After two weeks of the sublime and sometimes bizarre in Milano Cortina, I have embraced the Winter Olympics as a quadrennial extra Christmas holiday. The Games present a paradox: on one hand, they are the peak of human athleticism, and on the other, they can look like an elite school sports day. The BBC’s near-comprehensive coverage attempts to explain the sports to newbies, but it cannot clear up every question.
My father cannot enjoy pairs skating because every time someone is thrown in the air, he is convinced they are going to crack their head open like an Easter egg. The jeopardy of falling over is a key dramatic ingredient in any sport involving balance or working at height. But what are the ethics of watching a crash after it has happened? After Lindsey Vonn’s crash, the full excruciating footage was on iPlayer, and I found myself pretending to be interested in the result of the women’s downhill when I was really just waiting for the wipeout. On hearing her cries of pain, I realised I was a horrible ghoul and pressed fast-forward.
Biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid used his bronze medal-winning moment to announce an affair and tell his ex-girlfriend he still loved her. “I hope I don’t make it anything worse for her,” he said later. “I hope there’s a happy ending.” Meanwhile, his countryman Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, the most successful Winter Olympian of all time, apparently refuses to kiss his fiancee after racing because he is afraid of germs.
The BBC commentators, sitting in their broom cupboard, singing Bon Jovi and swishing lightsabers, deliver saucy commentary about backside double corks and alley-oop rodeos. Their flights of rhetorical fancy include describing a snowboarder who “sprinkles pressure on her breakfast cereal” and a Kiwi competitor as “a human cider stone … crushing the opposition”. As they might say after a frontside 1440 McTwist with a nose-grab: this is frying my brain.
This year’s ice dancing gold medallists, Guillaume Cizeron and Laurence Fournier Beaudry, travelled to Milan with considerable baggage. Cizeron had to deny allegations of controlling behaviour, and Fournier Beaudry continued to defend a former skating partner and current boyfriend accused of sexual assault.
