Lincicome: Beijing could be remembered as the Olympics of Grief
It is hard to take seriously any sport that has a section called "Kiss and Cry," which seems more an instruction than a description, though honest emotion can occur.
So it did for several ice skaters from Russia the other night in China, one of whom should have been allowed to just run off and hide as, say, skiers and snowboarders may. Failure is as much opera as triumph, more so, in fact, most of the time.
It was difficult to tell the winners from the losers of the ladies free skate because they were all stomping around unhappily, either from not winning or not winning enough, while the rest of us, accepting entertainment on whichever cable channel we could find it, thought, "Well, yeah. This might not be sports, but it was worth waiting four years for."
Beijing 2022 may be remembered, if at all, as the Olympics of Grief, whether it was American Mikaela Shiffrin sitting alone on the side of the slalom course or Russian Kamila Valieva sobbing as her coach chewed her out for something or other.
What was happening out in the wilderness on the long skinny skis was unseen, but the Norwegians seem happy and that is who the winter carnival is for anyhow.
I did not notice how the U.S. men's hockey team took losing to - wait a minute, I need to look this up - to Slovakia, or Canada to Sweden, no medals, eh, nor the American men with brooms, shut out of the medals, but as we assume, there is no crying in curling.
What was it one of the American coaches tweeted about all of this? "What a sweat show." He didn't call it sweat - not a whole lot of that when your nose is running - but something that rhymes, scatologically speaking.
And, sure it was, a sweat show. Always has been, from the time Emperor Nero used 10 horses to his opponents' four, or when strychnine and brandy was a drug cocktail.
From bribes to dope to gender masking to crooked judging to pushing politics, the Olympics have always been a model of deceit.
But this one was special. This was Tonya Harding propping her skate up to show judges she needed a redo, times 10, worse than the Canadian pairs in Salt Lake City getting a French kiss off that caused a change in ice skating judging that has led to Russian waifs leaping for glory.
Olympians are placed in the special section of sports where everything you want to believe about games is made flesh, where skill and honor and respect come together, where integrity and decency are not sacrificed for convenience, or for success.
Ah, what fools we couch muffins be. Delude me once, shame on me. Delude me again and again and call it the Olympics.
The whole ice opera is a commercial hustle, telling us who should win and by how much, commercials already in the can, and then lingering on collapse longer than success.
The natural movement of news is toward the surprise not the supposed. But money manages our expectations, the prepackaged pieces from NBC, the credit card heroes, the soft drinkers. They are who we know because the machinery of celebrity has worked to make them known.
Otherwise, we would not know a half-piper from a triple lutzer and the next time any of us use the word "amplitude" it will be 2026.
It makes no difference if figure skating is a sport or a spectacle since there could be no Winter Olympics without it. The only real game is ice hockey. All the rest are variations of transportation, getting from here to there, or from up above to down below or back to where you started, sometimes through gates, sometimes with flips and flops, sometimes with music.
The Winter Olympics are both too long and too short. They take too much time to do too little anyone who isn't a Finn or an Austrian cares about.
The whole mittened carnival could have been over the first weekend if they had let the teenage divas do their leaps. Maybe it ended when a 15-year-old became a wanted poster, long before she wept into her red-gloved hands.