Dee-fense!

It's missing in the Winter Olympics. But the Games have their moments, including a star-crossed pair of endearingly frumpy Canadians.

By King Kaufman

Feb 12, 2002 | As long as we're going to be watching together for most of the next two weeks, I feel I should tell you that my view of the Winter Olympics can be summed up thusly:

Hockey, and a bunch of Sports That Suck.

Now before you go away mad, let me say that I'm usually more or less won over every four years as the Games go along. Like most people, I'm able to overlook the ham-fisted jingoism and treacly sentimentality of the television coverage and, when the network in charge is good enough to lay down the violins for a few seconds and show us some action, as NBC and its hench-networks seem to be willing to do this time around, I find myself appreciating the real drama that's transpiring on the slopes and rinks and courses, admiring the incredible athleticism on display, reveling in the pure, uncomplicated joy of victory as it's experienced by people who every four years get younger. They're getting young enough now to be my children, although, fortunately for them, none of them are.

Why just Monday there was American figure skater Kyoko Ina's exultant reaction to her own performance with John Zimmerman in the pairs free skate; German luger Georg Hackl, the greatest athlete his sport has ever seen, winner of a silver and then three golds in the last four Olympics, applauding and then peeking around a corner to give a thumbs up to Armin Zoeggeler, the Italian who'd just beaten him out of a record fourth straight win; gold medalist Ole Einar Bjoerndalen of Norway and silver medalist Frank Luck of Germany collapsing at the finish line of the incredibly grueling 20-kilometer biathlon, literally drooling in exhaustion; the three American snowboarder dudes who swept the halfpipe competition, all baggy pants and goofy grins, accepting their medals.

But we still have problems, the Winter Olympics and I. When it comes right down to it, I don't like sports where: A) One competitor or game or match looks strikingly similar to all the others; or B) there's nobody trying to stop you from doing what you're trying to do.

The Winter Olympics are filled with sports like that. All of the racing sports, the skiing and bobsled and speed skating and luge, are exercises in déjà vu. One guy flying down a mountain on skis looks pretty much like another guy flying down a mountain on skis, and doing it in one minute, 39.13 seconds looks a heck of a lot like doing it in one minute, 41.25 seconds, which is a range that on Monday encompassed 20 skiers.

There are really only two possibilities when a skier charges out of the gate: The skier can fall or not fall. I find myself rooting for a fall on the "Anna Karenina" principle: All successful ski runs are alike, but every spectacular crash is spectacular in its own way.

This is not exactly pleasant.

Something I notice every four years is that most of these fly-down-the-mountain sports are decided in the first few feet out of the gate. Watch the split times on the TV screen as a skier or luger or bobsledder makes her way down the course. If she's, say, a tenth of a second off the pace at the first split, usually eight or nine seconds into the race, she's cooked. She'll fall farther and farther behind throughout the course. If she's in first place at the first split, she'll stay in first place, barring a spectacular crash. Again, I find myself, as a viewer, waiting out the will she crash or won't she question, which I don't find compelling. I don't want them to crash. They are real people. But then ...

I understand that most people get a lot of enjoyment out of the drama, the question of who's going to win, whether the current top time will stand up. I don't. I'm not a fan of racing of any kind because I just don't care, ever, who can go faster than who, unless A) that someone is an ambulance driver or a waiter and B) I am injured or hungry.

But my biggest problem is the lack of defense, which is to say the lack of direct competition. With the exception of hockey and, to a certain extent, curling, all of the sports in the Winter Olympics feature indirect competition. It's athlete vs. clock or athlete vs. competitor's score. The competitors take their turns, sequentially. They never face each other -- I mean literally, face each other, the way a hockey forward and defenseman do, or the way two boxers or wrestlers or even tennis players do.

That facing each other, that me trying to stop you and you trying to stop me, is what makes the great sports great.

Next Page: The X Games take over

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