Vancouver 2010 - Fun and Frolics... and Fatal Accidents (But We Don't Talk About Those) - Why I Love the Winter Olympics

Good afternoon, sports fans! (Don't worry, the blog won't all be in this tone). So, have we all been keeping up with the Winter Olympics? I know it takes a lot of flack and that the Britons have as much hope of topping the medal table as they do of recalling Eddie 'the Eagle' Edwards to the team, but I personally can't get enough of them. I have stayed up until 1 in the morning watching the Snowboard Cross and Curling and I'm not ashamed (well, maybe a little bit, but generally no more than usual). It is generally looked upon as the mildly-retarded, Yukon-dwelling cousin of the summer games, but it has bags of charm with its preposterous 'sports' and, best of all, the fantastic BBC commentary team.

As previously mentioned, my last two late nights/early mornings have consisted of the Mens' and Womens' Snowboard Cross competitions. Both were exceptional. For those who've never seen or heard of the sport (probably quite a lot of people), it's essentially a race on a downhill course. What's special about that? That's just like all the other winter race sports, right? Wrong. Snowboard Cross makes deliberate attempts to cause as many accidents as possible by inserting jumps, 'kickers' and 'four-packs' along the course. The procedure is a number of qualification runs take place- a time trial where individual riders attempt to make it through to the knockout stages, before a number of four-rider races occur until eventually we have a winner.

As I say, the course is very much the star. Commentator Ed Leigh (the Motson of Snowboarding, but with more jargon and impressions) explained that there 'had been tears backstage when some of the riders saw this Cypress Mountain course'. Now, in what other sport does that happen? I'm pretty sure that Nelson Piquet Jr. didn't break down into tears when he saw the Singapore track (well, not until Flavio Briatore told him to deliberately drive into a tire wall, anyway). It's a daunting, high-speed, freestyle-oriented course and plenty of the alpine riders seem to have come a-cropper with a number of favourites falling by the wayside. The Men's event was eventually won by veteran American Seth Wescott, who reeled in Canadian Mike Robertson with a remarkable turn of pace.

It was however the women's event that the expectant eyes of the sports media were fixed on. Lindsey Jacobellis was setting out to make amends for the most hilarious and idiotic blunder in Snowboard Cross History in the 2006 games. Britain had high hopes for 'medal-contender' Zoe Gillings (I don't suppose she was being touted as such in Canada or America...), who did a remarkable front-flip to recover after a dodgy air during one of the quali runs. Now, it was a foggy day yesterday and there were a hell of a lot of crashes, most of which are featured in this handy catch-up vid (sadly they miss out Leigh's masterful commentary on the very last crash in that film - "Did she go through the gate or did she go through the gate?"). Well it was non-stop drama, several bumrushings from the snow, a couple of headlong catapults into the safety fences and Jacobellis crashing out on the first corner of the semi-final. It was a fairytale finish however (expect a low-budget Canadian film about this one) as local-girl Maelle Ricker brought home gold for Canada.

Undoubtedly the highlights of Snowboard Cross are the massive wipeouts, but Leigh's commentary has to come a close second and he has already earned a cult following of people tweeting his best quotes as they happen. A happy evening was spent seeing comedians Lloyd Woolf and Mark Watson recommending people to watch the snowboarding and quoting the Ski Sunday co-presenter's (he's the one who isn't an ex-Olympic downhill skier) best bits. Take a look at Lloyd's Twitter feed for some terrific comic nuggets. My two particular favourites were "Again that four pack separating the ladies from the girls" (where have I heard that before) and "Pelvis-first into the back of that knuckle" which sounds like a rejected line from Carry On X-Games.

Also yesterday, some Curling happened. You know Curling, the one with all the Scottish people. It was Team GB vs. the dastardly Swedes in a game of what is essentially icy marbles with cleaning equipment. What's curious is that the Curlers are actually fairly athletic-looking. The British 'Skip' David Murdoch looks as though he could easily be doing a real sport and his Swedish counterpart, Niklas Edin, had biceps the size of a baby's head. They certainly don't need to be that large. Perhaps it's the sweeping that does it, the preposterous cartoon-style sweeping, I just don't know. It's a bit of a comedown from the Boarder X (as the cool kids call it), but it was a tense afair with canny Scot, Murdoch, just barely outsmarted by the hulking Edin. Excitement? I thought my trouser leg would never dry.

We are, of course, rubbish at the Winter Olympics. Speaking after veteran Swiss Didier Defago powered to a technically-perfect shock win in the Blue Riband event of the games, the Downhill Skiing, ending a 22-year Downhill gold drought, Briton Ed Drake said he was 'pretty pleased' with his 38th place. In other words, we've a ways to go before we produce any form of true skiing contender (though Chemmy Alcott is being touted for a top 10 finish in the women's event). Our best medal hope is Pewsey's own Shelley Rudman (just a short way down the A338 from the Or So I Thought... HQ) in the Skeleton Bob. The problem comes in the fact that the competition (of people throwing themselves downhill on tiny trays of carbon fibre) takes place on the same course that tragically claimed the life of Georgian Luger Nodar Kumaritashvilli in practice. They have since made the course slower and put up safety barriers, but the ghost of that incident is likely to feature in the minds of all the competitors not least for Rudman, whose young daughter will be trackside to watch, but the slider has stated that: "I would always think of my own safety and what happened was very difficult for everybody. But I felt more at ease when I saw the changes made and now I don't feel it is a dangerous track. Ella is my number one priority and I wouldn't do something that was absolutely high risk. If there's been an accident on the road, am I not going to drive my car any more? I'm here, I'm safe and I've just got to perform."

So we might not win anything, but it's the taking part that counts (in this case, it isn't loser talk) - the greatest thing of all about the Winter Olympics is the plucky underdog spirit. Very rarely do they win gold, or even make it onto the podium, but they have a dignity about them. Whether it's the Captain of the Indian team, a luger who's been to 4 Olympic Games, but had to rely on the charity of Vancouver residents to afford a lycra skin-suit or the legendary 1988 Jamaican Bobsleigh team, immortalised in the Disney film Cool Runnings, who punched so far above their weight and despite a horrific crash, walked across the line with the very dignity that I earlier spoke of. A lot of athletes could learn a thing or two about how to conduct themselves from the Winter Olympians (yup, that means you John Terry and just about every other England footballer out there).