Orympics

I like watching the Winter Olympics on TV. More so than the Summer Olympics, at any rate. I especially like the strange and inexplicable events like luge, skeleton, biathalon, ski jumping and downhill skiing. How did ski jumping come about anyway? I can see how biathalon might have started among hunters in a snowy clime, but ski jumping? Was there a need in the old days to cross major rivers by jumping over them? But practicality and real-world meaning (or lack thereof) aside, I like watching those events.

But I don't care for ice dancing. I don't hate it. It doesn't make me break out in hives. But it just doesn't hold my interest, and sometimes I want to slap the announcers. "They're really dancing with power and conviction," one of the announcers said last night. How can you tell, one set of twizzles (their word, not mine) being about the same as any other? Or "They're really sinking into their knees." Yeah, right. The jargon of ice dancing is stupid, and the event itself is nothing more than a popularity contest (I contend that any sport whose outcome is determined by judges is nothing more than a popularity contest in the end. Dick Button gets all defensive about that point and says that if you're going to dislike ice dancing because it's a judged event, you have to dislike all the other judged events.

I'm cool with that. I'm all for sticking to sports that are determined by objective criteria - distance, time, speed, quantitative measurements that don't depend on the whim or mood of the ruler or clock. (The terms "figure skating" and "judging scandal" are so closely linked in my mind I have a hard time telling them apart.)

Maybe I'd like ice dancing more if I was a pubescent girl or gay, groups not normally known for sartorial moderation and for whom the costumes are probably spiffy and not, as in my case, foppishly annoying. Or if they leaped 140 meters in a single go, or if they had to stop in mid-twizzle and mow down lemon-sized targets with a .22 rifle, or if they suddenly accelerated to 92 miles per hour and had to negotiate banked turns. But no, it's all scarves and twizzles and fabulously overwrought commentary from the announcers.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's hard to do, and I don't hate it. It just doesn't interest me, and doesn't in my mind repay its own hype. I'd just much rather watch ski jumping and wonder what sort of immense clanging brass cojones it requires to step off that little couch-like thing on the ramp and commit yourself to a jump spanning 130+ meters. Or watch people ski cross-country till their heart rates reach about two billion beats per minute, and then have to shoot accurately.