Admit it – we’re rubbish at the Winter Olympics
Allison Pearson
Icould have got this wrong but, apparently, other nations besides Britain are taking part in the Winter Olympics. Viewers of the BBC’S coverage may be allowed a tantalising glimpse of those chilled chaps the Norwegians, or the snowy blur of an Austrian winner, but we are soon bustled away to watch a woman from Edinburgh in tears after falling over. If Crying Over Spilt Scotswomen were a sport, Team GB would be riding high in the medals table in South Korea.
Some cheering for your own team is understandable, but in Pyeongchang, national delusion has gone over the top like a stoned teenager in the Snowboard Halfpipe.
How can I put this tactfully? We are rubbish at winter sports. The only events where we don’t fall over are the ones where we’re lying down to start with. This basic fact seems to be lost on Clare Balding and the BBC team in Salford Quays as they keep up an excited commentary on an endangered species called the British Interest. The quest to locate the British Interest is so desperate that it ropes in a classic American teenager (Izzy Atkin) and claims her slopestyle bronze for our own. But we know Atkin isn’t really British, don’t we? If she was British, she’d have fallen over.
Like Elise Christie. Disqualified in all three of her events in Sochi 2014, we were assured she could not screw up this time. Despite the best efforts of Clare and the Cheerleaders, the shorttrack speed skater managed to crash out in her first two races. Yesterday, the poor wee woman was sent packing again. That’s the British Interest for you. I prefer Tina, the plucky girl from Liechtenstein.
Genuine question. Does the Beeb think we are incapable of caring about other countries that excel at winter sports? That’s the same BBC, by the way, which never stops lambasting Brexiteers for being Little Englanders, then cuts away from a thrilling ice hockey match between two foreign teams to part nine of The Crying Scotswoman.
I’m a Brexit supporter but, unlike the BBC, I reckon Ester Ledecká, the Czech snowboarder who borrowed a pair of skis to take the gold in the women’s Super G and was sweetly dumbfounded by her own brilliance, is worth 10 Lizzy Yarnolds hurtling headfirst on her tea tray.
Unfortunately, the BBC is obsessed with the skeleton and the luge. Probably because even Brits can don a Day-glo prophylactic and stay aboard a teeny sled as it scoots like a demented sperm around a giant ice vagina. The whole thing is worryingly gynaecological. Who wants to watch Bavarian Brunnhildes, flat on their backs and ankles akimbo, basically submit to a cervical smear at 90mph?
No, thank you. We’d rather see the ice skating.
Good luck with that. Over the weekend, Himself and I gave up on the BBC and finally found the men’s figure-skating semi-final on Eurosport. It was sensational. Yuzuru Hanyu, the Japanese star, defied description even as he defied gravity. Handsome Spaniard Javier Fernández delivered a routine of sublime elegance, while American Nathan Chen shockingly bungled his famous quadruple jumps. How fine the line between aerial enchantment and crumpled humiliation. It was Olympic drama at its best.
We decided to record the BBC’S overnight coverage of the men’s final. In the morning, we turned on the TV full of expectation, and what did we find? Curling. Two hours and 43 baffling minutes of Scotswomen sweeping (it makes a change from Scotswomen weeping, I suppose). At one point, a team member actually tucked into a plate of food. And all the while, heavenly Hanyu was making Olympic history, becoming the first man since 1952 to successfully defend the figure-skating title.
“The BBC coverage of the figure skating has been dire,” fumed a viewer on Twitter. “Do you honestly expect us to get up in the middle of the night so we can watch it on the red button, since that’s the only place you’re showing it, and that can’t be recorded?”
Sadly, that is the case because curling, a cure for insomnia and a cult hit with potheads, supposedly contains British Interest. Is Japan’s cross between Peter Pan and a Harrier jump jet really less compelling viewing than a Scot eating a sarnie? Or might the BBC be guilty of, ahem, racism? Moreover, are we in danger of becoming like the US, which is only willing to broadcast sports to which its home crowd can relate?
I love the Winter Olympics, with its rich cast of death-defying lunatics. From the laid-back snowboard dudes drawing castles in the air, via the Frenchwoman who had to skate with one hand clamped over her breast following a wardrobe malfunction and still got through (bravo, mademoiselle!). Then there’s Seun Adigun, chiropractor student and leader of the Nigerian bobsleigh team, who admitted her chosen sport was “very similar to being thrown down a hill in a trash can”.
They make you laugh out loud at their daring, these athletes, even as their courage slips the bonds of nationality and becomes a crazy celebration of the human spirit. That’s why the BBC bias feels both embarrassing and beside the point. Time to be honest: we’re bad at Winter Olympics. Now, let’s get on, shall we, and be good sports?
The only events we don’t fall over in are the ones we’re lying down in to start with