2022 Winter Olympics Dispatch #1
Weather, mixed relays, Australia's domination at the moguls, skiing formats and more
Welcome to the latest edition of SSWOS, the Sick, Sad World of Sports, where sports is the mechanism by which we learn about the depths of shithousery and assholery and dipshittery of the human soul.
I hope you find it fun or informative but not both. If you want more of this particular species of brain worms, follow @scksadwos.
I also write exclusively about rugby league on pythagonrl.com and @pythagonrl.
Turns out that doing this more regularly than once a week, especially now that it turns out we’re in rugby league preview writing season (click here for Super League’s preview) , is too much of a challenge, so enjoy these slightly stale takes.
Day -1: Weather
The aerial photos on social media of the Beijing ski slopes just being tiny tracks of man made snow in among forested mountains seem to be accurate. There is not much snow outside of the alpine ski pistes.
The weather itself is cold enough. The forecast for the next week has highs of around 5° or 6°C and lows of -5° to -7°C but its just sunny as hell right now. [Update: there’s been some subsequent light dustings of snow in the background]
Whether you want to pin that on the site selection not being a perfect little Swiss alpine village or climate change or whatever, surely this suits the IOC and organisers. Instead of losing days of competition to inclement weather, everything will proceed as scheduled. [Update: alpine skiing was delayed because of inclement weather (wind)]
This, of course, means that we’ll have an indoor winter Olympics in the Gulf in the 2030s. Bank on it.
The grace, the beauty of sports
Day 0: Narrative
There’s got to be something between:
China is a horrible abuser of human rights, with ugly industrial landscapes, no real snow, no sporting culture and these games are a disaster
Everything is amazing and the Olympics represent the highest ideals of all huamn endeavour
The IOC should feel shame. Just in general. Not only over the decision to take the Olympics to China but also over every other instance of money grubbing corruption, of which there are endless examples. Having a Uyghur athlete light the Olympic flame at the opening ceremony is so on the nose that the expression loses all meaning and as ham-fisted as Peng Shuai meeting Thomas Bach. The IOC are culpable in attempting to launder the image of the Chinese state, not just now but also in 2008, but they’ve lost the ability to say no. The same system that’s cost the IOC the ability to have any sort of moral backbone is the same system that provides cheap consumer goods to the West at the expense of their own economic futures and is plunging the planet head first into climate disaster, so who can say if its good or not?
The nations holding their noses over China’s human rights records are, in Australia’s case, mandatorily detaining refugees and, in the USA‘s case, locking kids in cages on the Mexican border. Never mind the Bush-era relic of Gitmo or their treatments of their respective Indigenous peoples. That these acts exist in a legal grey-ish area, instead of an outright crime against humanity, only proves that how these nations treat people is not different, but only separated by a handful of degrees.
I don’t want the Uyghur situation ignored or not reported on. It’s the hypocrisy that grates, largely led by people trying to do serious capital-J Journalism for a couple of weeks before it gets stowed, never to be spoken of again. So, really, what I want is the heat left turned up on China and western countries held to a higher standard than blithely ignoring inhumane treatment of human beings, including children, under the guise of “immigration policy”. If one can be the target of sports reporting, then why not the other?
Also, regarding the ski jump venue set in a disused factory that’s gone viral twice:
Can we just accept a little something in the middle ground instead of endlessly complaining? Can’t help but feel other nations don’t cope this treatment1.
Day 1: Mixed relays deliver
Two fantastic races on day 1. The biathlon mixed relay swung back and forth between four or five contenders over each leg, as individual competitors crumbled at the various shooting stations.
Norway looked like having an unassailable lead early before Eckhoff’s shooting left them well behind the leaders and seemingly out of the running. The Boe brothers managed to pull them back before an astonishing sprint to the line from Johannes snatched victory by several inches. Officially, it was a margin of victory of exactly 0.9 seconds after over an hour of racing.
Cleaner shooting from the French would’ve given them an easy victory, although Fillon Maillet will console himself with individual gold, as the Russians disappeared on the final leg. A special shout out should go to Alexander Loginov, whose solo effort pulled Russia from seventh into the lead and had the fastest split of anyone in the race. He finished tenth in the individual event.
Later in the night, the short track program got underway. The mixed team relay final began with a crash before they had cleared the first corner and the race was re-started. Italy had the early lead through the first two legs before a stilted change allowed China and Canada to get the drop. Italy dropped further back on the fourth change, with a clear gap to the leading three, despite holding position during the actual skating. China ramped up the speed and began to edge clear while Canda and Hungary collided in midfield, with seven laps remaining. The carnage gave China a seemingly unassailable advantage going into the penultimate change. Being short track, there was a final twist as Pietro Sighel managed to visibly close down the gap in a few short laps to finish just 16 thousandths of a second behind the hometown team.
Sieghel made up .834 seconds in just three laps or 333m. It’s why we watch sport. Go find the video wherever the IOC will let you.
To clarify earlier comments around mixed relays, I just find it an odd trend that’s emerged with seemingly no driver other than gender equality (and perhaps program consolidation) and it’s the lack of an ulterior commercial or otherwise malevolent motive that’s disturbing me.
Day 2: When did Australia decide to dominate moguls?
One of the things about getting old is that if you’re not really paying attention to some things, a lot of time can pass very quickly. I wrote previously of watching Torah Bright winning a gold medal at Vancouver while injured and it turns out that was the last Winter Olympics Australia had won a gold medal. That in itself wouldn’t have been cause for alarm had twelve years also not elapsed in the interim.
Steven Bradbury, Australia’s first Winter Olympic gold medallist, is now pushing hair growth replacement and his turn of phrase in the short track commentary booth marks him as being of a certain era of Australian men. Alisa Camplin, a gold medallist a few days after Bradbury, went from flogging chewing gum to middle-aged middle management. Torah Bright has a kid now2.
The upside of not paying attention while masses of your very limited time on this planet slip away is that Australia feel suddenly very good at moguls. Via a cursory glance at the men’s side of the competition, I roughly estimated that Australia had more entrants in the finals than any other country. The women’s side of the comp actually delivered a gold medal with Jakara Anthony’s near-flawless downhill runs.
It all began with Canadian-Australian Dale Begg-Smith winning gold in 2006. As this piece from 2014 indicates, he’s just living his King Shit life:
Dale Begg-Smith, the mysterious and reclusive mogul skier who is Australia's most successful ever winter Olympian, is living on Grand Cayman Island, a speck of land in the Caribbean which is a well-known haven for the rich and famous…
"Hello?" he answered.
"Hi, is that Dale?"
"Who's this?"
"Dale I hope this is an OK time to call. My name is Anthony, and I'm calling from Australia."
Silence…
"I'm a former Australian ski instructor and I'm also a reporter for Australia's largest media company News Corp."
Click.
And that was that.
Probably a pretty good book in there somewhere and a point to be made about the flattening of time but then I’d have to know more about moguls and it’s just not going to happen.
Day 3: Short track speed skating
I was enjoying the endless chaos until I wanted to go to bed and needed them to get on with the medal races.
Day 4: Cross country sprint and biathlon formats
It was a bit funny watching both of these formats because they don’t seem quite right.
The traditional biathlon is a time trial event. That is racers start individually and are ranked by their time to complete the course, rather than the order they finish in. The thing about time trials is that they’re boring as shit and tough to follow for casuals. The winner could be the first out of the blocks or the last. In between, you could be watching dozens of no-hopers going through the motions for hours. That’s generally not what sport is about. The irony is that there is a separate mass start event, which I’m expecting will have similar drama to the mixed relay (also a mass start race) becuase you can see in real time the impact of crushing failure to operate a rifle correctly3.
Cross country skiing is the long distance running of winter sports. Its about maintaining a liquid, visually effortless technique to maximise efficiency. The races are an hour or more. But there’s also a sprint event that takes three minutes to complete and the athletes all, to a man and woman, collapse after crossing the finish line. As a subtropical Australian, perhaps its not for me to say, but I feel having a cross country sprint flies in the face of what the sport is meant to prove: who has the best endurance while being very cold. It feels like a format made for broadcast, a conclusion bolstered by the fact that mass start and sprint races were introduced for the 2002 games. This is not to say its not entertaining but it does feel like an aberration.
It’s hard to see either really changing without some sort of external pressure. There’s not a lot of sports that can realistically be added to the Winter Olympics, if they stick with their policy of only admitting sports with pure ice/snow DNA, so it’s not like there’s a bunch of programming space that needs to be cleared to make room for ice soccer or snow rugby or cyclocross. Until that changes, we’ll probably see this off kilter mix of traditional and modern format events.
Non-Olympics stuff
How the falsehood of athletes dying of coronavirus vaccines spread
UEFA president Ceferin compares Barcelona, Real Madrid and Juventus to flat-Earthers for persevering with Super League. The money quote of “Nobody wants it (the Super League) except the few who think that football is all about money” is *Italian chef’s kiss*.
The [Golf] International Series - What We Know and Which Countries Are Hosting. The Golf Super League is taking to take shape. The important thing left out of the re-mashed press releases is who LIV Golf Investments are. Spoiler alert: it’s everyone’s favourite public investment fund.
Mapping the celebrity NFT complex. If it turned out the Saudis were behind a substantial part of crypto and NFTs via celebrity talent agencies and sports sponsorships, that would just make so much more sense.
I’m told the Pro Bowl happened?
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But perhaps that’s just me and my social media usage.
According to a Google search, his name is Flow and they were at the centre of some Mummy Discourse, possibly the most vitriolic form of online discourse, last year.
Short of drowning during a marathon swim, I can’t imagine how awful it feels when biathlon-specific panic sets in. You really need your shooting to go right while you have an elevated heart rate from kilometres of cross country skiing and with the weight of expectation from yourself, your teammates and your country and the fucking bullet just won’t go into the target.