Ode to the Winter Olympics

I'm used to thinking and/or stating things that are profoundly uncool and that most people seem to disagree with ("The Monkees deserve more credit than most people give them" or "I look good in these relatively tight-fitting clothes" or "Uggs are some fuckin' butt-ugly shoes"), so here's another one:

I like the Winter Olympics.

I like being able to watch 10 minutes of programming and be completely caught up with everything that's happened in the past four years in any number of relatively obscure sports. Shani Davis vs. Chad Hedrick? I know the entire back story. I know that Bode Miller is a disappointment, and seems like kind of an idiot, that Sasha Cohen is a choker, and that figure skater Johnny Weir (whose name is almost always preceded with "flamboyant" in media coverage) and I are both originally from the same tiny town in rural hick country, PA ("There are a hundred ways to cover your redneck past," says North Carolinan Ben Folds). And I know that he occasionally gets in trouble for drawing bizarre parallels between recreational drugs and his costume or skating routine (another skater's program was "more like a vodka shot, let's-snort-coke kind of thing"). And that my sister is apparently really good friends with his cousin.

I like the Winter Olympics because two weeks every four years is exactly the right amount of time for me to pay attention to things like speed skating, bobsledding, and alpine skiing. I even like curling, for the same reasons everybody else does: it's a great sport for gawking, and whether or not "What the hell is going on here?" is verbalized or simply implied through a baffled stare, everybody is thinking it.

I like international ice hockey, and watching teams like Slovakia and Switzerland, little countries that could, hand it to just about everybody in the preliminary rounds, and I like watching Finland, because I want to be president of the Antero Niittymaaki fan club, and because Finns play the game right: physical and scrappy, but with great skills, and with 25 guys whose names all end with "nen" (Kapanen, Numminen, Jokinen, Pitkanen, Timonen, Lehtinen, Niemenen, and Peltonen, it's your time to shine!).

Now that they're over, I'm not going to miss the games, but it'll be nice in 2010 to turn my eyes to Vancouver and find out everything that's happened to Apolo Anton Ohno and Joey Cheek in the last four years.