Admittedly, I haven’t been watching much of the Winter Olympics this year. They’re on network! That’s like, 200 channels away from my comfort zone of basic cable. Whenever I think about switching the channel to NBC, a little groan escapes from my inner lazy that does not feel like entering two simple digits on my remote to bypass the 200 channels of movies that we don’t pay for. So instead, I watch an episode of The Big Bang Theory on TBS that I’ve seen at least five times.
Anywho, I have been paying attention to the coverage, and there’s been a lot of smack talk about curling on the Internets. Curling. A sport not unlike bocce ball, but played on ice. I can get down with the idea of ice-bocce, but then there are the psycho broomstick people who furiously scrub the ice down in front of an angus burger-sized puck.
If those people existed in bocce, they’d be two Italian mothers yelling at the ball all, “What the hell have you been doing with your life? Get off your lazy ass and get a job! If you don’t get close to the target, that means you don’t love me!”
I truly don’t get why these broomstick people exist. Yes, okay, their scrubbing sorta melts the ice and changes the trajectory of the puck or something. But then, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the original person throwing the puck? Shouldn’t the original person just, I don’t know, AIM the puck at the target? Confused.
And then there’s the luge. Robin Williams once described this sport as something invented by a drunken German gynecologist. He says, “What guy went, ‘You know what? I want to dress like a sperm. Shove an ice skate in my ass. And go balls first down an ice shoot.'” I couldn’t have put it better myself.
And can we talk about the biathalon for a second? Cross-country skiing is hard, no joke. It requires endurance, balance, and extreme patience. But why the pause to stop and shoot stuff? Let’s trudge through the snow for a while, let’s start to build up some speed, let’s hurdle toward our goal…let’s take a break for a picnic and bust out our guns! I feel like biathalon is a sport for Norwegian rednecks.
There are many other random sports at the Winter Olympics. Ice dancing, which is the reject sport for people who couldn’t quite make it on the figure skating circuit. Bobsled? Skeleton? Let’s face it, snow and ice sports are weird. There’s only so much you can do on a slippery, wet, cold surface. My winter sport consists of avoiding watching other people participate in winter sports while bundled in a Mexican covija laying prone on my couch. And I’m totally cool with that.
The Olive Gal
green of skin, black of heart
They already have the Luge sports, and they have the ski / snowboarding races. Contact Red Bull and get “Crashed Ice” in the Olympics. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Inw-NGscNZM