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The mountains always promise escape from the squalor of existence at sea level, if not a kind of purification. The fortifying ruggedness of the terrain, the apple-crisp air, the high-albedo dazzle of sunlit snow: at altitude, it seems, everything is thinned to its essence. The Winter Olympics frequently play on this mythology of purity, but rarely has culture’s quadrennial ascent up the switchbacks felt as clarifying as it does this year. Propelling us into heights untroubled by the compromises and tradeoffs that blight sport’s lower zones, Milano Cortina has delivered images so brilliant and sharp they’ve also served to expose how ugly – and morally murky – most non-Olympic team sports have become over the past four years.
As a TV spectacle, the excellence of this Olympiad has been defined as much by absence as presence. No gambling ads, no live betting odds gunking up the screen, no win percentage trackers, no janky little segments in which the hosts joke about what the prediction markets are doing: these Games have brought delight and relief to a tired public’s eyes in equal measure. Cleaned of clutter and slop, sport, it turns out, can still be a thing of wonder and mystery, agony and beauty. Who would have thought?
The unpolluting of the TV screen has made room for what matters in Olympic competition: the efforts of the athletes, above all, their mad contorsions and feats of ludicrous risk. But it’s also created a kind of acoustic space, drawing our attention to the percussion that Olympians produce while throwing their bodies against the mountain, into the track, and around the rink. The crisp of these Games is sonic as much as it’s visual.
That’s not to say that NBC’s coverage in the US has been flawless: there’s been the usual over-talking from the commentators, the adenoidal whine of the camera drones has been as offputting as the footage they’ve yielded has been sublime, and thanks to the host network’s commitment to explaining the minutiae of each sport’s rules, viewers probably know more now about the politics of curling’s hog line than we ever wanted to. But in the not infrequent moments when the action has been given clear air, the results have brought a frizz of sonic wonder to these Games. The Olympics have officially joined the ASMR era, but unlike ASMR as it exists on social media there’s been no rattling of nails on chip packets or spooning of random goop to keep us engaged. Instead viewers have thrilled to the sweetest music of all: the sound of other people working.
Motion, steel, fiberglass and ice are the basic ingredients of the Winter Olympic soundscape, but in Milano Cortina the audio has been so detailed that we’ve been able to appreciate even the tiniest gestures: the fastening of the straps on the helmet in the monobob, the twitchy click of the downhill skiers’ poles at the top of the run, the corporal clip of the gates as the slalomers shin through their obstacles, the thunk of the tumbles in the free dance, the collagenous pump of the mogul racers’ knees.
What exactly is going on here? Volume, the acoustic scientists tell us, decreases with altitude: the blast of a horn will sound softer and foggier at the top of Mount Everest than it does at sea level. But thinner air can also facilitate the production of a stickier soundscape: academic research suggests that ejective consonants, which have a viscous, glottal quality to them, are more common among languages spoken at higher altitudes than in the breathy idioms closer to the sea. Whatever the state of the science – and I’m no expert in this area, in case that’s not already obvious – the explanation for the quality of the soundscape in Milano Cortina may have less to do with physics, altitude and air density than money. For these Games, NBC has invested in immersive microphones and a fleet of on-site trucks to ensure the soundscape that’s piped into our living rooms is as rich and textured as possible. More money in sports broadcasting should go into useful things like this rather than partnerships with AI and gambling companies that no sane fan wants.
In the speed skating, the scrambling of the skaters at the beginning of each team race has produced a metallic clashing similar to the tinny ring of a volley of parries in Olympic fencing. The brutality of ice hockey, perhaps the most aurally over-stimulating of the winter sports, has been emphatic in the cranial crack of puck against stick, the frathouse chorus of 10 players driving across the ice as one, the Perspex warble of each collision into the glass.
Sound has been as critical as vision to the most electric moments in these Games: think of Choi Gaon’s feathery landings in the last run of the women’s halfpipe, or Johannes Høsflot Klæbo sprinting up the final rise in the men’s skiathlon, the leathering of his skis on the snow producing an audible marker of his obvious distinction over the triers struggling for air behind him. Even the silences have been amplified in this high-fidelity spectacular of sound: the pause after the delivery of the video review verdict in the 1500m short-track speed skating final, for instance, was a small masterpiece of sporting theater, punctuated by the official’s wry smile as he skated off amid the eruption of a jubilant crowd.
And what of the stranger sounds, those journeys into the acoustic unexpected? It’s to the extra-sporting realms that we must look to understand them. In the skeleton, the drag of the face shield on the ice produced a cosmic vibrato vaguely reminiscent of the unsheathing of a lightsaber in Star Wars. The drilling crescendo of the long hockey-stick descent in the ski jump has reminded me, at times, of a pot of milk boiling over, a foamy excess that resolves into the brief quiet of aerial suspension, then concludes with the padded clap of skis making contact with snow. The pulpy thrash of the cross-country skiers striding and double poling across the flats? A kind of juicing. The furious squidge of the brooms in the curling, as the sweepers strain to coax the stone into their preferred trajectory? The closest professional sport comes to replicating the sonic effect of biting into a slice of halloumi. Curling’s colonization of approximately 90% of the total Olympic program (a rough estimate I just came up with) has been made more enjoyable by the granularity of the team deliberations, shouted commands, and trash talk picked up by the sheet mics. In no other sport is the instructional language (“Hold the line, hold the line HARD HARD HARD HAAAAAAARD, HAAAAAAAARD!”) so assaultively audible; in no other sport can you enjoy such a rich taxonomy of grunts.
Despite all the problems and controversies that continue to dog the IOC, the 2026 Olympics have shown sport at its most powder-light and loveable. Even the great conspiracies and embarrassments of these Games – the judging in the ice dance final, contested touching on the curling hog line, Sturla Holm Lægreid’s tearful apology after winning bronze in the 20km biathlon, the condom shortage – seem quaintly homespun next to the industrial venality of modern professional sports, a throwback to an earlier era of artisanal corruption, innuendo-fueled intrigue, and après-ski hanky panky. Enhancing these happy vibes has been the TV screen’s jazz of drags, snaps, pops, and stops, a soundtrack so hypnotic it’s made Milano Cortina a marvel for the ears as much as the eyes.
