An Uneducated Guide to Assorted Olympic Sports

First, I am not a sports fan. I can hold my own at a football or baseball game and can muster a few semi-intelligent remarks when watching one of these games. I have played a little tennis, bumbled through several rounds of golf, and have a nodding acquaintance with basketball, soccer and lacrosse, but I am emphatically NOT  a candidate for an evening at a sports bar.

So now, trapped by the elements, I am watching the Olympics. I realize that people have spent their lives readying themselves for these competitions, but I just don’t get some of these sports. Skeleton, for example.  Run. Push. Leap. Steer with such subtlety that it looks like you’re doing nothing but lying motionless on a sled careening down a tube of ice. Man, that’s what I’d do for fun. Particularly when you see one guy fly off his sled and somehow, miraculously, land BACK ON IT and finish his run, instead of crashing painfully into the ice and being run over by his own wickedly sharp sled runners.

Bobsled and luge are just as bad. I’m not sure I know the difference between these. Bobsleds appear to have two or more people crammed into unnatural positions in a streamlined vehicle designed by BMW that corkscrews down the aforementioned tube of ice. Luge is in the tube as well—but a different one.  I find myself wondering who thought up the idea of racing through ice tubes on various kinds of sleds with varying numbers of people. Who developed the rules for this, anyway? And what possible purpose did it serve to develop these skills?

Then there’s skiing. Sorry. I don’t even like roller coasters because they go too fast; this sport is not for me.  There are jumps here that send people flying higher than Big Ben; there are moguls, which look like driving a car at top speed across a field of potholes—only here, you’re driving your body on skis and your knees are the shock absorbers. Inexplicably, there’s even an event that involves skiing and shooting and skiing and shooting—no doubt finding its origin in ancient times when people had to ski down hills with rifles strapped to their backs and shoot dinner or something. Then, as if having two boards strapped to your feet is not difficult enough to maneuver, there’s snowboarding, otherwise known as surfing on snow instead of water, or skateboarding without wheels in –you got it—another icy tube.  But then, there’s slope style, which as far as I can tell, is a competition as to who can offer for your viewing enjoyment the most dramatic pursuit of a death wish.

Speed skating offers circuit upon circuit of the same track, skaters in identical  gravity-defying positions that make you tilt your head and wonder whether the cameraman is filming sideways because surely no one could possibly lean inward at that angle without falling over.

Add into this the fact that all the participants are dressed like space aliens and are contorted into impossible positions in order to reduce drag on their flights/ slides/ skates.  Commentators for each sport are speaking some sort of individual sport-ese that is unintelligible to the average viewer, comparing form and landings and height and distance, and knowing and emoting (somehow) upon all the statistics and the relative chances of each participant to earn medals. Yeah. Like I understand the fine points of the ‘big G’ solitary jump and the perils of landing two feet above where you want to on the slope.

Figure skating is a world all its own: the language, the costumes, the jumps, the moves, the music, the judges. Layered on top of this are the injuries, the stress, the unexpected withdrawal of a favorite, the falls, the point deductions and the crowd reactions, and the general improbabilities of doing all that they do while balancing on the knife-edge of a skate blade.  Sometimes in concert. And in time to the music.

And in between events, there are the interviews and back stories. If there is a single Olympian athlete who isn’t pursuing a medal in someone’s memory, or for some one who sacrificed for them, or inspired them, or served them fries with their protein-enhanced burgers as a child, or  an athlete who is not overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds…well, I haven’t seen them yet. The Sochi Soap Opera fills all the chinks between events, and between the commercials that show Olympians eating yogurt or healthy subs, or companies doing inspirational stuff.

Ah, but we watch. We are riveted by all these sports we don’t understand; we are cheering for our athletes, whether we get it or not.  Unlike any other time,  it doesn’t seem to matter that we have  substantial differences in so many other areas. For a couple weeks, we’re all Americans –together again, albeit in the dark.