Observations on the Winter Olympics

1. The money quote of this Winter Olympics goes to Nils Van der Poel, the Swedish speedskater who won the gold medals in the 5,000 meter and 10,000 meter events while setting the Olympic record in the former and the world record in the latter. He has won every race he has entered in the last year, often by five or ten seconds – an eternity in a sport where races are routinely decided by hundredths of seconds. He is, by common consent, the best long distance speedskater in human history.

He is also a quote machine.

When you are a professional athlete in a sport that sucks as much as speedskating sucks, you’ve got to find a way to make it suck a little less. And whatever you can get inspired by, you need to find that. … If you can find the answer to that, perhaps you can win the Olympics.

There’s also this:

Athletes are clowns and dancers. We’re entertainers and role models. That’s the only reasonable explanation I can find to do sports.

I mean, he’s not wrong.

2. I enjoyed watching the American team win the mixed-double snow-cross or whatever it is they call that event (it looks like motocross, except instead of minibikes they’re riding snowboards that sound like jet engines as they scrape across the ice) since they were – by at least a decade – the oldest people competing in the competition. He was the oldest American to win an Olympic medal since 1948, apparently. Three cheers for the olds!

3. The other evening I spent a fascinating couple of hours watching the short track speedskating events, which are a strange combination of strength, grace, suicidal tendencies, and litigation. Every race goes like this: five or so athletes line up on one side of a hockey rink. The starting gun sounds and they go around counterclockwise several times – four and half times for the five-hundred meter event, nine times for the thousand – at speeds approaching three hundred miles an hour while riding on yard-long razorblades and separated by maybe half an inch in a sport where contact is illegal. Much of their time is spent going around curves while leaning at a 30-degree angle. The rink is surrounded by four-foot-high foam pads to catch the ones who slide off (blades up to avoid damaging the pads, apparently, though what that means for unfortunate racers nearby is an interesting question – next year their suits will be made entirely of Kevlar and I am not making that up). Once the survivors are done there is an extended period of review to determine whether any of them should be cast into darkness and removed from the standings – a process that can take up to half the known age of the universe and involves microscopic examination of replays and the application of rules that I strongly suspect are made up on the spot. And then they do it again. This gets even more complicated in the relay events, where two or three other full slates of similarly-kitted-out racers are rotating around the interior of the rink trying to align themselves just so in order to switch in. The old skaters shove them forward by the butt. Greater entertainment on a February evening you will never find.

4. What lutefisk-snorting Scandinavian killjoy forced the Norwegian men’s curling team to wear black pants? I’d been looking forward to their quadrennial display of pants that could be seen from space with the naked eye and suddenly – BOOM! – boring. Bring back the outfits that would embarrass a 1970s-era golf pro!

5. We’re streaming the Olympics on Peacock, which we have instead of NBC in order to get Premier League soccer. This means we get fewer commercial breaks with a much narrower range of commercials. But three cheers for US Bank and their “Crochet Guy” ad, which I’ve seen maybe eleventy-billion times now and which still makes me laugh. “I made my wife a bathing suit!” “Oh, did Linda like it?” “She did not.” “Ohhh.” The comic timing in that exchange is just priceless. The fact that it seems to be pissing off the crocheting community online is just a bonus – I’ve dealt with them before online and they’re meaner than Redditors, so the hell with them. I will never bank with US Bank, but I do appreciate art.

6. Also, Walter the Cat is the best character on the air these days. While the odds of me purchasing a pickup truck are slightly worse than me ever handing money voluntarily to US Bank, I do love the ad – especially the long version with the mailman. “No no no no no no! Walter! He’s a civil servant!” I would watch a sitcom with him as the star.

7. Maybe having the NHL pull its players from the Olympics was a good thing. The US men’s team certainly seems to be playing more cohesively with its last-minute group of college kids than it ever did with the all-star collection that the NHL would provide. I’ve seen their games with Canada and Germany and they looked like they were a real team out there. The level of play across the board certainly has not suffered.

8. What marketing genius decided that the women’s one-person bobsled event would be called “Monobob”? That sounds like a lot of things but a sporting event is not one of them.

9. The end of the Cold War has meant a genuine improvement in Olympic commentary now that the announcers don’t seem to feel obligated to promote political viewpoints. I’m old enough to remember when the Olympics, like everything else, was a Good Guys vs Bad Guys event and you weren’t supposed to cheer for anyone on the other side of the Iron Curtain even if they were, objectively, better at their sport than anyone else. It’s refreshing to hear announcers discuss things from a more positive place.

10. Although I could do without the ambush interviews of athletes who have just bombed out of this or that event. Seriously – give them some space.

11. Also, not surprised by the doping scandal in figure skating. It’s a shame – that particular skater was really quite something to watch. But I can’t say that a team already competing under an assumed name because of a widespread government-sponsored doping scandal is going to shock me when it happens again.

12. Still think the last event of the Olympics should be athletes competing in sports other than their own. Gold medal winners get to judge.