We are currently posted down Florida way. It's a very sunny day here in Miami, you know, mid-seventies kind of heat. Indeed, in Miami that hardly counts as news, which sort of limits the possibilities for small talk.

The point is that we should be where it is cold this week - at the Winter Olympics. Why aren't we there?

This column had the privilege of being in Lillehammer for the last festival of slipping and sliding. Despite being shacked up in a disused goat herd shelter situated so far north that the nearest neighbour was a kindly white-bearded man who kept reindeer and worked in a very seasonal business, it was undoubtedly the best trip this column has ever wangled out of the ever-credulous Irish Times. We slipped and fell on our fat backside a dozen times a day until we could no longer feel the bruises - but we were still drinking back then. On the main drag in Lillehammer, they swapped Olympic pins all day and all night. It was like a big clearinghouse for chat and goodwill. Salmon burgers in McDonalds, doing five minutes on Pat Kenny from a phone booth on top of a mountain, going home every night on the last bus with one hundred or so wildly drunk Norwegians and all having to get off the bus several times on the journey so it could safely negotiate a tricky passage of mountain.

Unfortunately Nagano, Japan, is twice as far and twice as expensive so, in common, I imagine, with most Irish publications, we won't be sending again.

Pity. It has been suggested to the sports editor by your brave and selfless columnist that if they could somehow contrive to have golf in the Winter Olympics, we would be sending two people and a photographer. He likes people to give him golf. Much like Clinton likes people to give him interns. To which the sports editor responded by exhaling his cigar smoke slowly and noting thoughtfully: "You know. You're never bloody happy".

He's from Finglas, of course, and has never really learned to appreciate the difficulties of the triple axel, especially when performed in combination with toe loops, salchows and the odd triple lutz. What can you do? Appeal to his low-brow interests?

"Suppose they start hitting each other on the knees with lead pipes again. Remember the whack that was heard around the world?" "If that happens, we'll think about it," he says slipping into his smarty pants, "but that generally happens in the run up to the Winter Olympics, not during it, and they don't announce the venue, so it's hard to get accredited."

"Doh" we said. Witheringly.

Part of the problem here is that all studies show that the Winter Olympics mean more to women than they do to men and, generally speaking, in newspaper sports departments we have yet to come to grips with what women like in sport.

The Winter Olympics have much to offer. The bobsleigh and the luge are extraordinary events. Skijumping is as good a day out as you can get in sport. Ice hockey is unparalleled for it's speed and drama. Then there is the figure skating. Tee hee.

In the States, three of the 20 most-watched TV sporting events of all time have been figure skating. When CBS lost the rights to NFL football a few years ago, it was to ice skating it turned as a replacement. Newspapers here have had to move beyond the old reliable fallback of making fun of figure skating and have had to start covering it seriously.

Indeed this column remembers making fun, in it's own shallow way, of the ice skaters in Lillehammer and subsequently receiving a small blizzard of chastising letters from skating fans. The problem was that by the time we got to the great showdown between Tonya and Nancy and the unbelievable drama of that night, we were locked into Tonya and Nancy and the whole ribald fun of it. Most of us came away admitting that the actual skating had been incredibly impressive. We'd still give an argument over judged sports and the balance between athleticism and aesthetics, which skating insists upon. We'd still have a chuckle about a sport wherein the participants proceed to what is called the "kiss and cry" area to receive their marks - but the skating was hugely impressive.

Up close, the sheer lack of forgiveness in the ice was frightening, as was the speed at which the skaters moved. Surya Bonaly would do a great athletic flip over the ice and we waited like worried parents for her skull to crash onto the floor. Take away the frills and the kissing and crying and this was a tough, lonely sport, not an arena for spoiled girls.

In Lillehammer, I remember speaking (well interrogating, as we all did) the small group of journalists who actually knew something about figure skating and being amazed at how unsurprised they were about the Tonya and Nancy incident. It's not ballet, they kept saying. It's tough and it's psychological. They told us to watch the skaters when they practised during the afternoons. They would intimidate each other by a variety of means. One would skate straight at another over and over again, defying her not to move out of the way. Others would make as if to trip each other up, hoping to force the other to deviate from line. Others again would perform movements they wouldn't dream of doing competitively just for the effect. Getting somebody spooked or psyched could be the difference later on.

The drama of skating is immense and incomparable to the drama of any other sport. Most sports are reactive, requiring improvised responses to situations. With skating you announce what you are going to do, the lights dim and you go out and do it. Every mistake you make is noted and punished. It must be a tough, hard world to grow up in.

Skating is unique in another way. It is the only sport I can think of in which women are the predominant sex, they are the big stars and they account for most of the administration. They are paid more for appearances and ice shows and TV work. What's more, they compete on the same terms, do the same jumps, twists, loops etc. Anyone remember who won the men's individual in Lillehammer?? Precisely.

If men were the big shots on ice, perhaps there might be a crew of us going to Nagano next week. As it is, women will turn on and tune in in huge numbers and we in the newspapers will miss out. We'll look at the frills and sequins and the artistic merit scores and we will chuckle and throw our white-fringed tan and cream golf shoes into the boot and clear off out for a few hours.

Dames eh???