I've got to admit it; I’m a Winter Olympics junkie. I seldom watch television, but for the last two weeks, I’ve been plunked down in front of our TV each evening. On the evenings when I had meetings, I recorded the coverage so I could watch it later, even though I knew the results by that time.
I like the Winter Olympics better than the Summer Olympics. Maybe it’s because we live in the Frozen Tundra, where the snow is as high as an elephant’s eye, and it “sometimes” looks like its climbing way up to the sky. Maybe we can change the name of that song from Oklahoma to Wisconsin. It might also be that I’m more familiar with those winter sports and have participated in several of them. Not at an Olympic level, needless to say.
I don’t know a Double Salchow from a Triple Toe Loop, but I’ve ski jumped, downhill skied, and raced cross-country. However, I’ve never tried those crazy aerial maneuvers and jumps. I’ve had some spectacular falls that may have rivaled a “forward 180 with a double-twisting, 360 backward, face-planting, belly-flopper,” but I wasn’t trying to do any tricks at the time. As anyone who’s skied knows, every once in a while, a snow snake will jump up and grab your ski.
We never ice skated when I was young, although we did play hockey… sort of. We’d clear the snow off the pond in the back forty to make our hockey rink. Our hockey sticks were made from tobacco laths. We’d cut a foot-long piece from a lath and nail it at an angle to another lath. I can’t remember what we used for a puck. We didn’t have skates so we just used our winter four-buckle boots and we were ready for action. Unfortunately boots are rather slippery and we took some nasty falls. It’s surprising we never got seriously hurt. I guess I bounced better when I was young.
Those tobacco laths were also used for ski poles. Needless to say they didn’t work real good because they didn’t have baskets like real ski poles, but they were better than nothing. Many times they got stuck in the snow and we kept going. Then we had to stop, and go back to get them. It’s surprising how many things a simple tobacco lath could be made into. You didn’t have to go out and spend a lot of money on fancy equipment.
I think everyone has gone sledding at one time or another. Now it’s an Olympic event called luge. Most of us would lie on our stomachs and go headfirst instead of on our backs as they do in luge. We also didn’t rocket down a hill at 90 miles an hour, although that would have been rather exciting. Almost as exciting as crashing into a tree or barbed wire fence, that most of our sledding places seemed to have an abundance of.
Perhaps another thing that draws us to the Winter Olympics is the high degree of danger involved in many of the sports. It’s like going to a stock car race. It gets pretty boring unless you have a few spectacular wrecks. It’s the old thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. How many times did we see that poor ski jumper fall and go bouncing off the scaffold on the Wide World of Sports?
I can also sympathize with skier Lindsey Vonn and her bruised shin. While downhill skiing one night, I hit a patch of ice and went flying into the trees alongside the ski run. I slammed into a tree hard enough to pop both skis off and ended up straddling the tree. The sight of me sitting there, in agony, hugging the tree, would have made a great cartoon. Once I determined I could still stand up and nothing appeared to be broken, I skied to the bottom of the hill. By the time I took my boot off, I had a knot on my shin the size of my fist. There’s no way I could have skied again for the next month. I don’t know how she did it. A bone bruise on the shin is very painful for downhill skiing.
Speaking of painful, if you’ve ever tried cross-country ski racing, you know what painful can be. I raced for 15 years and know how those skiers felt when they crossed the finish line and collapsed. I wish I was in half the shape I was when I raced. Those Olympic skiers have to be some of the most fit and conditioned athletes in any sport. They use both upper and lower body muscles and their heart and lungs need to be in super shape to go at the speeds they maintain for over two hours straight. I’m glad they finally showed some cross-country events. As a Norwegian-American I had to cheer for Petter Northug from Norway. After he won the 50 K race in a sprint to the finish, I was so fired up, I grabbed my skis and headed for the ski hill in Timber Coulee. Petter is safe, I’d never come close to him in a race, but I had fun.
Now the 2010 games are over and I’m in withdrawal. I guess I’ll get off the couch, head outside, and enjoy the snow before it all melts.
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