The Winter Olympics get my gold
The Winter Olympics are better than the Summer Olympics, obviously. How much better? I lack the superlatives but I shall find them.
The Winter Olympics win on sportswear alone. I have often turned off the TV in the Summer Olympics because I’ve seen something horrible, like the armpits of male basketball players. Can’t they wear T-shirts? One watches weightlifting with dread lest something give way or the athlete simply explodes from effort. And those wrestling outfits that look like rompers with shoulder straps.
In Winter, people dress with swagger in hats and scarves, great longarmed opera gloves and huge sunglasses.
The speed skaters are naked except for cut-resistant science skin painted onto their streamlined bodies. Snowboarders dress like astronauts because they sail alone into blue space. Curlers wear what everyone in my neighbourhood wears all year round, androgynous gear. I could curl, thinks everyone.
Winter is all about snow, fresh white heaps of snowflakes, radiant but also tactile, packed down hard like soap, puffing in spray clouds, tumbling like an avalanche of white dice, melting like tears in rain. I’ve seen things in snow you people wouldn’t believe.
Summer is all about sand. I hate sand. It’s like that Oregon woman finding 14 worms in her eyeball. Try 1,000 grains of worm sand in a place very hard to brush off in public. Also everyone’s sweaty. I don’t like sticky people.
Winter is faster. Downhill skiing can hit 160 km/h, followed by the bobsled, luge, skeleton, ski jumping and naturally, speed skating. Americans can’t even follow the puck in hockey games unless they’re neon so they prefer the Summer Olympics when athletes run relatively slowly. Not a great deal happens, but speed skaters move so fast that you imagine the air is broken.
Which brings me to the fact that Winter is dangerous and Summer is not. You could break your spine in half-pipe snowboarding and shatter into pieces on the ski hills. Skate blades could slice off a finger or a foot, and a stabby ski pole could lay waste to your liver. Now livers grow back but once you’ve lost your spleen, it is gone for good. I wonder if they use sawdust on the ice to mop up blood.
In Summer, what could happen? You could trip. And fall into sand. If you can’t do the long jump, so what. When the high jump defeats you, there are bouncy mats waiting below.
Face it, no one’s going to drown in an Olympic pool, and the smell of chlorine long ago dampened any diving euphoria.
There are a lot of Summer throwing events — hammer toss, discus, shot put and javelin — but someone in the audience is going to be impaled, not the athletes. The biathlon has a rifle so you’d think Americans would love that bit. The only truly brave Summer athletes are the flipping, flying young gymnasts, and their worst hell probably happened before they got to the Olympics, god knows.
The Winter Olympics are visually more beautiful. It is not clear to me if I will soon be able to buy quality pot for no good reason, but imagine watching Winter events while high, sans old-tyme paranoia. When the freestyle skiers and snowboarders sail slowly into the sky in Bokwang Phoenix Park, seemingly pausing, they are birds flying alone. Is it psychologically pleasing or troubling to be so detached from humans and landscape at that moment, to lose corporeality in the sweet clean air over country snow like beaten egg whites?
In the Summer Olympics, it’s polluted and baking hot. Particulates are drawn into lungs heaving like accordions. The levels of heat and dirt depend on how inappropriate is the host city chosen by a corrupt cabal years before. Athletes shouldn’t inhale crunchy air as hot as blow drier shots, no one should, but there is no filter.
Winter is different in that it’s better. The Winter Olympics comprise two kinds of winter, sweet and scary as described by Adam Gopnik in his 2011 Massey Lectures. Scary winter is the cursed winds from storm systems off the Korean Peninsula that endangered athletes in the women’s snowboard slopestyle final. Stupid wind. Scary winter is the 19th-century romantic, Caspar David Friedrich, painting a human alone and dwarfed by nature but glad of it too. It’s a Tommy Thompson painting of twisted trees and sinister water, it’s the death of winter mountaineers. “I may be some time,” said Capt. Oates in 1912.
But winter is sweet too. For one thing, cold can be defeated by lay- ering, unlike heat which will always triumph. Its companions are hot cocoa, feathered hoarfrost on the windows, coats that look like duvets and most important of all, the cosiness of watching at home on the couch with pillows and fake fur, studying the CBC app and switching TV channels from ice (hard cold) to snow (soft cold) and back. “The winter window has two sides,” says Gopnik, “one for the watcher and one for the white drifts.”
For the viewers at home, the Winter Olympics are a tribute to the reckless courage of people who aren’t us. Many Olympic events could kill. Watch skiers launch themselves into the great beyond. We don’t say what we say, yawning, at the Summer Olympics: “Hey, I could do that.” Yes, we all ran for a bus once and have smacked various balls with bats, racquets, sticks, clubs, etc. But we didn’t ski into a tree or smash our face in the skeleton.
Summer Olympics are largely about athletes coping in pools, on beaches, in gyms. They are xerocoles, desert animals like the kangaroo mouse which can hop and claw through sand.
Winter Olympics are about humans coping directly with nature, like the snowshoe hare which moves fast and then hides by means of complete stillness. One slips, one slides, one breaks a bone. Nature always wins the gold. hmallick@thestar.ca