Well, the Sports-We’re-No-Good-At Games have started. Were you just a little bit embarrassed when the Americans trotted out at the opening ceremonies with 250 snowboarders and engulfed the one little athlete from Trinidad and Tobago in an unprecedented selfie-absorbed display? The guy from Trinidad had a flip phone and more the one dude on Team USA thought he was a server and asked him to fetch a cocktail. Maybe I’m just easily embarrassed. I’m watching the Winter Olympics anyway for mostly the same reason all men watch the Winter Olympics – to see attractive Scandinavian women.
But it does seem like, even though we only win medals in a handful of events, the US is the big bully on the block, like we are the sun and all of the other Nordic countries are little Plutos revolving around us. There’s a certain ugly American aspect to it all. The US is always trying to rig the whole thing to its advantage. For the entire history of the Olympics, the country that takes home the most gold medals is considered to have won the Olympics, but in the Winter Games especially, where the US has a hard time out-golding the little countries on the tundra, the US started to promote total medal count as a more realistic way of saying we finished on top. Hey man, our nineteen bronze medals beat your eighteen golds.
An even more obvious ploy to make the Winter Games more friendly to Americans happened a few Olympics ago when the US made the international Olympics committee add about two dozen skateboard events (skateboard snowboard, same thing) – shit, we’ll never win the skiing-across-the-continent events, add some Olympic events with tricks so we can win!
It puzzles me why we suck at the activities we should be really good at. Why don’t we win the gun shooting thing? It’s because you can’t use a handgun, right? No, it’s because Americans have short attention spans. I saw a video clip they didn’t show on TV. An American was in the event where you ski carrying a rifle on your back. They ski around and then come to where you have to shoot at targets. The American pulls out the rifle, aims at the target and at the last minute thinks he sees a deer and starts firing off round after round into the trees behind the targets. That took care of that medal chance.
In another unseen video, a different American approaches the shooting range after skiing around and they have a bunch of rubber mats where the contestants stand to shoot and the American contestant approaches a guy already standing there and says, “Hey dude, you’re in my spot.” Turns out the skier is French and through subtitles, he says, “No I’m not, shove off.” And then the American takes his rifle off his back, points it at the Frenchy and says, “DUDE, YOU’RE IN MY SPOT!” Fuckin’ Americans, can’t stay on task, always angry.
Okay, go to the biggest hill you can find, ski straight down and then jump and see how long you can stay in the air!. Who does that? Stoners, right? Well, America has more stoners than any place else, so how come were not good at it?
Something that Americans are for sure good at is drinking games. Two guys are leaving a bar with suitcases, drunk as hell, in a place with a lot of snow, probably Canada. When one guy lifts his suitcase the handle rips off. He yells bloody hell and tosses the handle into the wind. The handle freezes to a giant rock. Thirty minutes later another drunk emerges from the bar, stumbles across the rock with the handle, picks it up, and hurls it down the road hoping it will hit the pedestrians in the crosswalk. He invents a sport called curling, the cornhole of Canada. Essentially a drinking game where you slide along the ice, try to hit the other guy’s rock, make up the rules as you go and head outside for a smoke when you have to change ends. Americans should be so good at this.
Pretty soon, the US will force the Winter Olympics to include only events Americans can win, no more of this biathlon and ski jumping and curling crap. And so we will have new activities and diversions that they will call sports but we all know they’re not because none of them have a ball. Most of these events will be started by the children of rich white people living in Aspen and they will all be derived from skateboarding and involve expensive equipment and jackets that have electronic heaters.
Every four years the people who think that snow is a weather condition, not a field of competition will be reminded that this world exists. And while the world assembles for peace and love on an ice sheet, the people that don’t have a trust fund, who don’t vacation in the Swiss Alps, who didn’t learn any gnarly stunts at the skatepark will be tuned in to something Americans are good at, like reality TV and basketball.