The Columnist Manifesto

I really enjoyed watching the Winter Olympics this year. Compared to the summer games, which I also enjoy, the Winter Olympics seem a bit more intimate, with fewer events overall and perhaps fewer athletes. My impression is that you have more multi-event competitors, and it's fun to turn on the TV and go, "what's Apolo Anton Ohno going to do tonight?"

This broadcast seemed less nationalistic than recent Summer Olympics ones, where you'd only ever seen medal ceremonies where a U.S. athlete had won the gold. Just in case you needed a reminder about the tune of the Star Spangled Banner. Actually, I saw only one medal ceremony, where a Canadian had won the gold and no U.S. athletes were on the podium. Tres international!

I loved the hockey. I've finally gotten over my carping about "professional" athletes in the Olympics, since they're all professional now, and since the historical alternative -- the original Olympic ideal when the modern Olympics were restarted in 1896 -- is the idea "gentleman" amateur, someone wealthy enough that they can dedicate most of their time to "sport."

Yet when the NBA dream team bullied their way to the gold medal in whatever year that was, I thought that was no fun at all, and I marveled at how in certain sports, players can have fun crushing people at much lower ability levels. (Something that doesn't seem to happen in tennis or, say, chess.)

I'm pleased to say that the ice hockey in this Olympics was awesome. Yes, there are tons of NHL players, but they're distributed throughout many of the world's teams. It makes the NHL kind of cool -- the imperial center of a truly international sport. Anyway, the fact that the U.S. team got its ass kicked (1 win, 4 losses, 1 tie) was not a source of frustration for me even though I was rooting for them: it will make it that much more fun when in some future games they win.

This year I particularly enjoyed reflecting about the speed and figure skating. In case you ever wonder "how tiring can it actually be to skate for four straight minutes?", I can observe that in addition to all the jumps and spins and one-legged thingies, those skaters spend about half their time going backwards. For reasons I can't explain, it's about 6-8 times more tiring to skate backwards than forwards. This I know from experience. Okay, try this: skate hard around the ice rink backwards one time... oh, right, you actually can't skate backwards. Okay, well when I do that, one lap and I want to stop for a breather.

Not that forward skating is not tiring. Those speed skaters make it look so effortless as the glide around that glassy track clicking one long blade edge seemingly lightly in front of the other. Well, last time I tried to skate laps around the rink -- which is way shorter than the long speed-skating track -- I was dying by 10 laps. So when Clara Hughes collapsed after her exciting gold medal run in the 5000 meters (three miles, people!), I thought, "I hear you girl. I know."

One little complaint I have is the way media coverage in the first week of the games seemed to be all about how much falling down there seemed to be.

One of two things is going on. Maybe there's always a lot of falling down at the Winter Olympics, and our memories are just very short. Look at the events, for pete's sake. Ski jumping! Dancing, jumping and spinning on ice on a narrow metal blade! Some of the events -- particularly "short track" speed skating and snowboardcross -- build excitement by deisgning the prospect of collisions and tumbles. So what do you expect?

If there is in fact more falling this year, that's even more interesting. It might mean that the athletes are bumping up against the very limits of human capability. Maybe they are beginning to push the records to the point where they can't go any farther, at least given current technology and training regimens. That would be kind of cool.

Either way, it's ludicrous for media outlets and talking heads to be criticizing the athletes for falling down a lot. Who's the audience after all -- we're talking about couch potatos for whom pushing the envelope means attempting to assemble a snack that might not be done before the commericals are over.

And I'm also including some of the ex-athlete announcers, particularly the old queens who do the figure skating commentary. It's really annoying to hear people who medalled decades ago doing single jumps now clucking about imperfections in triple -- and even quadruple! -- jumps the perfrmed by the current crop of athletes.