Almost everyone I’ve talked with has been disappointed in this year’s Winter Olympics, from 24-hour-a-day sports fanatics to weekend-only sports dabblers to once-every-four-years Olympics devotees. I’ve found the games themselves as entrancing as ever, but I’m also as disappointed as everyone else. The competition, it appears, has been great. Yet I add the “it appears” because the presentation, on CBS, has been atrocious, a postmodern mishmash of athletes and events that has allowed only the suggestion of the Olympics’ essential drama.
Put the world’s greatest skiers or skaters or lugers in the same place, allow the world to watch, and one has the elements of great sports drama. Examine the differences in the athletes, in their techniques, and in how each adjusts to the pressure.
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The men’s figure skating was, in fact, one of the few events covered with any skill. Play-by-play commentator Verne Lundquist was his usual nonpresence, but expert commentator Scott Hamilton, the 1984 gold medalist, excelled. Hamilton was a little embarrassing in trying to mimic the exuberance of Dick Button, ABC’s figure-skating expert of Olympics past, but Hamilton–like Button– displayed an unerring sense for judging the skaters’ various and varying confidence levels, both before and during competition. Hamilton also put together a terrific explanation of the various skating jumps–how to distinguish a toe loop from an axel–using footage of himself and other U.S. skaters. In addition, when it came down to crunch time in the men’s event last Saturday night, the top five skaters went one after another, and CBS showed the entire program of each skater (holding it to the last hour of the prime-time coverage, of course). Figure skaters are skittish as colts, and under the pressure each of these skaters made noticeable mistakes–from an extra twist on a landing to outright falls–but that was the nature of the drama, just as it was four years ago when Debi Thomas fell and Katarina Witt won it all by being the most elegant and composed competitor. In this event, Canada’s Kurt Browning–a three-time world champion in search of his first Olympic medal– fell in his first program and skated a measly, mistake-filled second program. It was a choke on par with the ’69 Cubs, which made Wylie’s composure (he was the smoothest skater of the night) all the more impressive.
Still, I’ve watched. At the risk of betraying myself as a sexist, I’ll say I’ve enjoyed the women’s speed skating and skiing as much as any other event. Women’s basketball will never be big; women are too graceless on the court compared to men. On ice and on the slopes, however, there was something about their smooth movements and bottom-heavy forms that made them more graceful than the men, who rely so much on pure athleticism to prevail.
