Joy or heartbreak? It’s all about expectations

Freestyle skier Mike Riddle finished sixth in the halfpipe competition, and with a smile on his face he said he was proud and happy and planning to have a big party to celebrate.

A day earlier, Rachel Homan’s curling rink crashed out of the medals, and there were almost immediately non-ironic calls for a national curling summit.

The Olympics are an opportunity for unrestrained joy and also bitter disappointment, and for most of the athletes here, much of what determines whether they will feel the former or the latter depends on what they expected of themselves going in. Canada’s luge relay team won a silver medal last week and it kicked off a frenzy at the Olympic Sliding Centre. But if Mikael Kingsbury had won the silver medal in moguls, he would have been crushed. The significance of his gold-medal performance, allowing the greatest freestyler of all time to avoid wearing a choke label for four years, was evident in the obvious relief of his celebration.

Expectations, in an event that only comes around twice in a decade, are everything. It wasn’t that long ago that Lindsey Vonn and Kaillie Humphries would have considered anything less than gold a disappointment. But each won bronze and declared themselves greatly pleased. I even think they both meant it.

But the thing about the Olympics and expectations also applies to these Games as a whole. Pyeongchang 2018 avoided much of the traditional kvetching that takes place in the months before an Olympics for a few reasons. Unlike Rio de Janeiro and Sochi, there was no evidence of widespread construction delays; the facilities in Korea were almost entirely completed. It’s also true that some of the normal pre- Games hand-wringing was overtaken by the not-insignificant concern that North Korea might use the opportunity of the international showcase across its border to do something reckless. It’s hard to get too worked up about venue signage and potential traffic delays when the worst-case scenario is nuclear Armageddon.

Still, it feels like these Games, in terms of the scrutiny that normally accompanies an Olympics, have largely been given a pass.

It’s as though the international media came in expecting two things: that Pyeongchang was kind of an odd place to host an Olympics, and that everything would be mostly fine anyway. Because both of those things have proven true, nothing feels like much of a crisis.

The thing is, some of the typical problems that plague an Olympics host are evident here. Attendance has ranged from decent to abysmal, with swaths of empty blue seats a regular sight at even high-profile events like the men’s free skate, alpine races and the women’s gold-medal hockey game.

Some people have waved away the lack of fans as merely evidence of Korea’s lack of a skiand-snow culture, but developing that was supposed to be the point of this thing. Organizers literally built ski hills here as part of the Olympics bid, but everything is too spread out for Pyeongchang to become a skiresort destination. The region will almost certainly be left with several costly and little-used venues, which is predictable in an Olympics.

What you get out of an Olympics depends a lot on what you hope to get out of it. For athletes, and host cities, alike.