For the last week, I’ve been watching the Winter Olympics like it’s my job. I’ve been doing my job as if it’s the washing up. And the washing up, well, just take a guess. I’m simply entranced by the various means devised of sliding down a hill, while flapping your arms to keep your balance. If I knew why I’m so fascinated, I suspect I’d know a lot more about myself.
It may just be that, like a cat, I simply like brightly coloured objects moving about on a plainly coloured background – see below for an embarrassingly large number of entries celebrating golf. Or it may be – golf again – that the less I know about a sport, the more I like it, just like my late Great Aunt Florence, who spent her declining years watching any form of televised competition she could find, from five-nations rugby to Bullseye, without ever really having the faintest idea what was going on.
Or it may just be the simplicity of the whole thing. Mostly you only have to watch one brightly coloured object at a time, while watching for the split times. And for the most part, it’s reasonably obvious whether or not things are going well. Man in Lycra flashes past the camera in a low tuck. (‘He’s going for it!’ says the informed commentator. Even I can see that.) Or, perhaps, man in Lycra enters the shot at high speed, upside down four feet off the ground and proceeds to drive himself into the snow like a nail, leaving only his skis showing. (“Oooh, that hasn’t gone at all the way he wanted,’ says the commentator, as some Canadians extract the victim, to hopefully dust him down and send him on his way.)
I even like the fact that things like half-pipe have made a virtue out of manoeuvres that look to me like a crash right up to the point where the victim’s snowboard comes bottom centre at just the right moment for them to ski away.
I know all this is based on ignorance, indeed I know I’m saying just the kind of stuff that sometimes grates when an outsider writes it about my own sport – though I like to think I’m fairly tolerant up to the point where someone suggests killing us.
But maybe the best thing about it isn’t the ignorance, it’s the innocence. When a snowboarder falls out of the sky over the half pipe in the style of a skydiver who’s parachute has failed, gets up, smiles for the camera, and slides away humming to themselves, I can convince myself that they’re driven more by the pleasure of the thing than anything else. It may well be so, or at least, more so that for a lot of other sports, but I’m almost certainly wrong in most of the time. For me to be right, they’d also have to be not really competitively driven, and that’s not how you get selected for the Olympics. I can make myself believe it, though, and that appeals immensely.