Oh, Are the Winter Olympics Over?

Even though the U.S. men's hockey team (below) won the Olympic gold medal for the first time since 1980, and even though Team USA won eleven Winter Olympic Gold medals at these just-concluded Games in Milan and Cortina in Italy, including Alysa Liu's figure-skating gold medal, one cannot deny - and some folks are certainly trying to - that these Winter Games were a snooze fest.  The intimacy and the modesty of the Winter Games that existed when a bunch of college kids defeated the Soviet Union in ice hockey at Lake Placid 46 years ago has long since gone, and the Winter Olympics have just become one more Big Event in multimedia programming.  

I only watched these Winter Games sporadically, and even though there were many victories worth celebrating, I actually watched Jordan Stolz win a gold medal in the men's 500m speed skating event (or was it the 1000m?) and watched Elana Meyers Taylor win the gold medal in the women's single-person bobsled event and felt nothing.  No patriotic pride, no joy . . . nothing.  And that's a good thing, good for Stolz and Meyers Taylor and good for me, because they're the only ones who should feel anything about their victories.  I wasn't the one skating or sledding.  And it's hard to feel any sense of patriotism in an American victory at the Winter Olympics when the country the athletes represent is a 3.8-million-square-mile wasteland of measles epidemics and masked secret policemen shooting civilians, all run by a demented ex-real estate developer and a bunch of tech robber barons.

Figure skating is pretty much ruined, especially after ice dancers Madison Chock and Evan Bates won only the silver medal in their event because a biased French judge underscored their performances to help a pair representing France win the gold.  Any interest I had in seeing Amber Glenn skate was killed when I learned ahead of time that she would be skating to a Madonna song - and NBC aired the video message Madge sent to Glenn thanking her for choosing her song to skate to (typical of Madge to jump at every opportunity to promote her mere continued existence).  So of course I didn't watch it.  (Which song was it?  Come on, they're all awful, does it really matter?)  I didn't watch Alysa Liu either.  Besides, the skaters' choice of music was so lame, I pined for the days when figure skaters all performed to the music of dead Austrian and Russian classical composers.  The music they skate to today is almost enough to make me hate sound.

The U.S.-Canada gold-medal hockey game?  Ahh, I didn't watch that either.  But who cares?  The college kids who used to comprise the men's national ice hockey team have been replaced by crack professionals who play for the teams of the National Hockey League, which shut down so that their pros could compete in Milan.  Big deal. 

And if I was bored with whatever event NBC was showing, like freestyle skiing (since when did skiing become an art form?),  there was always its sister channle USA, which showed . . . curling.

Fiendish thingy. 

Given the overcommercialism of the Winter Olympics, the empty nationalism, and the increasing scandal and tawdriness surrounding the athletes themselves, I don't care if I sound like an aging white guy cursing the elements, because, well, I am a sixty-year-old male Caucasian.  And I have several reasons to curse the elements - I got over a foot of snow, I have no idea when the guy who's supposed to clear it will get here, and I'm in no condition to remove from my driveway entrance a snowbank longer and higher than the Dolomite Alps that Mikaela Shiffrin skied down to win the women's slalom at the just-concluded Winter Olympics (and I wanted to see that, but I missed it!).  But, I guess my fellow Americans should still celebrate U.S. victories at these Winter Games.

After all, by the time the 2030 Winter Olympics open in France, there probably won't be a United States, thanks to Trump.  But come 2030, Team New England and Team Cascadia should have a lot of potential gold-medal-caliber contenders.