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Having avoided the horrific February weather by staying on my sofa for two weeks, I have embraced the Winter Olympics as a quadrennial extra Christmas holiday. It offers pine trees, baubles and the chance to gather around the TV while someone with an RP accent tells us how determined and courageous the British are.
The Olympic Games have always presented something of a paradox – on one hand, they are the peak of human athleticism, and on the other, they can look like an elite school sports day. There’s normally at least one activity that reminds you of your youth, whether it’s table tennis or trampolining. Presumably the skiing and snowboarding on display this month have felt very relatable to swathes of Surrey.
As someone too imbalanced to be let loose on snow or ice, I have little experience of the sports I’ve been watching. The BBC’s near-comprehensive coverage does attempt to explain them to newbies, but it cannot clear up every question. And so, with due humility, I submit those that remain: the puzzles and quandaries that even my recent 790% increase in screen time has not yet solved.
Is it OK to watch an athlete take a fall?
My father cannot enjoy pairs skating, because every time someone is thrown in the air, he’s convinced they’re going to crack their head open like an Easter egg. The jeopardy of muffing it and falling over is, of course, a key dramatic ingredient in any sport involving balance, precision or, to use the health and safety term, working at height. But it goes double in winter sports, where high speeds meet unforgiving surfaces.
I accept that, as a sports fan, witnessing injury is unavoidable. But what are the ethics of watching one when it’s already happened? After Lindsey Vonn’s crash I was forced to confront this problem. For those who missed it live, the full, excruciating footage was right there on iPlayer, and soon I was in the queasy situation of pretending to be interested in the result of the women’s downhill when I was really just waiting for the wipeout and its aftermath. On hearing her cries of pain, I realised I was a horrible ghoul, and pressed fast-forward.
Does the Norwegian team need a relationship counsellor?
As we know, biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid for some reason decided to use his bronze medal-winning moment to announce an affair and tell his ex-girlfriend he still loved her. “I hope I don’t make it anything worse for her,” he said later. “I hope there’s a happy ending.” Sturla, we admire your romantic optimism, and deplore your understanding of women. Meanwhile, his countryman Johannes Høsflot Klæbo – the cross-country skier who is now the Winter Olympics’ most successful athlete of all time – apparently refuses to kiss his fiancee after racing because he’s afraid of germs.
Are Ed Leigh and Tim Warwood actually a disguised Joaquin Phoenix and Timothée Chalamet, deep in character for an upcoming reboot of Wayne’s World?
Sitting in their BBC broom cupboard, singing Bon Jovi and swishing lightsabers, it’s possible they’re duping us with a long-running prank performance. There is, naturally, something saucy about these two closely confined commentators yelling ecstatically about backside double corks and alley-oop rodeos and switch chicken-wing Japan grabs. But it’s their flights of rhetorical fancy that really endear them, from the snowboarder who “sprinkles pressure on her breakfast cereal” to the one who leaps from the ramp like “an owl looking at a mouse”. One described a Kiwi competitor as “a human cider stone … crushing the opposition”, to which the other replied, after a sober pause: “If her opposition were apples.” As they might say after a frontside 1440 McTwist with a nose-grab – this is frying my brain.
Was the fuss over Team GB’s new skeleton helmets all a ruse?
Perhaps throwing in some curveball new kit – and having it banned a week before the Games – was all a ploy to make the rest of the field think they had a chance. Matt Weston could probably slide in an inflatable sumo suit and still win.
Is ice skating a seething pit of depravity, or not?
My assumptions about competitive skating are based on two of my favourite sports movies: criminally neglected romcom The Cutting Edge, and Blades of Glory, which present a stereotype of judgy, bitchy figure skaters who can’t wait to steal the limelight from each other. At times, of course, reality has been even darker (her, Tonya).
This year’s ice dancing gold medallists, Guillaume Cizeron and Laurence Fournier Beaudry, travelled to Milan with considerable baggage: Cizeron had to deny allegations of controlling behaviour, and Fournier Beaudry continued to defend a former skating partner and current boyfriend accused of sexual assault. The fact the French pair won by a blade-edge – with the aid of generous marking from a French judge – only added to the controversy surrounding them.
And yet – the pairs and singles figure skating provided some of the most cheering and humane scenes at the Games. During the men’s free skate, Mikhail Shaidorov sat in the leader’s chair encouraging his rivals even as their failures took him closer to victory. After Ilia Malinin self-combusted, the US “quad god” made a beeline to hug the Kazakhstani and tell him he deserved the win – allowing Shaidorov to finally celebrate.
And nothing beat the tender sight of Riku Miura comforting her sobbing partner, Ryuichi Kihara, after he dropped her in a lift. It was repeated, 24 hours later, when Riku had to comfort a sobbing Ryuichi after they nailed their final routine to take gold.
Are Canadians not the nice guys any more?
The curling scandal has rocked us all. Not because it seems a sedate sport – I always thought there was murder in Rhona Martin’s eyes – but because it has shaken one of the few foundations we relied on in today’s turbulent geopolitics. Canadians accused of cheating? And then – wait – swearing about it? The planet is surely doomed.
