SPECTATOR SPORT
Winter follies
Simon Barnes
AS THE Winter Olympic Games turn into their second week, it is time I made a con- fession. I quite like them. Sport dwells all the time on the cusp of absurdity: at the Winter Games it tumbles head over heels into the abyss of farce. There are no ver- nacular sports at the Winter Games, not unless you happen to live in one of the handful of countries that has a chunk of Arctic Circle within its borders. Every sport is unfamiliar; therefore every sport is obvi- ously absurd.
Now this was all right before the Olympic Games became a huge financial success after the Summer Games of Los Angeles in 1984. It was then that the Games embarked on their programme of intergalactic con- quest. One of the ploys was to make sure that we never had a chance of forgetting about the Olympics. And it was also a cun- ning stunt to squeeze an extra Olympic Games into the fag-end of the 20th century. The International Olympic Committee, otherwise known as Juan Antonio Sama- ranch, decided to abandon the concept of Olympic Year' and to hold the Winter Games two years after each Summer Games. And then they bussed in a load of new sports to try and inflate the Winter Games to the size of the Summer Olympics.
The result has been absurdity. In the sporting feast of an Olympic year, the Win- ter Games made a pleasant hors d'oeuvre for our undiscriminating sporting palates. But now we are asked to make an entire meal off the prawn cocktail: for there are no steak and chips and no Black Forest gateau to come. And woe upon woe, there is not enough Mateus rosé to wash it all down with.
The first displaced Winter Olympics in 1994 were remembered as a wonderful success. In the United States, television ratings hit a new high with the skating soap opera between Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. You will remember that Kerrigan was whacked on the knee with an iron bar and Harding, implicated, was convicted of obstructing the course of jus- tice. This was more farce than high drama. And then Torvill and Dean were done out of a gold medal in the ice dance by the latest bit of political marking, and once again the absurdity of it all was embarrassingly obvious. The new sports add to the element of nonsense. Snowboarding is skateboarding on ice, a jolly enough pastime but lacking something in Olympic gravity. Short-track speed skating is a bit like dodgem car rac- ing. Mogul skiing, in which you jump up in the air and wave your legs about, is not a suitable pastime for grown-ups.
We Brits tend to look at these games and wag our heads and feel left out. Not enough mountains, not enough snow, how can we compete with the rest of the world? But the rest of the world feels just the same. Everybody is left out. Winter sports have never been mainstream events; not for participants, nor for spectators. They were invented in a desperate effort to get people through the interminable northern winter, a doomed attempt to shake off the depres- sions of the lands of eternal darkness. Win- ter sports are a spirited counter-argument to that trio of Nordic rib-ticklers, Ibsen, Strindberg and Munch.
No, say winter sports enthusiasts, perpet- ual cold and eternal darkness can be fun. Oh really, we respond, unmoved. Winter sports are a brief period of flapping about between one long patch of darkness and another. Much more of this, and you start to say that all of life is just such a thing. Give me the sun, mother! Hush, my son. Only two and a half years before the dawn- ing of the Summer Games.
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