Why The Winter Olympics Are Awesome

I hate cold and I hate the winter.  That partly explains why I don’t ski, snowboard, or ice skate.  If it’s 30 degrees, I’m not exactly looking around for reasons to hang outside for hours at a time.  I like watching snow fall out a window while I’m warm inside (as I’m doing right now), and I can enjoy the occasional snowball fight, but other than that winter does nothing for me.

Accordingly, I don’t particularly enjoy watching skiing, snowboarding, speed skating, or figure skating competitions.  But, for two weeks every four years, I LOVE watching these sports.  Those two weeks have come around again and will start on Friday night and I can’t wait for the start of the ski jumping competition that night. 

I know I’m not alone here.  I know a bunch of people that would never consider watching a downhill skiing event who suddenly don’t want to miss the Super G semis when it’s Olympics time.  Why is this?  Do we all just buy into the hype of the Olympics?  Are these legitimately decent spectator sports that we don’t give enough respect to 99% of the time?

Actually, there’s a simple reason that the Winter Olympics are awesome: in so many of the events, absolute disaster can (and often does) happen at any time.  Now, obviously this is true of these sports all the time, but who cares if a random figure skater falls on his face in the Paris Open, or whatever events figure skaters do besides the Olympics.  For most Olympic athletes, the main goal of their entire lives has been to get to this stage.  They’ve spent the last four years pouring everything they had into this sport so they could represent their country at the Olympic Games.  They’ve spent many more years than that learning the craft, and dreaming about this very moment that we’re now watching.  And, in the blink of an eye, it can all go horribly wrong.

I guess that sounds morbid, but it’s not like we’re rooting  for them to fail.  I mean, sometimes we are, but usually not.  It’s just the combination of the fact that disaster could  strike, and that the stakes are so high for the competitors, that these events become riveting.

A downhill skiier could lose his edge and go flying through the air.  A speed skater could slip coming around the last turn and nail the wall.  A ski jumper could do this (0:50 mark).  A figure skater could go for the quadruple lutz, and not make it.  A bobsled team could flip right over.  You never know when the moment could come, so you have to keep watching.  And, not to get sappy now, but when a competitor makes it through and avoids all the pitfalls and gives the performance they always dreamed they would, that can be pretty cool to watch too.