I was a freak for the Olympic Games from the moment I first saw them.
An early memory was dragging a mattress outside and using some boards and nails and mom’s clothesline pole to fashion a high-jump pit in our backyard.
Fortunately, I married a fellow fan, a former women’s hockey player who was paid real money to teach cross-country skiing to Californians. To my knowledge, she’s the only Haines woman to finish the 50K race at the Buckwheat Ski Classic.
Every fourth February, the Winter Games shut down all other activity at our house for two weeks. This year we followed the competition on NBC, Canada’s CBC and on “The Peacock,” an NBC streaming service.
Like most Australians, my wife loves a good race.
If you look at all closely, you can poke holes in the Olympics. They’re a competition between rich nations. They’re too white. They’re too top-heavy in judged events that are as much entertainment as sport.
Most of these are particularly well aimed at the Winter Games. But all of them combined don’t outweigh the fact that Olympic competition is the least scripted show on TV, a chance to see citizen athletes at the peak of their strength and ability experiencing peak moments of their lives.
That’s something.
As we live on snow and ice, we favor the Winter Games, partly for their danger, partly for their loopy events like curling and skeleton, and partly because Norway, a tiny and peaceful nation of gentle people, crushes everyone else in the medal count. There’s a lesson there somewhere for the rest of us.
The ancient Greeks, who knew a few things about glory, invented the Olympic Games and held the quadrennial competition for at least 1,200 years, probably longer. Athletes came from as far away as Spain and Turkey. Competitions were held in such regard that wars were cancelled for them.
Today, nothing else in sports or entertainment quite compares to the Games because – at their heart – the Olympics are still about honor and courage, two of our highest values.
Sure athletes make bank on endorsements. Sure the Games are used as propaganda by host nations. Sure the Russians and anyone else can cheat, and do.
But the cheating is so obvious that the cheaters become cartoon characters like Boris and Natasha in the Bullwinkle and Rocky Show, to be ridiculed at and pitied rather than feared. They make jokes of themselves.
The introduction of professional athletes hasn’t “cheapened” the Olympics, as was predicted. And we can shrug off the cheery window-dressing of pageantry by host nations like China that routinely suppress freedom and torture their own people.
We don’t watch the Games for them. We watch for the athletes and for their moments of honor and sometimes dishonor.
We cheered Erin Jackson, our nation’s first black woman to win gold in speed-skating and cheered louder for Brittany Bowe, her white teammate who gave away her spot in the event for Jackson to compete after slipping in a qualifying race.
We booed the U.S. women’s ice hockey team for unanimous frowns while receiving their silver medals after being outplayed for three periods by the Canadians. To understand Olympic grace, the Yanks needed only to look across the ice to see the women from Finland exalting with their bronze medals.
We wept with legendary U.S. snowboarder Sean White who could not stop the tears as he ended his career as the sport’s most decorated Olympian.
And we laughed as the Russian figure skaters dissolved into a puddle of tears. From Peggy Fleming to Tonya Harding, ice dancing has always been a freakish mash-up of athletics, soap opera and debutante ball. For it to become a sport, the music and frilly outfits and make-up would have to be axed, and who would want that?
My only regret is not seeing enough curling, a sport where athletes outside the Olympics compete while holding a cup of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
Viva the Games. Viva the glory and the spectacle. Viva the indomitable weirdness of humans.