Every four years, like millions of others around the world, I thrill to the Winter Olympics. They have come around again: the opening ceremony takes place this Friday in Milan. There are six separate Olympic villages, and the closing ceremony will be in Verona on February 22nd.
I have never skied down even the smallest of slopes, and am unlikely to start now. There was a period of ad hoc sledding on a blue vintage sled during one snowy Yorkshire winter. There were a couple of attempts at ice-skating in the US and Canada, both times under the tutelage of two different Canadian citizens; a populace who learn to skate from babyhood. On those occasions, they each skated with speed and beauty as if winged, returning now and then to circle me in kind supervision.
That is the entire sum of my personal exposure to winter sports, unless you count the occasional unscheduled descent on a patch of black ice. However, it doesn’t mean I am uninterested in winter sports. I am one of those countless numbers who don’t participate personally, but who, every four years, delight in watching the world’s elite athletes display their talent.
What do I love? The unearthly flights of the ski jumpers as they glide like birds through the clear chill air. Camera technology is now so advanced it is possible to feel you are almost perched alongside those ski-jumpers, as they balance atop the ski jump awaiting descent; poised between stillness and unimaginable speed. I actually experience vertigo looking at these shots, while curled up on my sofa.
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I have no idea how you begin to practise this ski-jumping skill. All I know is how much I admire it and love watching it. In an era where so much of what we see on our screens is fake, or created by AI, to know you can trust your own eyes that the person on skis is doing this jump powered by their own unaided self, is to fully relinquish cynicism, and embrace a sensation of awe at what a human body can achieve.
For years, we only saw the Winter Olympics through the prism of various international broadcasters; only saw their necessarily limited perspective on the Games. Now, in the era of TikTok and social media, athletes themselves bring us inside their winter village accommodation; show us what’s on the menu in the dining halls; unpack the “hauls” of gear their country sponsors have designed for them; and give us some sense of their individual personalities.
I’ve watched some of these asides to the Games, marvelling at the smallness of the twin rooms the athletes are allocated. (Some will serve as actual student dormitories after the Olympics end.) I’ve watched potential Olympic-medal winners eat their dinners of pasta and meatballs and burrata and salad and focaccia. I’ve seen where they shower, and listened to their thoughts on bidets. I’ve marvelled at the amount of sponsored kit they will wear for the duration – the USA team alone have gear from Ralph Lauren, J Crew, Skims and Nike.
Have you heard of Ilia Malinin, one of the USA team members; a 21-year-old figure skater? Bar some unforeseen disaster, if you follow figure skating every four years, you’ll most likely be seeing this athlete on the podium multiple times. He is the Simone Biles of ice-skating; doing fantastical things within the sport that nobody else can do. Nicknamed (by himself, but who can object?) the “Quad God”, his most extraordinary ability is to perform a quadruple axel. That’s basically doing a four and a half turn in the air, which he not only does once, but several times per routine. He also adds backflips, just for fun.
It’s Malinin’s first time at the Olympics, because he wasn’t included in the team last time. Obviously, watching from my sofa, I have no idea how teams are chosen, or whether the coaches who made the decision to exclude him last time around are now permanently hiding behind their own sofas, but there you go. Malinin comes to the Olympics as the current world champion, Grand Prix final champion, and US national champion. That’s a lot of champion for his rivals to face up to.
The ice skating – the figure skating, pair skating, free skating, ice dancing – is always so beautiful to watch, and almost meditative. On occasion, if I am not having a great day, I have googled former Winter Olympic figure skating routines and watched them to transport me somewhere that seems both ethereal and unearthly. To watch these routines in real time is to witness the purest distillation of technique, skill, grace, athleticism and musicality in sport.
Another ice-skater I’ll be particularly looking out for is 24-year-old Maxim Naumov. His parents were former world champion pairs skaters, Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov. They were also his coaches. Both of them (and 65 other people) died in the 2024 plane crash in Washington DC, when their plane collided with an army helicopter. They, and half of the others aboard the plane, had been returning from the US figure skating national championships in Kansas. Their son had taken a different flight.
Maxim was recently named as a member of team USA, and is in Italy to compete. What he has been through in the last year is barely comprehensible. His courage and resilience is inspiring. There can’t be anyone watching him compete who won’t be urging him on. It’s less about the first three words of the official Olympic motto of “Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together”, and much more about the last. He has been supported by a community, and together, the watching world wishes the best for him.
Most of all, I love the fact that the Winter Olympics is shown in real time. There are so few events that unite international audiences in real time now, but sport remains one. The Super Bowl, the World Cup, the Summer Olympics. There’s the additional bonus for European viewers that these Italian Games are happening more or less on local time. As I sit on my sofa this weekend, watching what’s happening in Italy, I’m in possession of the dizzying knowledge that millions of others are also doing this, at the exact same time.
