The Winter Olympics are so cool I just wish I’d grown up in a country with an ice rink
ASA lifelong non enthusaist in the arena of spectator sports, I will be making an exception for the always-spectacular Winter Olympics, sliding off on the slopes of the wonderfully named Pyeongchang tomorrow.
There’s something totally bonkers and utterly magical about winter sports, which makes for a thrilling TV-viewing proposition far removed from, say, football, with its bunches of overpaid, over-hyped young men hoofing long balls around the pitch for 90 minutes in yet another stultifyingly dull nil-all draw.
Winter sports are a world apart. In fact, are they really sports at all? From where I’m sitting they really look just like leisure activities on steroids (not actual steroids, for any sports lawyers reading this. I mean that metaphorically).
They seem to be all about high-octane, hair-raising adrenaline-chasing, where winning a medal might be a nice bonus, but is beside the point.
And it all makes for great TV. I mean, climbing into a giant rocket shaped barrel and careering down an Alpine piste at 100mph? What part of that would you not want to see? The drama! The scenery!
The happy tinkling of cowbells as these brave maniacs hurtle themselves down impossibly steep gradients! It is fabulous and must be a television producer’s dream.
I love everything from the luge to the bob-sleigh to the ice hockey to the figure skating. In fact, I especially love the figure skating. It’s like the Bolshoi ballet crossed with ‘You’ve Been Framed’, with it exquisitely executed triple axels punctured with the inevitable side-splitting pratfalls. Genius.
As if all of this wasn’t enough, the Winter Olympics is also the one sporting event when you can genuinely kid yourself that even if you were the unco-ordinated, clumsy, slow-paced kid who was always picked last at basketball, this could have been the arena in which you would have excelled, if fate hadn’t been so cruel as to deny you the opportunity of living in a snowbound climate.
I’m confident I could have been a ski-jumping champion if I’d only had ready access to a ski-slope and a large pair of goggles. Bob-sleighing? I’d definitely have made the Irish team, if there was one. As for figure skating, if my parents hadn’t selfishly chosen to raise me in a country with no actual ice rink, I’d surely be an Olympic medallist. Watching winter sports allows me to give free rein to my latent sporting fantasies in a way that watching the Six Nations just doesn’t. For once, myself and my sports-mad husband won’t be fighting over the remote control. You could call it a temporary thaw in relations.