The year: 776 B.C. The place: Olympia, Greece.
Under a banner of truce, the greatest athletes in the land gather together to glorify their deities in contests featuring feats of strength, speed and skill. Coroebus, a cook by trade, from the nearby city-state of Elis, was crowned the first Olympic champion after having won a footrace that spanned 210 yards. He was awarded a crown of olive wreathes.
Flash forward to the year 2010 in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the western coast of Canada. American figure skater Johnny Weir takes to the ice wearing an outfit adorned with faux fox fur and enough shiny sequins to guide a mariner back to port on a dark night in choppy waters.
To an Athenian warrior displaced in time, these winter Games would seem far removed from the original spirit of the Olympics. In fact, Weir and the rest of his figure-skating and ice-dancing ilk would probably have been the ones the ancient Greeks abandoned at birth to perish from exposure.
And lest someone accuse me of ulterior motives in singling out the figure skaters, I assure you that by the end of the page, there will be enough mockery spread around for all. For these 2010 Winter Olympic Games are rife with mockable moments.
It starts with the biathlon. While perhaps trying to recapture the martial spirit of the original Olympics, someone somewhere came up with the brilliant idea to simply introduce gunfire to an existing winter sport; namely, cross country skiing. Biathletes ski around the course, pausing at regular intervals to fire off some shots with the rifles they have strapped to their backs. Because skiing without guns is like, I don’t know, grocery shopping without guns.
It doesn’t sound as ludicrous as it actually is until you try to envision Usain Bolt stopping between legs of the 4×400 relay to squeeze off a few rounds at some skeet.
There is no shortage of jokes to be made at the expense of frozen shuffleboard, also known as curling. The first time I tried to watch this silly spectacle, I had to spend several moments trying to figure out if it was the German men’s or women’s teams competing. To the eternal sorrow of German men everywhere, it was the women.
Then there are the sledding events. Don’t get me wrong, I fondly recall sledding as something fun to do at Blendon Woods when school got canceled. That does not mean that I can envision Leonidas’ mighty 300 clinging tightly to one another, luging their way two-by-two into the Hot Gates of Thermopylae to stave off Xerxes’ mighty Persian hordes.Or that those rugged Spartans would have welcomed into their midst the Olympic snowboarding contingent. It’s tough to imagine a Spartan unit led by Shaun “Flying Tomato” White or Scotty Lago, with their free-wheeling, Red Bull-drinking exploits.
I enjoyed a personal moment of mean-spirited mirth Sunday evening when the U.S. Olympic men’s hockey team defeated our 51st state, known in some circles as Canada. I reveled in the absolute devastation on the faces of the Canadian faithful as their “big brothers” to the south beat them down at their own game while mom and dad weren’t looking.
Their pained expressions seemed to say, “You already have straight bacon and policemen who don’t look like Ronald McDonald on horseback; can’t we have anything for ourselves? We already gave you Celine Dion and Martin Short.”
And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the interesting dress code for this year’s games. It can be summed up in one word: tacky. It’s bad enough that one of the ice dancers looked like he was actually wearing a dead, black swan for a costume. It was as though his dance partner had shoved him inside the swan to keep him warm from the ravages of the western-Canadian cold, a scene eerily reminiscent of Han Solo shoving Luke Skywalker inside the guts of a Tauntaun on the frozen ice-world of Hoth.
But someone actually had to explain to the Russian ice-dancing duo that it might not be in good taste to dress up in fake-Aboriginal costumes with foliage stapled to them.
You might be wondering where all the vitriol is coming from and why I don’t get caught up in the nationalistic fervor that generally accompanies the Olympic Games. Well, I’m willing to admit to the fact that my dabbles with winter sports have always ended in humiliation.
The first time I was able to successfully ski down Mad River Mountain’s bunny hill, I nearly killed a woman by neglecting to learn how to stop. I once had to be helped from the ice skating rink at the Chiller by a magnanimous 7-year-old.
But the fact remains that some of these farcical Olympic “sports” are more like hobbies and less like athletic competition. I remain steadfast in my belief that a small cadre of ancient Greeks could conquer all of the Olympic village.
At least until they come to the hockey villas.
