Out there on the frontier, full of possibility

WINTER OLYMPICS 2010: The Games are changing, becoming more adventurous, more vibrant, more breathtaking. Tom Humphriesenjoyed the ride on his sofa

THE SPORTS Editor. Twinkly old codger. He wants to talk. Something good – I can tell by now. Not extra work. Not less money.

Something good. Pushing back the borders of human misery, that’s the sports editor.

“Listen,” he says, “the Winter Olympics.” And he pauses. Relishes the moment. I expect he is going to produce snow goggles and a husky from behind his back.

Ah. Knew it. I know him. He knows me. Of all the hypes and hoohahs to cover in the whole of Sports World, the Winter Olympics are the best, the coolest, the most fun. He’s got me out there for three or four days of double axels, halfpipes, skeleton and big-air moments. I know he has. Love this man. Love this job. I could be in the kiss-and-cry area right now, blubbing like a baby.

“Want you to write about them off the TV. Big piece. Saturday week.”

Lose pucker. Shed tear. Down piste to reality. It’s here, isn’t it, the Depression? George Lee is just Clark Kent after all. Pair of Marks and Sparks jockeys over his little leisure slacks doesn’t mean he can fly. Now the real suffering is beginning. The Winter Olympics off the tele? Will nobody shout stop?

Start on Monday night. Watch Mad Menon RTÉ first . The Winter Games are perfect television, but nothing is cooler than Don Draper in his suit and five o'clock shadow sucking a Lucky Strike.

The Monday shift is tricky. Haven’t adjusted myself timewise. Need a few practice runs down the slope. Early on the BBC causes me to lapse into a dreamy consciousness wherein I, as Don Draper, impossibly cool 1960s advertising executive, walk around the games with the impossibly brusque Claire Balding of the BBC, telling her how I intend to advertise each and every event.

In this respect the tragic death of Nodar Kumaritashvili, the young Georgian luger, served a grim purpose. It got everybody onto the same page. The Winter Olympics is an exotic tourism destination for most media, and, once there, journalists tend to head off randomly to different events which seduce them, wow them and which merit 500 words of explanation before even beginning a report.

Nobody knows what is important and what isn’t. It’s a big smorgasbord of novelty.

The death of a young athlete, though, reminds us there is a rawness to winter competition which is lacking in almost any other sport.

Part of the guilty joy behind watching luge (or Formula One) is our admiration for the bravery of the competitors. One of the elements which takes our breath away is the knowledge that something could go seriously wrong. The death of Nodar Kumaritashvili got everybody back onto the same page at the start of the Games.

The Winter Games function best when there is a big unifying factor. Harding and Kerrigan in Lillehammer. The Great Ice Skating scandal of 2002 and so on. And now a luger losing it all on a run – in Canada, of all places. It’s awful, but it unifies our interest.

Let the games begin.

The Winter Games are an exercise in what might have been if we Irish had proper winters instead of these worst of everything, not enough of anything seasons of misery we endure. There are no Winter Olympic events which are centred around drizzle or persistent showers or a half-inch of snow which lies on the streets for two weeks while we mutter about arctic conditions.

We lose out badly, I think. Why were snakes banished? Was there an option of proper weather instead? Just asking. Norway has no snake problem, does it?

There is an elemental spirit to the Winter Olympics, a connection of people and environment and human playfulness which is missing in most other big-time sports. You can still invent a good winter sport and hope to get it on the programme, watching as people invent techniques and moves to become breathtakingly good at it.

We, of course, have wind and rain instead of snow. We have grey skies and that depression which comes from living inside tupperware.

What would it be like if, instead of joking about withdrawing from the luge till the course is gritted, we all gathered in our saloon bars and talked beerily about some green-clad roll of Irish sausage sliding down the course on her credit card? If we felt a genuine connection and passion to this rather than a sense of novelty? We’d be different people. Hardier, merrier, less of the sleeveen about us.

Because that energy is what keeps the Winter Games different. So many sports still on the frontier with their newness and sense of possibility. So many born of the antic sense of play which humans have. The Games change your view of big-time sports.

And in the meantime the Games are changing.

Example? Was the figure skating "appointment television" like it used to be? Nope. The American comedian Lewis Black contends that the gayest word in the English language is "equestrian" and that the whole of Annie Proulx's seminal story could have been told in a couple of words if Brokeback Mountainhad just been called Two Equestrian Guys.

Perhaps he is right, but the campest words in English are surely Figure Skating. The golden era of figure skating coincided with its most camp years. Torville and Dean through to Michelle Kwan. Back in Salt Lake City in 2002, the sport hit a major speed bump with a great big juicy judging scandal when two Canadians with very charismatic teeth made the crowd love them very much, but two surly Russians with better moves made the judges love them more.

There was uproar, a sacrificial goat, a sharing of the medal, and the sport has never really recovered and as a consequence it is losing a few sequins worth of its camp value every time we see it. By the next Winter Olympics we would expect Mickey Rourke and a Baldwin brother to be competing. Not right. Maybe necessary.

In fact, the figure skating, once the bejewelled tiara at the centre of the Winter Games, has been a drudge all week, the sort of thing you have to take stimulating drinks to stay up to watch. Then you end up resenting it. After the Salt Lake City business the skate dons made the voting anonymous and the voting system incomprehensible to those of us who watch as regularly as once every four years. We needed the dumbed-down version with the Ice Panel from Dancing on Ice.

Now nobody is trying to woo us or charm us or make us laugh. Now they are trying to efficiently stitch together as many moves as are possible to clock up the points with the judges. Which is fine, but the bigger scoring moves don’t get attempted that much because the cost of splatting onto your face while attempting one is too big. So they skate by percentages and are consulted by actuaries and statisticians. People hardly ever get overwrought.

You have to be careful what you wish for. We used to enjoy that miracle of television by which they split the screen so we could see the judges, their nationalities and the scandalous scores which they gave, while also watching the reactions these scores produced down in the kiss-and-cry area.

The judging was too subjective and the artistry too interpretive for figure skating to be taken seriously as a sport, but it was a grand entertainment. Now the ratings are through the floor and nobody knows what matters. The Russian, Plushenko, is out there doing the quadruple jumps without which he believes figure skating is not even a sport, but his rival, Evan Lysacek, who compared to the old days of camp looks as if he walked out of, well, a logging camp, is staying on his feet and getting almost as many marks.

On Thursday Lysacek got the gold. We were taken aback. The judges lost their nerve slightly and gave the medal for charisma rather than the technical excellence they had said they were looking for. On the sofa we dropped our Ferrero Rocher in surprise.

Nobody cared really. Figure skating won’t be on the programme for many more Olympics. There was a time when it got the sort of rating that mystified all other sports. That’s a time long ago. Celebs figure skate for fun now and outside there’s kids with long hair and attitude flying hundreds of feet in the air, lithe women hurtling down mountains on skeleton boards, dudes with deals shooting up out of halfpipes to perform moves like the Spiral Double McTwist 1260. They are rock ’n’ roll. And the skaters are Liberace without the fun or irony. Sad.

The Winter Olympics are in a complete state of flux. The innocence of the event is right at the tipping point where it meets money and prestige. The Games are about fun and comradeship and showing off and showboating. But once you codify these things and give out medals, something changes.

All week, competitors have muttered about the secrecy which the Chinese have been bringing to the events that they have chosen to compete in. The Chinese don’t turn up with bleached air, dishing out high fives through the windows of bummed out Volkswagen beetles. Neither do the guys and gals who attract the big sponsorships and the TV crews. So every four years you sense that the stakes have been ratcheted up.

Out of Japan this week came the snowboarder Kazuhiro Kokubo, a kid whose renegade antics alarmed the nation he left behind. You know the sort. Surly. Badly dressed. Disrespectful. Like a Premier League soccer player except it still goes down badly in Japan. Only the kid flunked it and cut his face and his poor parents apologised profusely for his behaviour. You sensed, though, that if he had pulled it off, brought home a gold, he would have had an impact on Japanese youth culture not seen since Godzilla.

Even the Canadians have been at it. Being mean and unsporting about the number of times they let competing nations use their slopes and their runs because they wanted to “own the podium” in Vancouver. So much for the old joke about the only difference between Americans and Canadians being that Canadians thought there was a difference.

The Americans have been having quite the week of it of course. Most of the new winter sports have an X Games feel to them naturally and tap into a vein of American youthfulness which is amusing in its assumption that it is different and cutting-edge but which sits really comfortably within our prejudices and stereotypes. It’s like Sheryl Crowe winning gold continuously.

On Wednesday, for instance, we watched as Lindsey Vonn, from Vail, Colorado, went downhill faster than Willie O’Dea’s career and wrapped up the alpine skiing. Later we were indoors for the delightful chaos of the speed skating (surely we should be targeting this sport. Ice and some traffic cones. Brilliant.) and Chicago’s Shani Davis won the second gold of the day for the Yanks.

And then up to the halfpipe. Snowboarding in the early hours. Enter Shaun White. Really, you don’t want to like Shaun White. Too much hair. Too much tooth. Too much youth. Too much of everything. But he blows you away because he has too much guts.

One of his rivals for this gold, a kid called Kevin Pearce, is missing from Vancouver. On New Year’s Eve he was landing a cab double cork (don’t ask) and went headfirst into the wall of the pipe at Park City, Utah. Result: traumatic brain injury. This week, according to media reports, as the Olympics unfolds, the kid is beginning to learn how to perform daily activities without assistance.

So you factor in that danger and watch Shaun White through your prejudices on Wednesday night. He has one run so filled with tricks and danger that it takes your breath away. But that’s the insurance run, a conservative canter through the stuff he knows he can do. But nobody beats it and when it comes to his second and final run he has the choice of playing to the crowd with a few fireworks or of doing what he came to do.

And so he gives us the spiral Double McTwist 1260, aka the Tomahawk, a move which leaves him in the air for maybe longer that it takes to read this paragraph, a double-flip, three-and-a-half spin manoeuvre. It’s beyond dangerous. It’s madness. Breathtaking madness. And you look at the kid, a wispy 23-year-old, and realise that this is no showman, this is Chuck Yeager pushing the envelope and Tiger breaking the field and Ali roping the dope. It’s somebody who dreams differently to the rest of us.

And the tele shows it to us a million times from this angle and that, but you wish more than anything that you had been there to see it and fully sense the wonder of the moment, watching a kid hang it all, literally it all, on achieving a moment of perfection.

We found it hard to get our heads around the problems facing the Great Britain men’s curling team after that.

The Winter Olympics doesn’t really do the big geo politics showdowns anymore. No more epic ice hockey bust-ups. No more Scottish women curling their way into history. The Games are changing, becoming more adventurous, more vibrant, more breathtaking.

These are qualities towards which money and television flow. We scratch our heads often and wonder how long the Summer Games can hold out against the pervading cynicism about performance-enhancing drugs. The enemy of the Winter Games, a different side to human nature.

Shaun White stole the week. His bravery, his refusal to do the safe thing, was a wonderful television moment.

And if he slammed into a halfpipe and ended his extraordinary life? The money and the TV would be fleeing quicker than a posse of speed skaters.

That’s what made it such a fine week of television. The sense of all these sports out there on the frontier, yet to be fully sanitised and drained of the risk. A special time. Even on the sofa.