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.
Reviewing every winter Olympic sport
At the time of writing, the 2022 Beijing Olympics1 are a bit over two weeks away and what better way to get into the spirit than reading what a guy whose seen snow maybe two or three times in his life thinks about winter sports.
Let’s get our skates on and rate each of these bad boys out of five (5) snowflakes:
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Short track speed skating
The greatest moment in Olympic history? Who can say. It is at least indelibly etched into my memory. I’ll go senile in a few decades, won't remember my own kids' faces but will remember how Steven Bradbury won gold at Salt Lake.
What’s not covered in the video is that the exact same thing happened in the semis. And that Australia’s 5000m relay team, featuring Bradbury, won bronze at Lilliehammer eight years earlier, the country’s first winter Olympic medal. And that Bradbury survived losing multiple litres of blood after an accident later in 1994. Luckiest man alive.
Skeleton
There are three sliding sports at the Olympics and they're all pretty similar but skeleton is obviously the most deranged of the three. Unlike those COWARDS in bobsleigh and luge, skeleton is a solo sport (so not teammates for moral support in your obviously unhinged endeavour), you go face first and there’s not really much other than a thin layer of lycra between your skin and precious bodily organs and the ice coming at you at 120 km/h. I have no choice but to respect it.
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Alpine skiing
Irrespective of it’s actual entertainment value, surely this is the quintessential winter sport: it’s full of rich, white people on snow going fast. In that sense, alpine skiing is not unlike motor sport and like motor sport, there’s a fine line of control and adhesion that athletes go up to and when they tip over, the consequences are catastrophic. There’s no small crashes at the speeds alpine skiiers are going down hills whose gradient would be intimidating if you were just standing at the top, never mind trying to control your fall to the bottom. In many ways, it’s fortunate that the athletes are uniformly well-off because fuck paying those medical bills otherwise.
Biathlon
They jazzed up cross country skiing by adding guns and it’s about time, I say. They’ll have to be careful not to do this where there’s too much snow and cause an avalanche but between global warming, poor host site selection and bad luck, I don’t think that’s been an issue for a winter games in some time.
Ice hockey
Unlike the Summer Olympics, which seems to be drowning in large team sports - soccer, field hockey, rugby 7s, basketball, volleyball, water polo, handball, base/softball and rowing, I guess - the Winter Olympics only has ice hockey. Ice hockey’s main benefits are that it’s a contact sport played at high speed, so that satisfies certain reptilian parts of my brain. However, I need to take half a snowflake off because I can never see the damn puck and another half off because NHL players aren’t participating because the now-not-so-novel coronavirus pandemic.
Speed skating (the other one)
FYI, there are two types of speed skating. The superior short track uses a 111m circuit while, uh, long track (I guess) is contested on a 400m circuit. Short track sprinting is often chaotic, with too many bodies trying to occupy too small a space, which is why it’s more entertaining. It’d be as if the 100m sprint in athletics had a finish line that was only three lanes wide.
Long track has the baffling appearance of being the easiest, smoothest, least effort of possibly all sports. Then you realise they’re doing 60km/h. Then you see them turn on the power for the finish. Then you realise your quads are not up to that task. Long track has also the bonus of borrowing the team pursuit format from track cycling, which I think is neat.
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Bobsleigh
People’s nostalgia for generic 90s Disney movies has given bobsleigh a lot more credibility in the English speaking world than it deserves. Do you know what I see when I watch bobsleigh? Some jingle bell-looking motherfuckers running for five seconds while one guy, the pilot, does most of the work and really, gravity is doing the real work and some of these guys are just along for the ride to winning Olympic medals. One snowflake has been added back on for the monobob discipline.
Cross-country skiing
This is the long distance running equivalent of skiing, so I guess if you like watching the marathon, but stripped of its historical relevance, then this is the event for you?
The fun thing about cross country skiing - and probably the entire basis for its three snowflake rating - is that, as an event that is almost entirely dependent on an athlete’s aerobic function, cross country skiiers have some of the highest* VO2-max values recorded. Coincidentally, the sport is also rife with doping. You can therefore comfort yourself that you too could do what these athletes do, if you had a couple of dodgy doctors to run a systematic autologous blood doping regime for you.
Curling
Lawn bowls. On ice. Ice bowls. There are few things more satisfying in life than taking an object with delicate and non-intuitive physics and moving it close to a target. Curling has that and sweeping.
At the risk of this getting incredibly parochial, Australia has qualified a team for curling for the first time.
I can’t wait to see how Seven butcher this.
Snowboarding
Look! It’s the Olympics pandering to the X Games crowd. At least, snowboarders are cool and no, I didn’t mean that as a pun.
Aside from the gold medal of hair replacement spokeman Steven Bradbury referenced earlier, my only other indelibly inked winter Olympic memory is watching Torah Bright win a gold medal in 2010 while I had a fucked up eye. It was a slight moment of reprieve in an otherwise extremely uncomfortable week of my life2.
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Figure skating
I had to Google how to spell “Salchow” by entering “triple sow cow”. I will not being looking up what an “axel” is. I already didn't like the sport, I don't care to be made to feel stupid on top.
Look, you can enjoy it without me. It’s fine, don’t let me stop you. Really. It’s not going anywhere because, like its summer cousin, artistic gymnastics, it’s very popular with US TV audiences. I didn’t know either.
Freestyle skiing
I do not understand why anyone thought up moguls as a thing. Surely the first ever moguls event destroyed everyone’s knees and it was consigned to the dustbin of history?
Ski cross is fine though.
Ski jumping
While ski jumping would be undoubtedly terrifying to participate in and incredibly difficult to execute without an important part of the musculoskeletal system exploding on impact, it is not that interesting to actually watch. They go down the ramp, they fly through the air and they land. Pretty much every attempt looks the same and it is not at all clear, least of all through the broadcast, why the ski jump gods favour one athlete over another. One snowflake for “damn, that dude went a really long way” and one snowflake for two-time Vuelta winner Primoz Roglic’s past as a ski jumper.
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Luge
This was the first picture on Google image search for two man luge. You look ridiculous. What are you even trying to prove here?
Nordic Combined
What if we took two of the least interesting sports - cross country and ski jump - at the Olympics, put them together and removed all the women? The only people interested are the manufacturers of fluorinated wax, who can probably illegally supply the Nordic combined peloton due to its general lack of public interest (and testing). This is the modern pentathlon of winter sports.
The grace, the beauty of sports
One more time
Very normal things
What a shame. It was a nicely timed distraction for the IOC who now don’t have to answer more questions about the whereabouts of Peng Shuai.
What a shame. I’m sure Matt Damon, the Lakers and half the big European soccer clubs aren’t missing any money.
Tom Ley at Defector saved me from writing the same piece almost word-for-word about the NFL’s Wild Card Weekend. I thought the contrast between the reluctant acceptance of post-season blowouts within the NFL fandom because money, and the existential hand wringing of college football in response to similar results was funny though.
As modern pentathlon begins its process to search for a new discipline, we can chalk up not getting in trouble with, what I can only assume are the famously lax and jocular, German police as another benefit of ditching horse riding.
News from around the grounds
Soccer: Comoros has defeated Ghana in the African Cup of Nations in a huge upset.
Figure skating: the Four Continents Championships start in Estonia in two days.
Water polo: Serbia defeated Italy, 12-9, in the men’s World League.
See the latest on the Governors and Leagues lists on Twitter.
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“Beijing Olympics” feels very much like a relic of a past era, like Obama, unending global financial crises in lieu of unending global health crises and the Giants winning a Super Bowl.
February in Brisbane meant lots of sunlight while I had a corneal abrasion which made it painful to look at things.