IT’S A SHAM — AND NOT ALL GOLD MEDALS
Television numbers dictate what ‘sports’ are added to already bloated event
Excuse me if I’m not among those celebrating the great gold medal victory by Canada’s mixed doubles curling team.
Mixed doubles curling, invented for these Winter Games, does not belong on the big stage. You know that for this very reason: Most Olympic athletes train their entire lives just to qualify for the Games, let alone wind up on any podium. Yet John Morris and Kaitlyn Lawes stood on a podium with gold medals around their necks having practised once for half an hour in Winnipeg, before dominating the field here.
Once. This is a longtime problem with understanding Olympic success. Not all medals are created equal.
The Mikael Kingsbury gold medal? That’s one worth dancing about. He’s been participating on the World Cup circuit for years, dominating it, and on the largest day of his sporting life, he came through wonderfully.
I’d love to tell you Morris and Lawes dominated the World Cup of mixed doubles curling, but there is no such thing.
In other words, this is a madeup sport, added basically because curling draws television numbers and this gives TV another sport that fills plenty of hours for broadcasters around the world.
And mixed curling is not alone in its place as an Olympic sport that should be edited out of this already bloated event. Canada has a gold medal in team figure skating. Do you know anyone who grew up wanting to be a team figure skater? Anyone?
This is a made-up sport, added basically because curling draws television numbers ...
Figure skating has been an Olympic sport for 110 years. It is a heartbreaking, dramatic event that has produced some of the greatest moments in Olympic history. The battle of the Brians. The drama surrounding Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. The excellence of Katarina Witt.
You know what they all have in common?
Not one of them owns an Olympic medal for team figure skating, which has been in the last two Games, and for 100 years nobody thought there was any reason to include it in the program.
It’s a made-for-TV nonsense sport, proving next to nothing.
Patrick Chan now has a figure skating gold medal because he was part of Canada’s gold medalwinning team. Once, as world men’s champion, he won silver at the 2014 Sochi Olympics and will openly admit he didn’t skate anywhere close to form. He now has three Olympic medals, a silver from singles competition, and another silver and now a gold from the team competition.
He now has a gold medal — as do his Canadian teammates — from a sport that doesn’t really exist.
Kingsbury. Morris and Lawes. Team figure skating. One of these things is not like the other.
I’m more impressed with the bronze medal of Alex Gough, becoming the first Canadian to win a luge medal than the golds of mixed curling or team figure skating, in which some countries took so seriously they left off their best skaters off for the event.
I’m more impressed with the medals won by Max Parrot and Mark McMorris — and the McMorris story remains beyond belief — in slopestyle than anything accomplished by team curlers and team figure skaters.
How can you not be impressed by the speedskating medals by Kim Boutin and Ted-Jan Bloemen — pursuits that are achieved by a lifetime of work and practice and dedication and heartache.
And the comeback of Laurie Blouin, hospitalized one day, in dangerous conditions the next, on the podium in women’s slopestyle the next, with a cut and a welt below her left eye.
All those medals, to me, are more meaningful than two curlers who barely knew each other taking on the world and a group of figure skaters — most of whom are contenders when it matters — bringing home gold.
Our history: Bring in new sports, we tend to succeed, no matter what you think of the new sports. Canada has three gold medals already: There will be more.
But don’t equate the three golds earned to date as equals. For now, Kingsbury stands alone as champion of the Games. There is room for others to join.