Putting Pizazz Into the Winter Olympics
Milano Cortina 2026 is upon us. That’s right, another Winter Olympics. Another two weeks of watching athletes sliding around on snow and ice, performing activities we only see every four years, and playing sports we never play in real life (been luging lately?).
While the Games portend many high points of athletic excellence — Mikaela Shiffrin in alpine skiing and “Quad God” Ilia Malinin in figure skating — they have already supplied a few lowlights as well. (RELATED: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 190: The Female Olympian You Should Be Cheering Against)
There is a “crotch” controversy, with accusations swirling that skiers from a certain country in Scandinavia, where they eat a lot of lutefisk, are enhancing their “packages” to achieve greater “hang time” in ski jumping.
And there are the predictable woke sportswriters wringing their hands about the lack of diversity on the Olympic contingents. “Why don’t the Swedes and Finns have more black ski jumpers?” they lament. The Norwegian Olympic team is whiter than a Norwegian dinner — fish, potatoes, cauliflower, etc. Tamp the outrage, woke sportswriters! We’ll pay attention to you when the NBA is 75 percent white.
And, lamentably, some of our athletes are taking anti-ICE sentiment to the streets of Italy. (RELATED: Olympic Athletes Fail at Their One Job)
But on the actual ice and snow, the Winter Games are a snooze. Not all the events are boring, of course. Hockey and the downhill have their moments, for sure, but, generally speaking, the Winter Games make falling asleep in front of the TV a daytime activity.
One way they do this is by laying on iteration after iteration of the same activity. Take speed skating — there are long-track events and short-track events. Long-track races are like time trials — skating around a track in a lane all by yourself, against a stopwatch. There are 14 different long-track events. Short track is fun for a while — very exciting — but eventually it’s like watching little kids chase each other around the dining-room table. They have nine short-track events.
There are also 12 cross-country skiing events. And this year they’re adding a 50-kilometer race for the women. That’s two additional hours of kick-glide excitement for us viewers.
Then there are the luge and the skeleton, which are vastly different sports. The former entails riding a one-person sled down a track feet first; the latter involves riding a one-person sled down a track headfirst. You wouldn’t want to break away from that even to walk to the fridge.
Once in a while, they add an event to perk things up. In 1992, they added speed skiing. Think about it: a skier assuming a tuck position at the top of the mountain and shooting straight down to the bottom! That’s the sort of thing that’ll get you kicked out of Copper Mountain or Winter Park. But not at the Albertville Games, where Michael Prufer of France reached a speed of 142.480 miles per hour to win the gold.
They’re adding an event this year, too — ski mountaineering. In “skimo,” as it’s called, competitors “ski” up a mountain, with adhesive skins on the bottoms of their skis, then remove their skis and walk, or “speed hike,” for a while, then put their skis back on and race downhill to the finish line.
This is exactly the sort of thing the Winter Games do not need: people skiing up a mountain.
This is exactly the sort of thing the Winter Games do not need: people skiing up a mountain. This is to calm those viewers whose heart rates elevate while watching cross-country skiers on level ground.
And, of course, in the grand tradition of Winter Olympics of quadrennia past, merely one “skimo” race will not suffice. There’s a men’s sprint, a women’s sprint, and a mixed-gender relay.
If we’re going to add sports, we can do better than that. Here are my humble suggestions for new events.
- Large Hill Ski Jumping (over moat). It’s time to put a little spice in ski jumping. But, you say, it’s already arguably the most dangerous sport in the Winter Olympics. A skier starts atop the large “hill,” hundreds of meters above the landing area, and then zips down two little tracks before flying off a ramp and soaring 200-plus feet through the air, only to land on two skinny boards attached tenuously to his feet. Scary stuff, right? Sure, for the ski jumper. But what about us, we humble viewers? Truth be told, after watching five or six jumpers go down the same hill, hit the same ramp, and then land in roughly the same place on the mountainside, we’re ready to switch to Ice Road Truckers (even now, in Season 12).
The event would be spiced up considerably by adding a moat to the landing area. Now, we don’t want to make the skiers land in the moat; we just want to make the moat a deterrent, placing it in front of the landing area. However, should a skier be so inept as to land in the moat, that mistake has to be punitive. And, no, I’m not talking about stocking the moat with alligators. It’s far too cold in Milano Cortina for gators. A nice environmental touch would be to bring polar bears from the Arctic and put them on ice floes in the moat, where they could consume inept ski jumpers. A double whammy! Inserting excitement into ski jumping and saving polar bears from extinction!
- Texas Tree Slalom. As now constituted, in the slalom, skiers ski around thin, slight, reed-like poles in the ground, poles with much give in them. These poles, called gates, present no obstacle to a skier’s progress down the hill at all. Slalomers look like they even try to hit them aggressively with their shoulders as they pass them. In the Texas Tree Slalom, the poles would be replaced with trees, and the trees would have white bark — so, aspen or birch — to make them harder to see. This would make the slalom races far more interesting. The “Texas” part of the title is in homage to the many skiers who ski into trees on the slopes, to injurious effect, many of whom, in my experience as an avid skier in Colorado for a decade, seem to hail from Texas.
- Executive Hockey. This is hockey played by men in dress shoes — no tennis shoes or athletic shoes; footwear must be a wingtip or wholecut oxford, or, at a minimum, a nice derby. If you’ve ever seen a singer or other celebrity try to make it from center ice to the boards safely, you know how entertaining such an event would be. All the better if they were required to wear suits and ties. Maybe have advertisers field teams — so the Swedish team could be Team Volvo, the German team Team Audi, and so forth. A women’s event would mandate stiletto heels.
- Ice Fishing. The Winter Games need a drinking sport. Now, obviously, all events lend themselves to spectator tippling. The 50-kilometer cross-country ski race would, I think, require numerous curls of the 12-ounce variety just to get through it. And the biathlon is no adrenaline rush either.
But what about participant quaffing? Here we run dry, so to speak. The sport most amenable to in-competition imbibing is, obviously, curling, which is almost identical to bar shuffleboard, except it’s played on a sheet of ice instead of in a bar, with participants chasing a curling stone down the sheet while wielding Swiffers instead of mere sand facilitating puck passage. If truth be told, curlers look naked without red Solo cups in their hands. They sup from “water” bottles, of course. Curlers, like other athletes, absolutely need to keep hydrated; the sport is so strenuous. It ain’t all water that’s in those bottles, though, ya know, eh?
But all this is pure speculation. Ice fishing would remove the questions. If you think there’s only fishing going on in those little huts, think again.
None of these suggestions is likely to be approved by Olympic authorities, of course. But, then again, if they can green-light an event in which skiers race up a mountain, well, who knows?
READ MORE from Tom Raabe: