team flamed out of the hockey quarterfinals, but I would dump men's hockey. The "national pride" dimension of the Olympics is just completely lost on the hockey rink. Adding the pros here has had the same effect on my interest as the NBA players in the Summer Olympics. I could not care less who wins. The players seem to be only slightly more motivated. Ask them—would you rather win a gold medal or a Stanley Cup? I would predict an overwhelming majority to favor the Stanley Cup (which pre-dates the Winter Olympics). It seems absurd to me that the NHL allowed its season to be disrupted for a tournament with many of the same players just on different teams. (Side note: not a big surprise that the NHL owners and league president made a stupid decision on this matter).

I say dump men's Olympic hockey and bring back the quadrennial Hockey World Cup.

Dileep Rao—First, just on principle, the aerial. I saw something so disturbing, I could NOT BELIEVE they allowed it to be broadcast on TAPE DELAY! A female aerial skier did her hot-dogging (BTW, another subjective judging feat that seems hardly Olympic), landed awkwardly and clearly shredded her reconstructed knee. She screamed as if horsewhipped by a red hot iron. I can not unsee that awfulness, and the sound that the parabolic microphones picked up was horrifying—her screaming, over and over. The pain must have been unimaginable. I don't want to see it.

In my accounts, the risk of that kind of injury is just not worth the minor delights of the aerial. I think it's stupid and should be eliminated.

My second answer is that all sports where a single nation has a dominance either through heritage or the neophyte status of the sport should be decommissioned til their international bona fides truly are believable. The overwhelming dominance of the Americans in the snowboard events is disgusting to me in that we might as well have announced a "Star Spangled Banner" competition. The world is not a competitive force in these events and it should be eliminated. I get the same feeling watching these events that I do watching the X-games, that the events and their overstyled terminology all reek of the lingo=legitimacy commentary that I find repugnant and pretentious.

I do like the youngsters and their 'snowboarding bra' bravura. They infuse the tired and overhyped packaging with an unfakeable and slightly suspect sense of truth. Watching some of them in the medal ceremonies was moving (I'm thinking of Shaun White, Il Pomodoro
Volante) as the tears were real, the stage was immense and the event
and its meaning—that they had won a medal for their country—seemed to descend upong them in the moment. It was great theatre. The events though, simply aren't competitive enough, internationally, to be real Olympic events. Not yet anyway.

Brant Wellman—Ice Dancing, which is hands down the one event that least deserves to be in the Winter Olympics. One night while I was watching this event (and openly mocking it), I came to the conclusion that there is very little difference between Ice Dancing and the Ice Capades. I might even go as far to compare it to Disney on Ice. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that what they're doing isn't difficult, but come on, is this a sport? No, and its not even a game (which is why I don't complain about curling being in the Olympic GAMES). Ice Dancing is a performance, pure and simple, and has just as much business being in the Olympics as ballroom dancing.

All throughout one of the Russian couple's performances I couldn't get the image out of my head of Goofy gracefully skating into the picture, cutting in, and skating away with the woman. This of course was followed by an image of professional hockey player Rob Blake skating into the picture from the other side and dishing out a punishing hip-check on the guy, sending him flying out the opposite side of the screen. Hehe. Still makes me chuckle.

Wade Armstrong—Like most of us who watch the Winter Olympics, I love the unique speed and danger of these Games. People hurtling downhill faster than I go on the freeway; the headfirst Skeleton racers dodging death; speedskaters risking a wipe-out while moving an order of magnitude faster than any track-and-field athlete; all of these exemplify the unique flavor of the Winter Olympics. Heck, anyone who's watched the pairs Figure Skating or even Ice Dancing has seen some death-defying accidents this year—after that Canadian woman flew to the ice from above her partner's head, you can't tell me that they're not risking their necks every time they go out there (and did you see the file footage of the Russian ice skater dropping his partner on her head, and how she bounced and then laid there still? That was better than any World's Wildest Police Videos I've ever seen).

The problem is, there's one pussy sport that drags down the excitement of the whole Games. Even the ice dancers have the cojones to go out there in nothing more than lycra, nothing between them and a thorough de-teething except their skill. Sure, the bobsledders wear helmets, but I have it on good authority that is only because it takes so long otherwise to clean up the brains after a bad accident. But those pansy hockey players armor every inch of their body against the chance that they get a small ouchy from one of their fellow game-players. Are they hurtling through the air, far above the ground, at speeds my grandmother never drives, only inches away from their opponents as in Snowboard Cross? No, these girly-man (and girly-girl) hockey players are firmly affixed to the ground, skating in circles—just standing there half of the time!—and yet they need more body armor than do our brave troops in Iraq.

So, let's get rid of hockey, and leave the Olympics for the real brave, tough athletes, the ice dancers, the snowboarders, and the mens' doubles lugers.

Bob Jensen—Many people, I fear, are going to lobby to remove curling from the Winter Games, but I am opposed to that for two simple reasons. First and foremost, it provides a glimmer of hope that I may yet be able to become an Olympic athlete. I hate to admit that I am aging, and having to admit that I could not possible compete in the Olympics is a bitter pill to
swallow. Oh, mind you, I am not in shape to become one of the sweeper
guys, but I still believe that, with some training and practice, I could
become one of the rock slider guys.

Secondly, some of the girls who compete in curling are hot. If we could get some of them to compete in bikinis, I bet they would move from the 3am time slot right to prime time. The event that confuses me is the biathalon. Skiing and shooting? How archaic, and bizarre, is that combination? Why don't the Summer Olympics combine random talents like, say, hang gliding and dog catching? Can you imagine contestants winging their way down the course in pursuit of dachsunds? It would make about the same sense.

I will admit that I do watch the Winter Olympics, because they contain a lot of the things that make the Olympics great. Top world athletes train for 4 years and have only one shot, often mere seconds or minutes, to make all that work pay off, or alternately to see 4 years of hopes dashed, in one foolish attempted showboating trick off the last snowboarding jump. What could be better? Well, I'll tell you—the Summer Olympics are better, and the reason is that more summer events are contested in head-to-head matchups, while winter events are either for score or against the clock. Snowboarding cross is Step 1 in fixing that. The logical Step 2 should be that all downhill events—skiing, bobsledding, luge—be contested in a head-to-head format.

But with some imagination lets go to Step 3. How much more fun would figure skating be to watch, if 5 or 6 of them were competing, on the ice, at the same time? If it catches on in Winter we could move it to Summer and even improve those games. I might actually watch gymnastics if the freakishly small girl on the balance beam was not only trying to complete her own routine, but at the same time was trying to push the other freakishly small girl off the other end.

Now, where does one practice sliding curling rocks in Southern California?

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