Our Hero

Go big, Lizzie, go big!

ONE of the principles that we abide by here at In Play Lose is that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. And few people have taken that principle to loftier heights than Californian-turned-Venezuelan-turned Hungarian skeleton-rider-turned-freestyle skier Elizabeth Swaney, who put forth one of the lamest attempts in Olympic history when she went for a casual Sunday ski in the countryside down the halfpipe in PyeongChang. Swaney finished dead last, 24th of the 24 competitors entered, and then afterwards expressed her disappointment that she didn’t make the final (those who interviewed her weren’t sure whether or not she was being sincere), and then uttered some generic boilerplate text about how she aspired to be an inspiration to the Hungarian people – which, I suppose, could be true, in that the Hungarian people could see that it’s possible to do something really, really badly and yet somehow get attention for it.

Swaney was the latest in a long-line of Winter Olympic tourists, the most dubious of which are chronicled in this excellent piece published by The Ringer. The IOC is generally okay with obscure nations fielding sup-optimal athletes for events, and with good reason: the goal is to spread the gospel of the Olympic Games, and encourage participation across the globe. These athletes from weird, obscure nations may seem ridiculous, but over time, it’s possible to find true talent anywhere, and then eventually, you just might wind up finding someone from Surinam or Liechtenstein on the podium. (And it is an unstated goal of In Play Lose to somehow eventually mention every nation on earth within these posts. There, I’ve just named four more in two paragraphs. I can assure you this sort of behavior is nothing odd among journos. Someone at one of the weeklies I worked at ran a story with a Vaduz, Liechtenstein, dateline and I said to him, “you just ran this because you could get a Liechtenstein dateline in the issue” and he said, “well … yeah …”) 

I happen to agree with the idea, in principle, of attempting to expand the playing field, and I can understand completely that this will inevitably create some disparity in aptitude among those who are competing. That disparity becomes a bit more obvious in the Winter Olympics than in the summer, of course, for the simple reason that there are a lot of nations on this earth that don’t have any snow or ice. The Winter Olympics sports are almost all extremely technical in nature. Anyone can go out for a run. Not everyone can go out for a ski. 

And sometimes, the best way to encourage participation is for nations to go out and find willing participants, wherever they may be, which means finding some college kid from Seattle with Peruvian roots and suddenly declaring him to be a Peruvian. In order to field a team for the Winter Olympics, when you don’t have much snow or ice, the best way to go about doing that is to find someone from a place where there is snow or ice and give them a passport. The days of the iron-clad eligibility rules have long since passed in the Olympics – rules which were in place, mainly, because authoritarian nations wielded enormous power in the IOC and attempted to disincentivize their athletes defecting to the West in as many ways as possible. But nowadays, you can pretty much just hand someone a passport and say, “congratulations, you’re a Bulgarian” or what have you, and make up whatever justification you want. As time has passed, many of those shamateuristic Olympics ideals have faded, one of which being that somehow you need to continue to be tied to whatever nation you hailed from – a notion, which, historically, doesn’t hold any water as all, as the athletes from the original Greek games were perfectly happy to sell their services to whichever city-state ponied up the most. 

Nowadays, nations will just out-and-out buy a team, if need be. I’m actually surprised that it doesn’t happen more, in fact, given the inherent disproportion in talent you’re going to find from sport to sport. If one dominant power’s 10th best athlete in a sport – really good at what they do, but not quite good enough –  is better than anything you can put out there, let them come and be on your team, cultural connections be damned. You could field a good enough team of next-level Americans to finish 2nd to the Dream Team in the Olympics, for instance. Were the rules to permit it, I imagine Qatar would go about filling out a soccer team for 2022 World Cup by flying to Brazil and handing out fistsful of dollars along with passports. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve done that. I went on a trip to L.A. with The Official Spouse of In Play Lose a few years ago, and we found ourselves housed in a hotel which was also playing host to a World Cup rhythmic gymnastics meet, of all things, and seemingly everyone involved seemed to be a Russian, no matter what the name of the country on the back of their tracksuits. The eligibility rules vary by sport, of course, with some more strident than others, but if the rules say you can buy a team, then go out and buy one!

But Elizabeth Swaney, our Hungarian freestyle skier here, didn’t need to be bought and, indeed, never could be because she doesn’t actually know how to do the event. One of the oddities about this case is the fact that the officials at the Hungarian Skiing Federation have admitted that they never actually saw her ski before, which speaks to a curious lack of oversight. Many of these Olympic tourists are one-off novelty acts who serve as something of a side show and comic relief: there is some African cross-country skier who looks as if they’ve never seen snow, or some Caribbean luger or whatnot, and they provide a certain amount of levity to what is a tense and stressful competition, what with them being long on heart and short on any discernible talent. But what sets Elizabeth Swaney apart from the others is her sheer persistence, having swapped passports more than once and tried multiple sports in her single-minded quest to make it to the Winter Olympics, all the while displaying incredible dedication as well as her ability to employ one of the most American of virtues, that of finding the loophole and figuring out how to game the system.

This particular ruse is multifaceted, which I definitely applaud. Almost every sport in the Olympics has, to some extent, some sort of minimum qualifying standard that you have to meet. The IOC has periodically been willing to relax or ignore competitive standards in the interest of encouraging participation – which is noble, I suppose, right up until you see someone like Eric the Eel attempting to swim, at which point you worry that he might, in fact, drown. (And god bless you, Eric, for giving it a go.) High-level competition can, in fact, be extremely dangerous, particularly in the winter events, and the sight of Eddie the Eagle flinging himself off the ski jumping hills of Calgary long ago gave everyone at the IOC offices in Lausanne a case of the heebie jeebies. So there are some standards here to uphold, although they aren’t as air tight as you might think. In order to qualify for the Winter Olympics in freestyle skiing, you need to earn enough points, which you do through achieving Top 30 finishes in World Cup events. 

Which gets us back to the reason the IOC is trying to increase participation, which is that there aren’t enough competitors in a lot of these sports in a national team-based construct, which restricts the number of team members. You could find 30 Americans, Canadians, and French to fill out the field at freestyle skiing events were these open competitions, but at a good number of events, there simply weren’t enough competitors – meaning that Elizabeth Swaney, our Hungarian hero, was earning points simply for showing up. And like I say, this isn’t just a freestyle skiing issue. For example, when women’s hockey was introduced to the Olympics in 1998, there were basically two good teams, the U.S. and Canada, and 20 years later, there are still basically two good teams. There aren’t enough biathletes, there aren’t enough lugers, nor enough bobsledders in all of the right places.

So Swaney spent several years traveling to competitions across the globe – all of which lacked sufficient numbers of competitors, which enabled her to amass points simply for showing up. She was also able to take advantage of one of the peculiarities of freestyle skiing, in that it’s a judged event in which what constitutes a performance is left entirely up to the interpretation of the judges. Judged sports are, of course, also historically some of the most corrupt, easy to rig through the greasing of palms or the swapping of favors. These sorts of sports have attempted to quantify how they are judged or scored over time, and these systems have their pluses and minuses. Some, like gymnastics and figure skating, have emphasized the importance of risk-taking so much as to create a series of perverse incentives where doing something difficult and doing it badly is better than not doing something difficult at all. (And, naturally, the Russian skater who won gold in PyeongChang did so by gaming the system.) Others take the tact of “whatever you do, do it well.” Freestyle skiing falls into that category. If you fall down, you get severely dinged no matter what it is that you’re trying.

And, as you can see from the .gif that fronts this entry, Swaney took the tack of not doing anything at all, which would actually benefit her in the standings at many events. She couldn’t be graded down for missing a jump, because she didn’t even try one, and doing the bare minimum occasionally resulted in finishing higher than competitors who tried stuff and failed. Taking this tack, of course, makes something of a mockery of the event. Freestyle skiing in a halfpipe is truly one of the most insane sports that I have ever seen. The flips and tricks these athletes pull off as they go flying into the air off the 24’ walls are stunning and absolutely terrifying. The jumps are amazing, the crashes are horrifying. And see, those flips and spins and tricks on skis are the whole bloody point of the event! As much as Eddie the Eagle has been mocked and lampooned in Olympic folklore, the guy was still willing to strap some enormous skis onto his feet and fling himself off the side of the mountain. Almost every sport in the Winter Olympics save for curling seems like it’s designed to kill you.

And you’d think that, in the years’ time she’s been doing this that maybe, maybe, she would, you know, learn how to do the event – but that clearly wasn’t the point. She already has shown enough self-preservation instincts to give up skeleton, properly concluding that hurling oneself head first down a narrow corridor of ice at 80 mph wasn’t a good idea. Swaney has said in interviews that she can, in fact, do some tricks in training, but just hasn’t incorporated them into her halfpipe routine, which is sort of like saying that you should be able to play for the Warriors because you can dunk on the 9’ rim at the middle school around the corner. (Her instructor in Park City was, well, diplomatic when asked about her technical abilities.) Instead, her 1-speed Land Cruiser of a run amid a field of Ferraris stood out like some bizarre alt-theatre piece. What the hell is this? What am I watching?

So to summarize, she spent several years travelling around the world, backed by a federation who’d never seen her ski, getting points for showing up and occasionally getting even more points for doing literally the bare minimum required to garner a score, doing nothing repeatedly in the halfpipes all around the globe in the hopes of eventually doing nothing in the halfpipe in Korea, which is exactly what she wound up doing. 

This is awesome. This is bloody brilliant. Elizabeth Swaney rules. 

Some would argue this makes a mockery of the Winter Olympics, to which I would reply that there isn’t an event on earth more worth mocking. Over the past 24 years, the Winter Olympics has been veering and skidding and hurtling uncontrollably through artificial and unsustainable growth, having been transformed from this fun February diversion taking place in sleepy alpine hamlets into this colossal event costing untold billions to put on. That this has occurred at all owes entirely to one singular event in 1994, which involved the entourage of one American figure skater conspiring, and then attempting, to bludgeon and break the leg of another. That scandal led to must-see viewing and huge ratings, because we all love crime capers and we all love to chase ambulances. Those enormous and record-breaking TV ratings, in turn, led to huge broadcasting rights fees paid by NBC (who, like usual, have completely misread all of the ratings data over that time and concluded that the main reason the ratings are so good is that we Americans actually care about figure skating), which is the basis for everything that the IOC does. Throw in a little bit of bribery here and there, sprinkle in some petrostate billions, season it all with grotesque senses of largesse and self-importance, and this fun, little February diversion has, over decades, grown to ultimately become so expensive, and so unwieldy, that no sane nation on earth wants to host it any more. I said previously that I felt like these Olympics were going to be something of a dud, a low-watt endeavour lacking starpower which was struggling to find ways to remain relevant. One thing that I noticed across Olympic disciplines this year was this attempt to invent new variations in order to generate interest – team events, new sorts of relays and the like, many of which the best athletes found pointless and skipped altogether. All of it felt forced and artificial. The event never really took off for me this year. It sort of slogged on and petered out for me. It was little more than a good way to kill some time during the weeklong NBA All-Star break, instead of doing much to stand out on its own.

And I say that as someone who has always loved the Olympics, because I love seeing people do incredible things on the grandest of stages. Seeing Elizabeth Swaney go meandering down the halfpipe does, in fact, destroy any sort of ideal that I have about the athletes. I mean, back when I had two functioning feet and I lived in Colorado, I would ski every day. I got to be a very competent skier, a skier who would probably have been better able to execute a freestyle ski routine than Swaney – and that’s not tooting my own horn, either, because no one of my level of skiing ever has any business ever being in the Olympics ever! 

But at the same time, this is one helluva hustle she pulled off. We like the Olympics, of course, precisely because cool athletes do cool things, and she wanted to be a part of that one way or another. And something more that I would say about our beloved Eddie the Eagle is that, when you think about it, save for Katarina Witt and possibly the dueling Brians, Eddie the Eagle is the single-most memorable character from the Calgary Olympics of 1988. Quick, who won the Men’s Alpine Combined in Calgary? Who won the biathlon relay? How many medals did the U.S. win? And no looking it up! You put that internet down right now! … oh wait, that means I don’t have any readers … 

The point is that these narratives fade and are soon forgotten. Part of why you see so many older athletes in the Winter Olympics is that they cling to this moment. It’s why you see 46-year-old speed skaters and 45-year-old ski jumpers. This 2-week period is their one chance to make even the slightest of marks and they yearn for that opportunity. American skier Mikaela Shiffrin, who won two medals in Korea yet somehow wound up being construed as a failure given what was expected of her, spoke of the intense sort of emptiness that these athletes feel once the Olympics are over. Many of them suffer through bouts of severe depression, wondering just what the hell it is that they are doing with their lives and questioning why it is that they keep breaking their bodies as they toil in obscurity. I’ll applaud anyone who finds the will to keeping doing this stuff in order to make it back to the Olympics, even if they have to cheat and game the system in order to do it.

The Lose awards the gold medal of these Olympics to Ester Ledecká, the gold-medal winning Czech snowboarder who also, for the hell of it, went over to run with the 2-plankers, used a pair of borrowed skis and won the women’s Giant Slalom. This reaction is priceless, as she could not believe she won. She just might be the coolest person in the universe:

The silver medal goes to “Team Reject,” the U.S. curling team, four guys who were basically told “you suck, now go away,” by the U.S. federation after the last Olympics but refused to do so, winning a gold medal and making curling cool in the process. Seriously, we need a rags-to-riches curling movie made, possibly directed by Christopher Guest. (The fact a Russian curler was caught doping makes all of this even more ridiculous. Why are you doping in curling? Just drink more beer!) This was some fun and fabulous stuff from Team Reject. I don’t know anything about curling, but I knew this shot was cool when I saw it:

The bronze medal goes to the U.S. women’s hockey team for finally beating those dirty, nasty, evil Canadians in the Olympics after 20 years of trying. This winning goal by Jocelyne Lamoureux in the shootout is filth. Pure filth. It was an incredible game. and, in the process of finally exorcising their Canadian dæmons, the U.S. women’s hockey team have now also carried on that time-honored Olympic tradition of reminding people in this country what a great sport hockey is, which will then be followed by a great number of enthusiastic, hopeful budding hockey fans tuning into NHL games and wondering why the product seems so bad: 

We have to give a shout-out to U.S. Speed Skating, who continue to be terrible and continue to be poorly attired. They win our Worst Dressed award for these Olympics. (French ice dancer Gabriella Papadakis wins our Least Dressed award). You may recall this imbroglio from four years ago about the high-tech suits Under Armour designed which they never properly tested. Well, Under Armour was back again in 2018 with this bizarre design highlighting skater’s privates which, well, make you wonder what the hell anyone involved in this process was thinking. Oh, everyone involved gave some reason why this special design would improve performance and such, but did you, you know, ever stop and look at them?

But Elizabeth Swaney wins the entire Olympics. She wins the whole thing. I award her one Olympics for her tenacity, naïveté, and for bringing some absurdity to a bloated event badly in need of it. She wins all the things. She is the true Lose Olympic hero.

Go big, Lizzie. Go big!

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me atinplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.

Quick Misses

Who knew curling was so hazardous?

THE LOSE is not into curling, which is basically shuffleboard while being cold. If I’m going to play shuffleboard, it’s going to be on the deck of a cruise ship with a festive rum drink in my hand. I will admit, however, that I ventured into a curling club near to my home out of curiosity, and the club director game me the hard sell: “We have league night every Saturday, and we have a keg of beer.” Now that’s my kind of sales pitch right there! And I’ll give curling some props because it’s the only sport in the Winter Olympics that a normal person could actually do, which adds a niche sort of watchability of it, and it’s also one of the few sports where being great at it doesn’t require cheating death. That said, were I to curl, with my unsnug 2x4 of a right foot, I’d probably find a way to hurt myself, most likely doing something stupid like falling over the stones, which I’ve now seen two competitors do, the most recent being one of the Russian mixed doubles team.

Oh, wait, that’s the “Olympic Athletes from Russia” mixed doubles team. The fact that you have to use that phrase in these Olympics is one of the dumbest things ever and speaks to how ridiculous that supposed “ban” levied by the IOC against Russia really is – they threw the Russians out of the Olympics, and yet there is 160+ of their athletes competing. The argument put forth is that you shouldn’t punish the athletes who have never tested positive for any sort of performance enhancing drug, and I can see that reasoning, but the whole bloody point of throwing the Russians out of the Winter Olympics in the first place was to say that given there has been systematic doping and total lack of oversight and compliance, it’s impossible to assume that anyone involved in that structure isn’t cheating. They are assumed to be doing so since you’ve gone out of your way to cover it up!

But no, instead, the IOC decided to pussyfoot it in deference to political and monetary forces, which is their way when it comes to this sort of thing. As I’ve said previously, I’ll take the IOC seriously about their desire to supposedly stamp out all drug-related cheating from its midst when it goes back and expunges every single medal ever won by an East German, because everyone knows they were doping and there are plenty of records in the archives to prove it. This ridiculous grandstanding on the part of the IOC in the run up to the Olympics in more farcical and hollow than if they’d done nothing at all.

In the meantime, I should ask any number of cyncial figure skating fans among my circle of friends if, instead of using the term “SWR” to explain ridiculously marked up scores for skaters from that part of the world, they’re now using “SWOAR” instead.

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Oh for fucksake

It seems odd to me that the Winter Olympics in Korea have so far been hampered by, well, by winter. I mean, isn’t the whole point of the event that it takes place in snowy and icy conditions? But the cold and the snow and, worst of all, the winds have made a mess of some of the events on the slopes. They’ve already had to restructure the entire Alpine skiing program because of the high winds, rescheduling three races and so severely rejigging a fourth, the men’s Combined, that it pretty much took all of the fun and joy and drama out of the event – the idea being that the speed guys will go super duper fast in the Downhill portion, and then the technicians will try to reel them back in with the Slalom, but then they lopped a huge chunk of the Downhill off and made it pretty much impossible for any of speed dæmons to have any chance of winning the overall title. The high winds severely curtailed the slopestyle snowboarding event, which is one of the most truly beautiful and jawdroppingly awesome events in the entire Games, and when it came for the women’s event, it basically rendered the course unplayable, with competitors falling all over the place. It clearly wasn’t safe for the athletes to be out there and the event never should have happened. But it did happen, and the competitors are fuming over the fact that they felt they’d been put at risk – and rightfully so.

But I have to say that I’ve read a whole bunch of stuff from columnists and journalists decrying how little concern both the IOC and the FIS – skiing’s governing body – had for the women’s snowboarders in deciding to allow this competition to continue, and I find the amount of indignation over this somewhat curious, because this is the Olympics that we’re dealing with here, this is the IOC, and anyone who thinks the IOC truly gives two shits about the concerns of the athletes is fooling themselves. Why would you be surprised by how all of this came about? Athletes come and go, they have short careers and simply pass through history, whereas this nonsense concept of the “Olympic ideal” has been around since the ancient Greeks.

Ultimately, the reason why you should be concerned about the IOC’s handling of a state-supported doping case is not because state-supported dopers have an unfair competitive advantage, but it’s because taking those sorts of drugs can kill people! This is why the message put forth by the IOC in regards to the ‘OAR’ is so troublesome – oh, hey, you just go on ahead and keep on doping over there, and win some medals and such, and if some kid drops dead in one of your training centers pumped full of this junk, well hey, at least they’re out of the public eye when it happens. And that sort of catastrophic event, unfortunately, is what it takes to get someone’s attention. It didn’t occur to anyone that maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t be designing luge tracks where sliders can go 90 mph until a Georgian crashed off the course at Whistler and 2010 and was killed – but by that point, of course, it’s too late to do anything about it. So a few gals on snowboards got blown around in the wind the other day. Well, you know, no one died, so ultimately it wasn’t so bad, now was it? On with the show! The show must go on!

The Olympics are, first and foremost, a television program. We’d all like to think it’s an athletic competition above all, but it’s not. It’s a TV program. Networks rule the roost, come hell or high water, and the sports have to fit the proper programming windows around the world, which is why you have figure skaters doing routines at 9:30 in the morning and why biathletes are shooting in the dark. Athletes are entertainers, first and foremost, and what history has shown, time and again, is that behind every entertainer is some shyster or scofflaw who benefits far more from the entertainer’s labor than they themselves do.

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The Suns with an interesting variation on moving without the ball

One of my Christmas presents from The Official Spouse of In Play Lose is a pair of tickets to see the Sea Dubs – the Santa Cruz Warriors, the D-League G-League affiliate of the Golden State Warriors. It’ll be a good excuse to get out of town for the weekend and head down to the Monterey Peninsula, and the Sea Dubs are good fun and provide good bang for their buck. And the Sea Dubs’ opponents in this game we’ll be attending in March are the Northern Arizona Suns who, at the moment, quite possibly have more NBA-caliber players on their roster than their parent club in Phoenix. But don’t just take my word for it:

“I’m going to be the first to say it. They’ve got to send the whole Phoenix team to the G League for that. I’m sorry. Except Devin Booker and T.J. Warren. The rest of them have got to go to the G League.”
– Denver Nuggets guard Will Barton

The Phoenix Suns have reached a new level of ineptitude, a depth at which they are no longer simply incompetent but are, in fact, contemptible. Watching the Phoenix Suns will make you hate the game of basketball. A week ago, in the first game of the ESPN doubleheader, Cleveland and Minnesota played one of more exhilarating games we’ve seen in the NBA all season, with the Cavs winning 130:128 in OT on a buzzer-beater by LeBron in a game where the two teams combined to sink 40 3-pointers, which is an NBA record – and whatever good vibes you may have had from seeing the game played at a spectacular level were almost immediately erased in the nightcap, as the Suns proceeded to score all of 9 points in the 1st Quarter, allow the Kawhi-less Spurs to score 41 points in the 2nd Quarter, and trail by as many as 53 before ultimately losing by 48 … at home, no less. Only a last-second alley oop dunk by the Suns prevented them from joining this dubious list of teams who got beat by 50, and it was the worst home loss in franchise history, besting (worsting?) their 47-point loss to Portland in this year’s season opener. It was a hideous and hateful performance by the Suns against San Antonio, one that almost seemed designed to kill your love of the game.

Throw in this past Monday’s 129:83 drubbing here in the Bay Area by the Warriors, and the Suns have now become the first team in 49 years to lose three games by 46 points or more in one season – a laughable result, as the Warriors thought so little of the Suns that Steve Kerr and his coaching staff essentially took the day off, letting the players run the huddles during the timeouts as well as the morning shootaround and film session. And it wasn’t like the Warriors were racing up and down, trying to run up the score. If anything, they went easy on the Suns. The pace wasn’t terribly fast, and the Warriors as much as treated the game like preseason, working on their sets and progressions. Hell, they could’ve won by 60 if they’d wanted to, since the Suns could scarcely string two passes together, routinely had their pockets picked for easy steals, missed open shots, missed contested shots, took bad shots, took even more bad shots and missed all of those as well, messed up their defensive rotations, and played with all the verve of the residents of a morgue. Some people chimed in afterwards and said that the Warriors essentially autopiloting this game was a sign of disrespect to their opponent. Hell yes, it was a sign of disrespect, but the Phoenix Suns disrespect the game of basketball pretty much every time they step on the floor.

The Suns were missing guard Devin Booker in both of these recent 40-point shellackings. Booker is a 24-point a game scorer who is out injured at the moment, and the Suns having 18 wins is a testament to just how good Booker is, since Booker has to basically do everything on his own on the offensive end, seeing as how he has no one competent enough to pass him the ball, nor competent enough to turn his passes into assists. The Suns have the worst defense in the NBA, the second-worst offense, the worst point differential, and the most losses. If anything, their record of 18-40 is an overperformance on their part. To their credit, they get to the foul line more than almost every team in the league, but they also foul more, and thus give up more free throws, than almost every team in the league, which means their games are not only displays of complete incompetence, but are also maddeningly ponderous with all the stops and starts.

The Suns roster is an amalgamation of bad ideas and failed philosophies. They’ve wasted three Top-10 picks on big guys who can’t play, valuing raw upside potential while having no apparatus in place to help those guys actually develop into sound NBA players. Someone asked me after this past draft which of the top prospects I thought would be a bust and I immediately said Suns forward Josh Jackson, who put up a -43 while shooting 4-18 against the Dubs on Monday. I said this not because I think he sucks, but because the Suns are bound to mismanage and misuse him. Their two best players, Booker and T.J. Warren, were taken more towards the middle of the 1st Round in the draft, when the light when on and it suddenly occurred to someone in the Phoenix front office that you should take the best player available. What? Draft a guy that can play? What a concept!

I hate this team. I absolutely hate this team. Whenever I watch this team play, I’m amazed that anyone involved with its construction and operation still has a job. In fact, GM Ryan McDonough actually got a contract extension, though it’s not quite clear what he’s done to deserve it other than have the good fortune of having Booker fall into his lap in the draft. The Suns fired coach Earl Watson three games into the season – two of which were 40-point losses – but interim appointee Jay Triano has done little to distinguish himself apart from drawing up one groovy inbounds play which took advantage of a loophole in the rules no one ever thought of. (There is no goaltending on an inbounds pass because it’s a pass and not a shot.) The Robert Sarver reign of error in Phoenix is reaching pre-Joe Lacob Warriors era levels of despair, having taken over what was a franchise known throughout its history for playing high-level, exciting, sometimes revolutionary basketball and driven it straight into the ground.

NBA Tankamania is about to take off after the All-Star break, a full-on race to the bottom with eight teams having 18-19 wins and 37-40 losses among them – and the Knicks seem hell-bent on making it a 9-team race, having given up on the season after the Porzingis injury. I’d put the Suns as favorites to reach the bottom and I wouldn’t even call it tanking, because the Suns are so bad that the operation’s best efforts wouldn’t look much different than its worst. People in the baseball world have gone back and attempted to portray the Houston Astros as having tanked, forgetting that they were truly that bad to begin with, a 110-loss team which also possessed the worst farm system in baseball and had literally become unwatchable, putting up 0.0 ratings on their local TV broadcasts. Much like those Astros, the Suns don’t have to make any special efforts this year to go about being the worst franchise in the NBA. They’re already there.

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It can be construed as a sign of growth and development in the game of soccer that the U.S. Soccer Federation’s presidential election drew the interest that it did. A lot of people cared about the result. Soccer’s growth in this country is unquestioned. It’s been shown in surveys to have reached the level of being the 4th-most popular sport in the country for a reason. More people are playing the game, and more are watching the game, than ever before – and, given the catastrophic collapse of USA FC last fall, more people are also angrier than ever before. Sports are ultimately a results-oriented business, and it was that disastrous result which finally caused the extremely insular USSF to reach a day of reckoning about what it’s doing.

So there was high palace intigue at the USSF’s meetings in Orlando last weekend, and the final results left quite a few people unsatisfied, and with good reason. After all, if an organization is serious about reform, and then elects the sitting VP to the top position, the optics wind up looking pretty bad. In the end, Carlos Cordeiro proved to have some pretty savvy political chops, having dared to announce his candidacy for the position before outgoing president Sunil Gulati had decided whether or not he was going to seek reelection, which rankled many of soccer’s top brass but also earned him some cred with those within the organization who wanted change. This allowed him to build enough of a base to defeat the establishment’s preferred candidate, Cathy Carter, and then pivot to the rank-and-file and urge them not to go for one of the anti-establishment candidates, most of whom were former players and none of whom possess any proven business sense. It was well played by Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs exec who admits he doesn’t understand as much about soccer as he would like.

What Cordeiro will actually do remains to be seen. He said all of the right things and made all of the right promises – most importantly that he intends to be more inclusive and consensus-building when it comes to decision making. Cordeiro says he intends to hire a GM for both the men’s and women’s programs, which is a start, but he comes off as something of a technocrat whose solution to most problems is going to be to form a committee. This approach makes me nervous, given that committees tend to set out to design horses and wind up designing camels, but given the previous approach, in which an autocrat sees fit to do something as dumb as name Jürgen Klinsmann the technical director, I suppose we can hardly do worse. And as I said before, the USSF has been an overly insular organization, one in which assorted entities have entrenched themselves – and sometimes also enriched themselves – and one of the problems with an insular organization is getting those sorts of people to give up what they have for the greater good. Far too many decisions wind up being made for the benefit of far too few. Cordeiro has stated one of the prime objectives is solidifying the joint U.S./Canada/Mexico bit for the 2026 World Cup – which I’m all in favor of, because given how truly terrible we’ve been as a nation when it comes to developing talent, the automatic bid which comes with being host may be the only way that we can qualify.

That was a joke. Sort of.

The fact of the matter is that the talent development wing of U.S. soccer is broken. It’s too expensive for kids to play, it’s too expensive and time-consuming for adults who want to coach. The entire apparatus is exclusionary in nature, far often becoming a question of one’s ability to pay rather than one’s ability to play. That all needs to change. And this doesn’t just speak to our presently inept men’s national team, either. On the women’s side, one of the great effects of Title IX was that it gifted U.S. soccer an enormous talent advantage over the rest of the world, but as big European clubs continue to see a value in investing resources in the women’s game – which they are starting to do, and will continue to do – that edge is going to get smaller and smaller.

But it’s hard to get the sorts of entrenched self-interests in an organization such as the U.S. Soccer Federation to see the forest through the trees. Everyone involved in this election had skin in the game and potential conflicts were everywhere. What’s clear is that final kingmakers in this election were the Athletes Council, who held more than 20% of the vote and who made sure to vote in a block, thus giving themselves the power to swing the election. What’s not clear is whether or not they acted out of greater interest or out of self-interest. Given the propensity for everyone in the game to squabble over salaries and bonuses and whatnot, the former cannot necessarily be assumed. That’s not to be accusatory, either. I’m just inherently skeptical of the entire process.

The big loser in all of this was MLS, who has been painted as one of the bad guys and an impediment to reform. There’s some good reason for this, of course – it’s an entity which still hasn’t figured out its place in the footballing world, and seems far too self-important for its own good. But the frustration with MLS is also misguided, in that the goal of the league is, first and foremost, to be a good league. That MLS and it’s marketing wing, SUM, have wound up heavily funding and financing the USSF can run counter to that goal. Sure, MLS wants to have good American players coming through the pipeline, but first and foremost, they need a product on the field, and they’re going to use guys from anywhere on the globe they can find in order to make that possible, nationality be damned, which is as it should be. This sort of thing is not new, mind you – people in England bitch all the time about there not being enough English players in the EPL – and the point is that you cannot look to MLS to be a vanguard for the American game as a whole. It should reflect the American game, but not define it.

I don’t know where any of this is going, but as I’ve said previously, I don’t care that the federation is now profitable. Not having money was a legit excuse for not putting out a good product in the 1980s, but here we are missing World Cups in 2018, and that excuse no longer holds. One of the themes we touch on repeatedly here at In Play Lose is that the people who create the problems are very rarely the ones capable of finding the solutions. My hope is that U.S. Soccer will remain mindful of the need for serious reforms and reach outside of itself in search of new ideas. But in the past, everyone involved in U.S. Soccer thought they were doing good things instead of actually going about doing them. It’s hard to reach out when you’re too busy patting yourself on the back.

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me atinplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.

Fool’s Gold

“I had a mile of ice to think about what just happened, and now I have four more years to wait.”

This quote came from American skeleton rider John Daly, who was in line for a medal until his final run, when this rather basic error happened at the start and his medal chances were shot. I was looking for a quote which would best sum up the Winter Olympics from the perspective of IN PLAY LOSE. There is your winner right there.

That was a shocking mistake in a sledding sliding (apparently they are to be called sliders and not sledders) sport – all three of which, while being interesting for the speed and the sheer insanity of the competitors, are usually surprisingly absent of drama. When the Canadian women rallied in the 4th run of the bobsled to win, it was something that had not happened in at least a decade. The Canadians kept getting in the way of American success in the Olympics this year, either by being better than them or occasionally through being worse:

Darn you Canadians! We are supposed to be friends!

The best way to think of the Winter Olympics is to start with Sayre’s Law, and extrapolate from there. Sayre’s Law states, in essence, that so much is made by so few over so little. There may be little to fight over, but what there is worth fighting over wildly increases in magnitude. In the case of every single sport that’s been played out in Sochi over the past couple of weeks, the Winter Olympic Games are the only event that matters. Seriously, no one cares if you win your 4th consecutive World Luge Championship in Igls, Austria, or prevail in a World Cup speed skating event in Almaty, Kazakhstan. No one cares. And everyone in the competition knows that, of course. The Olympics is what athletes dream of winning and what they prepare for, and the result comes to define their career.

And for those of us on the sidelines, looking at the Winter Olympics in total and seeing bombast and largesse, it’s easy to forget that. Most Winter Olympians toil in obscurity and do it primarily because they love what they do so much. The Olympics offer a stage they never get otherwise. And this giant spectacle is composed of a great many small sports. Very small sports, in the grand scheme of things. The Sochi Olympics saw several 6- and 7-time Olympians in their 40s winning medals. Their dedication is quite impressive and commendable, but the fact is that 40-somethings winning medals in their 7th Olympics does speak, to some extent, to a lack of a deep talent pool. The sports are generally desperate for growth in all areas: competitors, spectators, opportunities, facilities and finances.

When so much gets made of so little, the one event that can legitimately be labeled as SO MUCH will often bring out the worst in people. Part of why acts of class and sportsmanship such as this and this are heralded whey they occur in the Olympics is that they do not happen nearly as often as they should. You usually see a lot of bad behaviour associated with the Olympics. Sochi was surprisingly absent of antics, however. There were only a handful of doping cases, most of which were minor infractions and one of which, involving Swedish hockey player Nicklas Backstrom, seemed a bit strange and definitely came at a particularly bad time. I also heard a lot less whining than is the norm. This was a fairly well-behaved Olympics, which is something of a disappointment. There was, however, some juicy snippets of infighting and the periodic bursts of incompetence to keep things interesting, and the conditions were often unideal, leading to some additional challenges for the competitors. (The alpine skiing courses all looked brutally hard to begin with, and the icky snow made it worse, but it’s not like skiers are unused to wild and weird weather swings.) And mercifully, there were none of the sorts of large political distractions which seemed possible, and even likely, at times during the run-up to the Games. Putin et. al pulled it off, in the end. But at what cost? Well, we will get to that in a bit ...

The best way to sum up these Olympics from a North American point of view is that the Americans like going down hills in the snow and the Canadians like going across ice. As has been the case since the Winter Olympics started ‘modernizing,’ the North Americans were the big beneficiaries of all of the so-called ‘extreme’ sports – crazy stuff you do on skis and snowboards that is stunning to watch done well and terrifying to watch done badly. There was probably more whining in the snowboard events than in any others, which was very unbecoming of a supposedly mellow group that likes to hang out and shred and preach camaraderie. Yes, the halfpipe sucked, but it sucked for everyone equally, and conditions for the entire snow portion of the games were a little problematic. (This is what happens when you try to have winter sports in what’s basically a Mediterranean climate.) And there was a wee bit too much schadenfreude going on when Shaun White failed to medal. He has set himself up for that, of course, as he has always been entirely driven and focused upon winning this event, and also promoting himself in process – notions which supposedly clash with the ‘ethos’ of snowboarding. But as soon as you set up a pinnacle like the Olympics, guys and gals are going to be singly-minded to win it. It was inevitable a Shaun White would come to exist. And yeah, White made something of a dick move by pulling out of the slopestyle at the last minute – in taking a spot on the team in an event his competitors say he had no intention of doing, he had cost a spot on the Olympic team for another athlete – but the resentment of White seemed based upon jealousy more than anything else, since he makes $15m a year and everyone else is scrambling for table scraps. Bottom line is the guy has done more to make the sport relevant than any other person, but killing your idols has always been somewhat necessary, I suppose.

I still think the ‘extremists’ are out of their minds, but damn, some of the stuff they do is just phenomenal. The slopestyle event became a favourite of mine almost immediately, because the tricks and the twists and the flips were so jawdroppingly awesome to watch. At first, I thought it was weird that the slopestyle events had no actual criteria for judging – the judges simply awarded a score from 1-100 based upon the impression they got from the competitor’s run. But in hindsight, there is something refreshing about a sport whose judges just say, “we make stuff up.” At least they are honest about it. Judged sports have always bothered me in that the results are so easily manipulated. From a layman’s perspective, I watch the athletes and see the scores and it is impossible to understand why they are being given the scores they are given. It seems somewhat superfluous to have judges in ski jumping, since it pretty much follows form that if you fly the farthest, you get the most style points from the judges. (And by the way, who gets the ‘babes’ or the ‘dudes’ more than the ski jumpers? I mean, seriously here, THESE PEOPLE ARE FLYING! I saw people doing this in person while I lived in Steamboat Springs, where they have a so-called ‘normal’ hill, as opposed to a ‘complete lunatic’ hill. It is AMAZING.)

And it wouldn’t be an Olympics without a figure skating judging controversy, of course. I don’t know that much about the sport, but most of the people I know who do know something about the sport seemed to think the Russians were getting a few too many breaks from the judges. Far too many American sports media members that I read sort of missed the point in making arguments that it is natural for the home team to get the breaks. For one, this is not some home-and-home in the NBA. It’s not like there is another Olympics next week in which the breaks and the calls will even out. Since the event happens so infrequently, you can understand why athletes feel more cheated than the norm. And secondly, as I mentioned in my previous Olympic blog, cheating in the Olympics involved a lot of bureaucractic maneuvering over the years, nations getting judges and officials and administrators in positions to affect outcomes, which they would then do at the expense of home nations. Eastern Bloc judges were going with their guy whether the games were in Moscow or Munich or Montréal, Sapporo or Squaw Valley or Sarajevo. (And vice versa, I should add, but the Western judges were often simply outnumbered, having failed to play this particular political game well.) I have heard the term SWR bandied about to explain some curious figure skating results in Sochi. That term didn’t come from nowhere. (I’ll let you figure out what it means.) I think it is too simplistic to look at a judging panel, see their nationalities and assume who is ‘voting’ for whom – people were quick to assume judges from Estonia and Slovakia were tabbing Russians, and I feel pretty comfortable in saying Russians aren’t on the Best Dressed lists in either of those two countries. But we’ve been conditioned, after watching years of bogus results in the sport, to immediately go looking for conspiracies. The French sport daily L'Equipe made some news by breaking a story early on that the Americans and Russians had some sort of secret deal in place to help each other’s nations at the judging podium at the expense of those darn Canadians, a notion that seems ludicrous given the long history of mistrust and animosity between the two nations in the Olympic arena (nevermind in far larger and more important arenas). If anything, it was most likely a planted story intended to try to knock some skaters off their games, a curious sort of tact playing upon the worst that the sport has to offer.

But in the case of figure skating, the politics are both the best and the worst the sport has to offer. We expect it to be corrupt and sleazy and shambolic by now. The drama is one of the most compelling acts within the sport. The ISU has attempted, since the judging scandal of Salt Lake City in 2002, to change the judging system by doing such things as making the judges votes a secret. How a sport supposedly becomes more transparent by becoming more opaque is beyond me, but this is the same governing body that allowed the wife of the Russian skating federation president to be a judge during the Sochi Olympics. (No, there is no potential for conflict of interest there or anything. None whatsoever.) They’ve attempted to create a scoring system in figure skating much like that in an equally politically motivated sport, gymnastics, which is based upon start values and rewarding skaters for elements. The problem with this is that the benefits of attempting a trick far outweigh the penalties for not doing it very well. Diving has degree of difficulty as a multiplier, but you still have to do the dive right. 0 x 3.2 is a whole lot of zero. Instead, figure skating has start values – basically, one routine is worth more than another before it even begins. It just seems weird to me that the field is not all beginning at the same starting line. (The only sport I know of where you start with a handicap is polo, but at least there the better team starts with the deficit and has to play catch up.) It seems to me that if you are going to try and do something on the ice, no matter the value, you had damn well better do it right. But in figure skating, it’s almost as if you’re getting points for falling down.

It certainly seemed that way watching the men skate, which produced more carnage than short track speed skating. Guys were falling down everywhere. Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan fell twice during his long programme, and this is the guy that won the event. And I have no doubt that what he was doing was damn near impossibly hard for 99.999999% of humanity, but guys winning gold medals in the Olympics shouldn’t be falling on their asses twice. That cheapens the sport, which is intended, in part, to be a presentation of both skill and grace. (The failure of Patrick Chan to capitalize on his Japanese rival making so many errors produced the greatest tweet of the Olympics from Canadian figure skater Joannie Rochette. For our English speaking audience: “He had the gold on a silver platter. He took the platter.”) The judging system creates a fundamental disconnect – no one knows what they are watching, so no one really knows who is actually winning. Hell, the athletes do not even understand the system. The sport would probably be better served with a scoring system that was genuinely transparent and made some sense, but I am not sure the governing body of the sport wants it that way, to be honest. Without all the controversy, there wouldn’t be nearly as much interest. Trust me, they’re well aware of that fact.

[EDIT: speaking of figure skating, a watchful reader has pointed me to a jewel of an online rant posted by American skater Jeremy Abbott in the wake of his Sochi performance, which was notable for his terrible, and somewhat frightening, fall in the short programme, which is something he has done before in big competitions. He does not much care for the ‘choker’ label he has been saddled with:

“I just want to put my middle finger in the air and say a big ‘F-you’ to everyone who has ever said that to me because they’ve never stood in my shoes and they’ve never had to do what I’ve had to do. Nobody has to stand center ice in front of a million people and put an entire career on the line for eight minutes of their life when they’ve been doing it for 20-some years. And if you think that that’s not hard, then you’re a damn idiot.”

Well, it is true that I have never stood in his shoes (or skates, for that matter). I have never had to face that pressure. I think what he attempted to do is incredibly hard. And I also think that quite a few of the other competitors put in the same time and efforts, faced the same pressures, and DID NOT wind up faceplanting repeatedly on the biggest stage. But I appreciate the defiance. If you are going to go down, you might as well do it swinging.]

I cannot say that I thought the Russians were getting that many breaks from the judges (some others sure thought so, and in more than one instance), but Russia experienced the usual home bounce on their way to capturing a total of 33 medals. The Russians had a terrible go of it in Vancouver in 2010, but they were certain to rebound. Along with some natural home field advantages came a few built-in ones – the Russian sledders sliders, for example, all trained on the course extensively, whereas their opponents were not nearly as familiar with it, and familiarity makes a big difference when flying at 85 mph down a sheet of ice that is trying to kill you. The Russians also used one of the time-tested methods of finding top talent so as to improve their national performance at the Olympics, one which dates all the way back to the city-state days in Ancient Greece: they went out and bought it. Among the 13 gold medals awarded in Sochi and accompanied by the Russian national anthem were three won by a Korean speed skater and two more in Alpine snowboarding won by Vic Wild, who hails from White Salmon, Washington.

In the case of Wild, it was a coming together of interesting circumstances. He married a Russian, and even though he was near the top of his game, it was a game no one at the U.S. Ski Federation cared about any more, as they eliminated his program – which, in hindsight, looks kind of dumb, now doesn’t it? (And this aptly-titled article does well to express what it’s like when you lose your aegis.) The lack of greater outside financing structures, combined with the hierarchical structure of the Olympics – basically one giant collection of sports federations – makes it such that the federations essentially control the purse strings, which means they have all the power to make or break the career of an athlete. And being this good at anything does not come cheaply. Wild really had no other choice if he wanted to continue to hone his craft than to seek another nation, and the Russians were more than happy to oblige. Wild will reportedly earn $250,000 from the Russian government for each of his gold medals, a windfall impossible to achieve in the sport in any other way. Choosing to pursue success in one of these sports is rarely rewarding, and often maddeningly disappointing. It is part of what makes the event so appealing to me, being someone who truly appreciates the efforts of the athletes and someone who also sympathizes with the failures (and the crushing consequences of failure.)

As for the Korean speed skater I mentioned above, Victor Ahn – formerly known as Ahn Hyun-Soo – he won three gold medals in Turin in 2006, got hurt, missed the 2010 games, got into a spat with the Korean Skating Union, was told he was no longer in their national team plans, and went out and actively offered his services to another country, including the U.S. (Ahn was also a part of this melee in Salt Lake City, which is probably the signature moment in the history of short track speed skating and also the greatest tortoise-and-hare moment in all of sports. Apparently Aussies have made gold medalist Steven Bradbury part of the language as a result of that, which is definitely a badge of honour.) Come 2014, Ahn turns up wearing Russian colours, as does a promising Ukrainian skater as well, and suddenly the nation becomes a short track speed skating power – although some of Ahn’s competitors at the European Championships in Dresden were not too happy to see him there:

The LOSE sees nothing wrong with this sort of recruitment, by the way, believing that sport mirrors life and that, in life, all people should have the freedom to move wherever they wish for whatever reason they wish. To the people in Korea, Ahn turning into a speed skating mercenary was more a condemnation of the Korean skating federation than it was of him. It just seemed a little odd that Ahn actually signed a contract to be a Russian, complete with an apartment in Moscow and a coaching job when he retires. Sort of a strange deal, but we live in strange times.

As for the angry Dutchman in the photo above, Sjinkie Knegt, he also medaled in Sochi in short track, and that is about the last angry picture of a Dutchman on skates you are going to see for years, because the Dutch dominated the ice the way the Dream Team opens a can of whoopass on Angola. The Dutch won 23 of the 36 medals doled out in speed skating on the long oval. It was a surprise but it probably shouldn’t be, given the rabid interest in the sport in the Netherlands (which is backed up by an infrastructure to match no other). The real surprise may be that full-fledged Dutch dominance of speed skating hadn’t happened sooner. The supposedly second-best team of speed skaters on the planet, meanwhile, were another story entirely. In fact, the U.S. speed skaters pretty much showed everything that is wrong about the Winter Olympics over the course of two weeks. So, of course, this was far more interesting to me than anything else going on in Sochi.

The U.S. won zero medals in a sport where it has won more than any other in Olympic history. Not only did they win zero medals, but they were never even close. The defending Olympic champions and World Record holders composing the American team all looked like they were skating through wet cement. What the hell was going on? And with the bad results, of course, comes a pipeline of sludge spewing forth and spilling everywhere, most of which centered on the racing suits they wore, which is a vital piece of equipment in the sport.

The Americans showed up in Sochi wearing shiny new suits from Under Armour, the American federation’s major corporate backer. Under Armour set forth with Lockheed in 2011 to create the sickest, slickest racing suit in history, which they presented to the American skating team six weeks before the Olympics, claiming they were state-of-the-art threads. The problem being, of course, that they had not tested the suits in any sort of competition, and this report from the Associated Press pretty much shows where everyone’s head was. It would appear that secrecy was far more important than anything else, fearing that some other nation (read: the Dutch) would get their hands on this secret technology and exploit it for themselves.

Read this graf from that AP story again:

For the men’s 1,000 on Wednesday, one U.S. skater — Haley wouldn’t say who — skated in a slightly different version of the new suit, essentially for testing purposes. There was no significant improvement in the time. Davis finished eighth, ending his bid to become the first male speedskater to win the same event three straight times.

Wait a minute. Why are you testing the suit at the Olympics? Don’t you think you should’ve done this, like, at one of those World Cup races the Americans kicked ass in all year, or maybe at some domestic dog-and-pony show of a competition you just throw together in Salt Lake City or Milwaukee ostensibly to give the suits a go? If Under Armour is going to put this much time and money into developing a suit, they could certainly put up a little more scratch for such an enterprise. You can test all you want on a mannequin in a wind tunnel, but mannequins don’t skate. Humans do! And humans have to like the feel and performance and respond positively. Why was this such a difficult concept to grasp? This sort of hubris seems akin to a Hollywood production company that thinks all along they are making a great film, instead of actually going about making one.

Indeed, some of the design ideas Under Armour came up with were apparently thought of, tried, and deemed to be bad ideas by Dutch designers in the past. The other athletes were baffled that the Americans would show up with new outfits that had no proven ability to help the skaters. And while blaming the racing suits may seem like a ready-made excuse for failure, there is probably something to it if an entire team of world-class skaters suddenly, collectively seems to forget how to skate.

U.S. head coach Ryan Shimabukuro then offered up this gem of a defense when asked about the racing suit controversy: “I’m not going to criticize them (Under Armour), even if I was allowed to. They’re a great partner. And it’d be stupid to criticize a company that has backed us completely.” Aah, so let me if I have this straight: the company who signs your paycheques apparently has carte blanche to fuck everything up for your skaters in the most importance races of their lives. OK, got it. When guys like this have your back, the worst is behind you.

Seriously, if you are an American speed skater, how do you not feel like you got sold out here? This is the biggest event of your life, and you are done in, in part, by a bunch of empty suits of the pinstripe variety who clearly didn’t have your best interests at heart? (Apparently, some of the skaters do feel that way.) The team quickly shifted to different racing suits, but by that point the distractions were immense and morale was non-existent. Good luck trying to compete at that point. And then came some finger pointing about training regimens – why is a team prepping on a rock-hard outdoor surface in the Italian Alps for a competition indoors at sea level, where the ice will be soft? – and other administrative bickering, and the whole thing was revealed to be a big clusterfuck.

Now, you can understand the need to partner up with big corporate dollars. Speed skating in the U.S. is a minor sport. The American success at it over the history of the Olympics has been somewhat remarkable, in fact, given that the sport has almost entirely been a rugged and determined individualistic pursuit with little financial support or windfall. (Especially considering the spawn of state sports systems American athletes found themselves facing for decades.) But clearly, some people at US Speedskating need to get their priorities straight. Then again, they promptly reupped with Under Armour, so one wonders if they really get it. Under Armour is now promising to underwrite US Speedskating for another 8 years, which is about how long it is likely to take to undo all the damage from this debacle. It is unfortunate, since it is a sport which has never been appreciated in this country to the extent it should. The rewards have not been in keeping with the results. It is a powerful and beautiful sport to see done well, even if the actual competitions seem a bit dull to me, as they are going 2-by-2 and just racing the clock instead of each other. Perhaps my Dutch relatives can explain to me the appeal from the live spectator standpoint. I assume there is beer involved. Actually, given that the Dutch are famous for throwing the best parties at the Olympics, I am certain there is beer involved, and probably a lot of vodka this year as well, since this was going on in Russia.

And nothing drove the Russians to drink more than their hockey team. The Russians had a big Olympics, but since they lost in hockey, they probably do not care very much. That really was the only medal that country, as a whole, cared about. But I looked at that roster full of a few too many KHLers and wondered what was going on. The shootout loss to the U.S. in the prelims was a great game and a memorable one, but my thought when I watched it was, “you know what? The U.S. is better than they are. They should win this game. They have better players and they play together better as a team. There is no way that Russian team is winning a gold.”

And the U.S., of course, wound up on the bitter end of defeats to those damn Canadians on both the men’s and women’s sides. The women’s gold medal game was excruciating, frustrating, fluky and somewhat incomprehensible. Blowing a 2-goal lead in the last 3½ minutes seems like it should be classified as a choke, but it did not really look or feel like a choke. And it did not surprise me too much that the U.S. men phoned it in during the bronze medal game after their 1-0 loss to the Canadians in the semis. For all intents and purposes, that semifinal with Canada was their gold medal game. After losing it, the players found no collective value in coming in third. And I can certainly understand that. I have played in consolation games at tournaments before. They suck. You lost the game that really mattered. You do not care. Nobody cares. Whomever cares the least in the consolation game winds up losing. Winning a medal of any sort mattered a lot more to the Finns than it did to the Americans, which I think is actually in keeping with the nature of the tournament. For the North American players, participating in the Olympics is a big deal, but it is an even bigger deal to the Europeans.

The NHL periodically threatens to pull its players out of the Winter Olympics, but the players always block it in the CBA. NHL owners do not like the Olympics, basically, because they do not make any money off of it. Whatever other reasons they offer up are bullshit:

• Other leagues don’t take two weeks off in the middle of season.
Well, actually, pretty much every soccer league other than the EPL does that in the dead of winter, and it has no ill effect. It’s not like they cancel the games – they just get shuffled around a bit.
• There’s the greater risk of injury.
Well, there is always the risk of injury every time you step on the ice, but the risk is no different whether you are playing at the Olympics in Sochi or playing some pre-season slugfest in Saskatoon. (Honestly, injury is probably more likely in the latter.) Furthermore, having two weeks off during the season likely does wonders for healing injuries to the rank and file players who aren’t playing in the Olympics.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. The Olympics should be free P.R. for the NHL, because any Olympic game involving two of the élite national teams in the sport showcases the game being played at the highest level, but the NHL screws it up, of course. The NHL has always had this curious bent to it, this strange notion that the needs of the marginal outweigh the needs of the skilled. The league ultimately doesn’t like the fact that so many new Olympic-made hockey fans then tune in for some mid-season drudgery between Columbus and Phoenix and are disappointed by the sorry product they see. The league wants to trot out some World Cup of Hockey concept again, so we can watch a guys who aren’t in game shape skating around in September. I hope the players continue to push back on this, because the Olympics really do matter to them. 1980 ultimately taught everyone who plays the game of hockey, on both sides of the Atlantic, just how magical and important the game can be. So long as memories of 1980 in Lake Placid and 2010 in Vancouver are still in players’ psyches, I suspect the NHL will be sending reps to Winter Olympics. I hope so, anyway. It would be a shame if that were discontinued. What would all of my Canadian friends fixate upon and obsess over at that point?

I kid, but I must also give props. The LOSE is a friend to all Canadians – I speak excellent Canadian, I have been to Tim Hortons more than once, I love poutine, and I have engaged in a uniquely British Columbia form of self-torture for 30+ years by permitting the Vancouver Canucks to get my hopes up. I must now give it up to my many good friends living in this continent’s cool upstairs apartment for their national team’s two victories in hockey in Sochi. Well done. But I have to say though, I cannot for the life of me understand their national fascination with curling. They say it is ‘chess on ice.’ I say it is shuffleboard on ice, and my interest in shuffleboard will only ever materialize if I am on board a cruise to the Caribbean. But being a dutiful correspondent, I made it a point to watch a little of every sport offered in the Winter Olympics. I tried to watch curling with an open mind and was completely baffled at what I was watching, as baffled as I have ever been watching any sport. Apparently this is bad if you are the yellow team:

 
The Americans were the yellows and they gave up a 7 here, which is really bad. I asked my assorted Canadian correspondents about this and they said it was the result of extremely bad curling. We apparently suck at curling in this country. I must be honest here, I am not that concerned about our lack of curling prowess.

Americans won 28 medals in Sochi, down from 37 in Vancouver, which really wasn’t that bad. It’s just that some of the name athletes people knew of – the Shaun Whites and the Shani Davises and the whole concept of the U.S. women’s figure skater – didn’t manage to win. Those names and/or concepts are somewhat familiar to people who watched four years earlier. We collectively do not know anything about skeletons and bobsleds and slopestyle skiers. The American media coverage necessarily gravitates towards that which is familiar, but every athlete reaches a point where they are past their prime. Given the spots in their respective careers, skiers Bode Miller and Julia Mancuso achieved quite a bit in winning medals, but the alpine ski team was perceived as somehow struggling early on, simply because the medals won in Sochi did not match the colours of medals won in Olympics past. The real stars of contemporary American skiing, Ted Ligety and Mikaela Shiffrin, sort of got pushed to the back burner, even though they both completely dominated their events. In the case of the 18-year-old Shiffrin, she will almost certainly be the #1 American Olympic poster child four years from now, but considering she came out and said her goal was to win five gold medals in Pyeongchang, she is not exactly shying away from the limelight.

And anyone who thinks American media is overly jingoistic and American-centric should get out of the bubble and watch some feeds from other nations. It is just as jingoistic and nationalistic, and sometimes even moreso. And people who complain about nationalistic coverage of the event miss the point. The connection a viewer has to an athlete from the same nation is far more likely to be based on being from the same place than it is from sharing interest or ability in the same sport. If we were all truly interested in biathlon as an event, we would have better biathletes in this country. Amazingly, we are not any good at that sport, given that two components of the sport – snow and guns – are things we have in abundance. Whenever you miss a shot in biathlon, you have to go over to a penalty course and essentially ski a lap of shame. It seems like you could liven up the event by having a gallery that boos and heckles the competitors when this occurs ... but then again, the competitors have guns are are not in a good mood at that point, so maybe that is not a good ideal after all ...

The LOSE was impressed with the Sochi games, in the end. The organizers somehow pulled it off. It does not change the fact, however, that I am staggered by the costs. $51,000,000,000 for all of that, a large amount of it almost certain ended up being poured down ratholes of corruption and inefficiency. Now, I can see some of the bigger picture issues at play here, some of which get lost from time to time. Putin wanted to present a showcase for the reimagined Russia, make the case that it is back as a global player. Putin also wanted to take this opportunity to transform Sochi into a major resort destination. And a good way to raise your mid-sized city profile is through sport. This has been shown to be successful in places like Indianapolis. Sochi already has a Formula 1 race planned for 2014, and the Olympic Stadium will be used during the 2018 World Cup, as well as serve as the sort of year-round football grounds and training facility the Russian national team has always desperately needed. All of those sorts of efforts will prove to be useful in the long run. Sochi does seem primed to reap some longer-term benefits.

That being said ... $51,000,000,000 for all of that? That figure is absolutely staggering. And while a good number of those sports facilities will be salvagable and serviceable from hereon, not all of them will be much use. (Speed skating ovals are particularly large white elephants – the buildings are cavernous, and the participants have very little long-term use for a facility such as the Sochi oval for training, as it is a low-altitude venue where the ice can easily turn into a slurpee.) And gussying up the city for a couple of weeks doesn’t make all of the other problems go away, of course. The Olympics are often rather naïvely viewed by activists as an opportunity to bring awareness to their particular issues and/or grievances, but once the Olympic flame is extinguished, the world turns it’s collective interests elsewhere. All which became familiar to us for a couple weeks disappears again into the woodworks.

And for a great number of the athletes, of course, a great deal of soul-searching goes on when the games are over. Is it worth it to carry on? Is it worth it to still be broke, to be perpetually injured, to be constantly at the whims of dumb politicos, to be spending too much time looking for funding and not enough time working on their game? One of the more interesting phenomena I noticed throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s was the number of leftover East German athletes who were still participating in the Olympics for a unified German team long after the country which had produced them had ceased to exist. A lot of them seemed to be continuing on (and doing so quite successfully) in part because they had no idea what else they would do. Sport was what they knew. They were, in a sense, bred to do it. I certainly admire their dedication, as I have never been dedicated enough to accomplish anything, but it also seemed to be tinged with an unintended hint of pathos. Winning the gold medal may be the crowning achievement, but what is ultimately the true value of spending a lifetime pursuing a sport and never achieving it, that dream having turned out to be made of fool’s gold? I suspect it is a stunningly empty feeling, one which would take quite a long time – maybe even a lifetime – to overcome.

I am not really sure, and it is easy not even to think about that kind of thing once the spectacle is over and the games go away and the bulk of the athletes disappear again into obscurity. But every time the Olympics come around, I am certainly going to watch. It is the most compelling, exciting, crushing, and occasionally tragic theatre piece we have ever invented on this planet. It’s irritating that a group as smug and selfish as the IOC knows this, of course, but for all the excess and the swindling and politics and bad behaviour and cronyism in the run-up to the games, those who participate in the games continue to save the IOC from themselves, and make the event impossible to ignore.

Gold, Silver and Lose

The Olympics are here.

Be still my foolish heart.

It goes without saying that sports’ greatest spectacle is rife with failure. But the Olympics go far beyond just winning and losing. With both their sheer stature and their structure, the Olympics present The LOSE with a veritable gold mine of storylines, as a fair amount of the worst aspects of human nature surface during the course of such single-minded pursuit of winning. Cheating, whining, swindling, politicking, corruption – the Olympics has it all. It simply gets no better (or worse, depending on your point of view).

Now, the over-the-air broadcasts will do their best to gloss over all of the seedy stuff, portraying the Olympics as a bastion of all the best that humanity has to offer – talent, sacrifice, dedication, tenacity, desire, commitment to excellence. All of which is true. The #1 reason that you should watch the Winter Olympics for the next couple of weeks – indeed, it’s pretty much the only reason – is that the athletes are incredible. Just incredible. They will do things which most of us can’t even imagine, much less attempt to do. They will showcase small facets of human potential nearly perfected, elevated to levels seemingly unfathomable only a few years ago. And that’s pretty awesome. Anyone doing something that well is worth my attention, even if I think the particular sport is stupid. I’m likely to think the sport is stupid no matter what, but I can certainly appreciate the toil and the effort required to reach the highest level.

And this is the Winter Olympics we’re talking about, of course, which means that not only are the Olympians incredible, but they’re all completely crazy. Everything in the Winter Olympics hurts. It’s all subject to harsh conditions which seem unnatural – most of us can barely walk on ice and snow – yet here are people strapping skis and blades to their feet, or climbing into various sledding contraptions, and they’re throwing themselves down hillsides or whooshing across a frozen plane. Failure in the Winter Olympics can hurt really badly, and no matter what happens, you wind up feeling cold. And if there is a sport in the Winter Olympics that seems sissy – let’s take the classical form of speed skating, for example, where two people race the clock and just make a series of left turns – the organizers just come up with a new variation specifically for crazy people – which is how you wind up with short track, which is speed skating mixed with demolition derby. (The LOSE appreciates speed skating, by the way, but the deviant in me always wonders what would happen if you surprised all the competitors and made them race in the opposite direction. They’d probably all fall down.)

This year, the Winter Olympics are taking place in a country synonymous with winter: Russia, where the winters are among the harshest of anywhere on the planet. The winter conditions in parts of that enormous nation boggle the mind. However, this isn’t exactly what comes to mind when you think of either a) a Russian winter, or b) a winter sports paradise:

Welcome to Sochi, which is a summer resort on the Black Sea.

In order to host a Winter Games, the Russian government has basically had to manufacture a ski industry in the nearby mountains, along with creating all of the infrastructure to link ski and sea together. The cost of this endeavour, all told, is estimated to be somewhere around $51,000,000,000. That is a lot of zeroes.

It could be argued that choosing such a location is a case of the Winter Olympics being a victim of its own success. (The cynic might say a victim of its own largesse. I’ll leave that for you to decide.) For years, the Winter Olympics was held in quaint little mountain hamlets like St. Moritz and Chamonix and Lake Placid, and was a cute little sideshow, a teaser for the grand summer spectacle that was the Summer Olympics which would happen later in the leap year.

But the International Olympic Committee made a decision to split off the Winter Games beginning in 1994, allowing them to become a show all to themselves. Since then, the games have grown really big, really fast, and all you have to do is look at a map to figure out where the problem lies. There just aren’t enough cities big enough in mountain locales to host this sort of event. The IOC now has to be creative when it comes to awarding the Winter Olympics, as the event is far too big for the mountain ski resorts of the world: Cortina d’Ampezzo and Garmisch have given away to Turin and Vancouver. Vancouver at least made some sense, given that the mountains basically run through the city (there are ski areas within the city limits of the suburbs) and the winter sports mecca of Whistler is an hour up the northerly road, but I’ve been caught in enough downpours in February in Vancouver to know that it ain’t exactly a winter wonderland. The choice of a summer resort on the Black Sea as the site of a winter sports festival requires the suspending of all disbelief, but the IOC has always been good in selling faerie tales, not to mention believing their own myths. (The 2018 games are centered on Pyeongchang, which is a cool looking area in the mountains of South Korea, but all of the ice events will take place down the hill in the coastal city of Gangneung. A cursory glance at the list of hopeful bidders for the 2022 Winter Olympics shows a few more creative acts of geography.)

The ways in which the Winter Games have grown are certainly ways that I approve of: adding more opportunities for women participants, which I am certainly in favour of, and also the further adding of legitimate forms of winter sports expression like snowboarding and freestyle skiing. But there’s a curious by-product of this move, which the IOC was well aware of in both of those cases: the United States now does well. Really well. (Some of the events were lifted right out of an American invention, the X Games, whose effect on the Olympics shouldn’t be discounted.) Consider that in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, U.S. athletes won a grand total of six medals. And 14 years later, at the new-look, younger, hipper Salt Lake City Games, U.S. athletes won 34. Some of that was due to home-field advantage, of course, as the home side usually excels, and some of it due to an emphasis on the Salt Lake City games by the USOC. But the IOC knew very well that to keep their winter event relevant, they needed the U.S. to be successful at it, because U.S. success translates into U.S. interest, which means good U.S. television ratings, which means continued flow of revenue through U.S. broadcast rights fees.

And there isn’t a greater example of biting the hand that feeds you than the IOC’s relationship with the United States, as it is wholly dependent upon American television revenue to continue their operations, and yet the IOC is one of the most decidedly anti-American bodies on the planet, possessing all the disdain for their primary clientele that the head of a cartel has for the flock of addicts keeping his smuggling operation afloat. We tune in regardless, simply because we love the competition. It’s theatre of the highest order. The drama of the event and the emotions it creates – both in victory and in defeat – is far greater than any drama we can script for a cinema or a stage. It is better than fiction.

And, on occasion, stranger than fiction.

The impact of that particular comedy of errors from 1994 on the Winter Olympics cannot be understated. Consider that 1994 was the first time the Winter Olympics were standing on their own. The U.S. sucks in the Winter Olympics. There isn’t even the same old enemies for Americans to hate, as the Berlin Wall has fallen and the Cold War is over. (And we’ll cover that point in a minute.) What’s interesting for an American in this event taking place in a snowy Norwegian village? Well, not much really … until figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, who is gorgeous and graceful and excels at one of the few winter events Americans actually do well at, gets whacked across the leg with a club and all signs point to the perpetrators being members of the entourage of one of her closest rivals, Tonya Harding. Well, hell, the Winter Olympics just became Must See TV with that single swing of a club! The ratings on CBS for the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer promptly went through the roof, adding an ever greater sense of legitimacy to the whole event. And without that scandal, I would argue that the Winter Olympics wouldn’t be a fraction of the size that they are today. That scandal was the greatest gift the IOC could have ever hoped for. (There was even a nod to the old school, business-as-usual ways of the Olympics at the end of that Kerrigan-Harding bit, with Kerrigan settling for a silver in Lillehammer and losing out to Ukrainian/former Soviet Union skater Oksana Baiul through what appeared to be an act of bloc judging. It doesn’t really matter who I thought did/didn’t deserve to win. The whole point of bloc judging is that it doesn’t matter who deserves it. That was nicely done by the IOC, keeping it real like that while giving a tip of the cap to the past. But I'm getting political far too early in this blog, and this parenthetical is getting far too long, but I will also point out that I've actually been to the actual restaurant where the evil Nancy Kerrigan whacking plan was hatched, which is my only personal connection to this post.)

The IOC HQ in Lausanne is the most wretched hive of scum and villany this side of Mos Eisley. It's always been a haven for the best-dressed and most well-connected autocrats, scoundrels and scofflaws that the world has to offer up, all supposedly under the auspice of promoting (and zealously protecting) the Utopian Olympic ideals set forth by IOC founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Most of those ideas were myths, of course – the notion that Greek city-states all suspended wars for the purposes of sport is not true at all, and the notion of amateur athleticism (since mercifully disbanded) is that of an élite creating a realm and idle plaything all for itself, since the rich would have time for such leisurely activities while the working class were busting their asses in factories during the Industrial Revolution. And being a member of the IOC has always been a curiously good way to line one’s own pockets. The IOC somehow managed to spin its way out of further scrutiny in the wake of the Salt Lake City bribery scandal, when a large part of the argument put forth by those implicated in Utah was, in essence, that they were bribing IOC members because that was business as usual. It was what was necessary to land the games, and everybody else was doing it as well.

The new IOC president, Thomas Bach, recently made himself look stupid in calling out Barack Obama and a few other Western leaders who have shown their disliking of Russia’s anti-gay laws. He didn’t name names, of course, but everyone knows who he’s talking about. Bashing the U.S. has always been a popular pastime at the IOC, none of which should ever be taken with more than a grain of salt. My personal favourite IOC sniping at America for years came from the desk of Dick Pound, whose name I shall not joke of and who was head of the IOC spinoff World Anti-Doping Agency. He always loved taking the U.S. to task for lax policies when it comes to testing athletes for performance enhancing drugs. I will take the IOC seriously on that front after it goes back and retroactively strips EVERY SINGLE MEDAL that was ever won by an East German athlete. They’ve stripped medals before, after all (Marion Jones immediately comes to mind), and it’s not like there isn’t proof. There are entire warehouses full of documentation of a state-supported doping programme in East Germany. But making a principled statement of that sort would require far more courage than anyone at the IOC can ever muster.

The Olympic movement has always been particularly good at propping up dubious state-sponsored sport systems – and, indeed, one of the ways that state systems ultimately thrived (and continue to thrive) involves making enough alliances and getting enough people placed in influential positions so as to influence IOC policy and administration of the Games. It isn’t just enough to train/abuse/dope up athletes so that they will win medals on the field, because there is too much left up to chance once you take to the field of play – a place where everything is, in fact, complicated by the presence of the opponent. The state sports system is inherently an offshoot of the Ministry of Propaganda. Anything short of winning is unacceptable, since winning advances the aims of the state. It’s therefore important to also field a handful of corrupt officials and referees, and attempt to manipulate the games behind the scenes. There has been no better example of this than the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, the awarding of which was tantamount to handing the inmates the keys to the asylum. That event was already a mess, with the U.S.-led boycott on account of the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan earlier that year, but then you had blatant acts of upfront, out-in-the-open cheating such as this going on such as this, which makes a complete mockery of the whole idea that games have a purpose as a competition. (And, of course, one of the athletes most affected by that, Australian triple jumper Ian Campbell, went to Washington State, proving that not only can Cougars find ways to lose, but sometimes ways to lose can be found for them.) The event was clearly intended to be little more than a showpiece for the state sports system, a chance for the Soviet organizers to pat themselves on the back in front of a world audience – albeit one much smaller than originally intended. (Here is a fascinating piece on those 1980 games from George Plimpton.)

Now, The LOSE is not naïve. Athletes cheat in the West as well and always have, albeit on a personal need-to-cheat basis. Part of why anti-doping efforts are much harder in the West is that efforts at breaking the rules are usually undertaken by individuals rather than groups, and are much easier to hide in smaller numbers. But unlike in the West, where athletes make the choice to break the rules, those in places like East Germany didn’t necessarily have that choice to make. Here is a PBS documentary on East German doping. That it’s an episode of the show Secrets of the Dead tells you that it wasn’t all fun and games.

But I never have bought into that whole narrative put forth which surrounded the Olympics while I was growing up, which was our aw-shucks, gosh-and-golly American kids were venturing into hostile arenas armed only with their guile and wits while facing those colourless, soulless drones from behind the Eastern Bloc. That I didn’t buy it is saying something, in fact, since that is what everyone involved in the whole construct of the Olympics was selling for decades. Part of why the IOC has adopted a decidedly anti-American stance in recent years is that the movement, for it to be successful, needs enemies and villains and guys that wear the black hat. This flies in the face of the supposed anti-political stance of the Olympic movement, but the fact is that the entire concept of the Olympics only caught on because of the corresponding political back stories. No one cared that all much about the Olympics before 1936, when the Olympics in Berlin became a centerpiece of Nazi propaganda. (Watch this film sometime if you have the chance, as it is a truly remarkable piece of cinema years ahead of its time, political message be damned.) Once the Soviet Union and assorted Warsaw Pact entries began entering, the Olympics became yet another battleground in the Cold War. Every victory over the other guy was a triumph of ideology and way of life. If the Olympics was really not about politics, the athletes would not march in under flags and listen to national anthems on the awards podia. OF COURSE IT IS POLITICAL, and it always has been. The greatest threat to the Olympic movement, in fact, was a potential loss of interest after the Berlin Wall fell. Trying to figure out who was who in 1992 was ridiculous. (The Unified Team? What the hell is that?) Someone has to be the enemy, so it may as well be the baddest dudes on the block – which is the U.S., who wins all the time.

Athletes train and play to win. It is the only objective, in the end. For most of those who participate in the Olympics, the Games are the biggest competition in the world. They are, in reality, the only event that matters, for no other contests in their discipline – even World Championships – carry the same prestige and exposure. The set-up of the Olympics has always dictated not only winning, but doing so at all costs. And this is more true than ever now that the Cold War has fallen and the Olympics have become a 100%, full-on capitalistic venture. Pretty much everyone in the Winter Olympics makes nothing for their efforts and toil in obscurity for four years between games, save for some of the skiiers, the figure skaters and the NHL hockey players (who seem to embrace the Olympic spirit far more than just about anyone else, interestingly enough). Success at the Olympics can lead to fame and fortune otherwise unattainable – which simply intensifies the need to win, and which makes failure all the more of a bitter pill.

Sounds good to me.

Let the losing begin, and let all of the assorted responses to losing begin as well. Let there be controversy, protests, counter protests and everything else. It will happen. There will be whining and bickering and complaining, there will be allegations of foul play and bribery and graft, there will be people booing and protesting at the injustice of it all. It is all great stuff, wondrous stuff. The greater the stakes, the more personal the defeat, and the greater the indignation when it happens.
  
But again, it is all fun and games until something happens like what took place in Munich in 1972. That was a terrible Olympic games to begin with, what with the travesty of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. basketball final, the first appearances of doped out East German athletes who would come to dominate sports like women’s swimming, and a few other acts of lousy sportsmanship along the way, but the murder of athletes by terrorists showed the larger nature of the Olympics. The event does not take place in a buble. It is not just a sporting event and idle diversion for a couple of weeks. Sport is never free of politics. Nothing in this world is free of politics. A gathering such as the Olympics is the ideal place for those people who wish to call attention to their causes through violent means. We have learned the hard way in this country that nothing is safe and nothing sacred. Going into Sochi, there is legitimate worry that some sort of nutjob or another from the various insurgencies and counterinsurgencies running rampant through the areas of the old Soviet Union will decide to turn the Olympics into their own macabre theatre piece. From a distance, a security situation like that faced by F.C. Anzhi Makhcachkala seems bizarre and almost comic: “Due to armed conflict in Dagestan, the club's players live and train in a village near Moscow, at a training base previously used by Saturn Moscow. The club fly in for home matches which have a heavy security presence.” But it really isn’t a laughing matter at all. That such concerns exist at all should really trouble all of us.

And given all of the conditions at play, the awarding of these Olympics to Sochi seemed like a curious idea from the beginning, if an downright bad one. Then again, given how large and how costly the Winter Olympics have become to operate, it is something of a wonder anyone would bid to host the games at all. Vladimir Putin has viewed the Winter Olympics (and also the World Cup in 2018) as an international stamp of legitimacy for his government and what the ‘new Russia’ has/can/will accomplish. The cost of the games – $51,000,000,000 – is absolutely staggering, a sum larger than all previous Winter Olympics combined. The process has been rife with cost overruns and allegations of corruption, and early reports would seem to indicate that Sochi is still not quite ready on the eve of the event, there are security concerns of every sort, and the result of all of this is a collective sense of “why in the hell are we doing this?”

My hope is that Sochi pull this off, and that the Winter Olympics is memorable for the competition. I wonder, however, if this event actually leads to a gradual drawing down of the Winter Games, an event which seemed at one time like a wonderful little vacation like a ski getaway to the alps, but has become one very long, very strange, and very expensive trip.

So let us hope for everyone’s sake that is ALL I am writing about over the next couple of weeks is failure on the ice and snow. I declare open the Lose of the XXII Winter Olympic Games. Let the games begin!

And it would not be the Winter Olympics, of course, without the Norwegian curling team and their fabulous pants:

I gotta get me a pair of those.