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Excitement for Olympics is mounting for winter sports fan
(by Kara Krekeler - January 20, 2010)
My feet are beginning to tingle. I can hear the rough scraping sound as I go through a turn and feel the bumps of textured hard plastic beneath my mittened hands, even when I’m sitting on my couch at home.
It can only mean one thing: the Winter Olympics are nearly upon us.
The 2010 winter games kick off Feb. 12 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and since Christmas is over, I’m now focusing all my “eager anticipation” energy on this two-week event.
The Winter Olympics are not as popular worldwide as the Summer Olympics, which makes sense: anyone, pretty much anywhere, can run or wrestle, but few people have regular access to a bobsled, much less a track on which to use one. Same thing goes for a snowboarding half-pipe, a long-track speed skating rink or a ramp for ski jumping.
But the Winter Olympics have always been my favorite. The summer games, I can take them or leave them. I may get swept up in the moment as I was in 2008, watching Michael Phelps swim his way into the record books and fuming at the Chinese gymnastics team (those girls were way younger than 16), but every four years, I live for the Winter Olympics. Why else, in the days leading up to the games, would I regularly get the sensation that I’m carving my way down a ski slope?
Growing up in Montana, I skied every chance I got, often fantasizing about competing in giant slalom or moguls as I weaved my way down the mountain. I watched in 1994 as Montana native Tommy Moe won the gold medal in downhill at Lillehammer, Norway. The next year, I made my way down a run named after him at a Whitefish, Mont., ski resort, dreaming of having a downhill run named after me too.
Eventually, I came to realize that I didn’t have the athleticism or money (skiing is a pretty expensive sport, especially if you’re competitive) to follow those dreams. Instead, I moved to the Midwest, where mountains are, to put it nicely, hard to come by, and married a guy whose history of knee problems makes ski vacations impractical. Suffice it to say that I haven’t strapped on the planks in a while.
But even though I no longer live in a place where I can just ski to my heart’s content every weekend, I still have a great affection for the sport, and it’s one of few that I’ll watch on TV, even if it’s not the Olympics.
While the skiing events are definitely my favorite at the Olympics, for my husband it’s a curious tie between hockey and figure skating. The hockey is easy to understand — my mother-in-law was one of the original Blueliners and Karl grew up going to Blues games at the old Arena. Hockey is in his blood.
But Karl’s also one of few men I know who knows — or at least willingly admits to knowing — the full names of several individual Olympic figure skaters and an Olympic ice dancing pair.
During the 2006 Games in Torino, Italy, Karl became swept up in the high drama that is figure skating. Maybe it was because of all of the athlete profile packages that aired between tape-delayed performances, but Karl started picking sides in the showdown of styles between U.S. skaters Johnny Weir and Evan Lysacek. (For those at home keeping score, Karl will be rooting for by-the-book Lysacek to beat the “obnoxious” flamboyant showman Weir at the Vancouver games.)
It’s fun to tease Karl about his mysterious obsession with figure skating, but secretly, I love it. As someone who loves to watch all of the Olympic events, I’m glad to have someone at home who will enthusiastically watch at least some of them with me. Maybe this year, NBC will air some packages that highlight a big rivalry between the U.S. curling team’s sweepers and sliders, and he’ll get sucked into that sport too.
Hey, a girl can dream, can’t she?
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