So Jesus and Mohammed walk into a taverna in Sestriere. Jesus orders sacramental wine; Mohammed goat’s milk. Both ask for it to be served in an official Olympic™ souvenir glass. A long-in-the-tooth, down on her luck streetwalker strolls over to them and says, "You fellas lookin’ for a good time?"
Jesus says, "As a matter of fact, we are. You got any cheap tickets for the pairs figure skating finals?"
Okay, so it’s not particularly funny. But it hopefully won’t get me beheaded by some imbecilic Islamofascist or rabid evangelical Christian with a shriveled, vestigial sense of humour.
Such is the state of the world as we skate merrily back toward the Dark Ages.
In Italy, in scattered mountain towns with narrow, two-lane roads leading in and out, my esteemed editor, Bob Barnett, sits on a bus wondering, no doubt, why the governments of Canada and British Columbia are spending a bazillion dollars upgrading the Sea-to-Sky highway while the Torino Olympics™ sail by with latter-day cow paths. Are over-blown highways only "requirements" in countries so addicted to travel by SUV they’d rather choke to death on exhaust than spend the money on alternate forms of travel?
Or maybe he’s wondering why tiny Whistler, who was, in essence, promised we’d no more be saddled with Olympic™ debt than a man could get pregnant, is weighing whether or not to go into hock up to our collective eyeballs to build a Paralympic™ sludgehockey arena capable of seating 3,500 when ice events in the real Olympics™ are drawing half-full crowds and scalpers are pleading with people to buy tickets for less than half their face value.
Is it just the laconic Italian ClubMed lifestyle dampening the spirits and keeping the crowds away? Or is it a more fundamental Olympic™ fatigue among anyone not part of the Olympic™ family? Maybe we’ll have to wait and see how the television numbers shake out.
But are there lessons Whistler can glean from these Olympics™? Lessons we can incorporate before it’s too late? Before we wind up the west coast Montreal? Or have we been duped into overbuilding, overspending, overindulging in dreams of Olympic™ glory?
Was that a rhetorical question?
Of course it was.
Work is already commencing on the gash that’ll surely become the White Elephant Memorial Sliding Centre on the flank of Blackcomb mountain. While there is no firm idea what this monument to retched excess is really going to cost – and c’mon, what kind of sucker would you have to be to believe any of the numbers associated with the 2010™ games – there are still no voices asking what ought to be the threshold question: Why are we doing this?
Luge, skeleton and bobsleigh embody much of what’s gone wrong with the Olympics™. What began life just over a century ago as an outgrowth of the simplest of pleasures, sliding down a snowy hill on a toboggan, has morphed into a glaring example of western civilization’s headlong embrace of the unsustainable and the Olympic™ movement’s rush to embrace big money professionalism.
In St. Moritz, Switzerland, a shade over 100 years ago, bobsleigh was little more than the Soapbox Derby on ice. On a course carved out of a glacier, guys in homemade sleds raced for fun, glory and an incredible adrenaline rush.
Having bucked the trend of modernism, St. Moritz still has a natural bobsleigh course.Each year, a team of craftsmen from northern Italy show up to reconstruct the 1,700 metre-long course out of some 5,000 cubic metres of snow. Each spring it melts back into the glacial ice. Talk about your green sports.
When the St. Moritz course was built in 1897, it was the first. By 1914 there were over 100 natural bobsleigh courses.
Today, there is only one.
But St. Moritz, while maintaining their historical traditionalism, is no throwback. Their course is still a featured stop on the World Cup schedule and, at least according to some, still the best.
But what passes for quaint sentimentalism in Switzerland, just won’t cut it in modern day corporate Olympism™. The spare change and pasta it takes to build St. Moritz’s run doesn’t stack up to the many millions the two engineering firms qualified to build IOC-sanctioned courses require in order to make modern Olympic™ dreams come true.
And those homemade sleds have been replaced by marvels of modern engineering costing upwards of $80,000.
One might, if one lived with one’s head in the clouds, justify all this expense. We are, after all, talking about the greater glory of sport, aren’t we?
Hell no. We’re talking about bobsleigh, luge and skeleton. If everyone who’s participated in those three events in the last half-century were gathered together in, say, Whistler’s future sludgehockey arena, you’d think the place was empty. As spectator sports – live spectator sports – the three sliding disciplines are about as exciting as watching traffic whiz by on a freeway. A blur of motion… silence… another blur of motion. Yawn.
And success in any of them owes more to engineering and steely nerves than it does to athletic prowess. Even the sporting bodies themselves admit the race is won or lost in the first 50 metres. Bob and skeleton require fast-twitch muscles and ballistic sprints. Skeleton demands strong arms and upper body strength and eyes in your feet. All three require an admirable blend of thrill seeking and craziness.
But none of them are worth the dough being spent, the energy being wasted and the legacy of endless operating expenses left in their wake. They are anachronisms, monuments to hallow glory and blind belief that if it’s sport, it’s good.
In the end, we’ll have a leftover, overpriced, underused, white elephant stitched to the side of Blackcomb. Some day, long after most of us have moved on or died, there’ll be a great debate by the council of the day on whether to shoulder the expense of tearing the beast down or plowing more dough into propping it back up. By then we’ll know whether the 2010 Olympics™ made us, broke us or were of passing indifference.
Nobody will remember who won the medals in luge, bobsleigh and skeleton.
That’s the optimistic take on what’ll happen four years from now. If the radical fringe of Islam has its way, four years from now we’ll be embroiled in the Cartoon Crusades and nobody in their right mind will be willing to risk coming to a high-profile event like the Olympics™.
Or delusional boomers will be keeling over from our lifestyles of excess and denial as outlined in this week’s report from the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada.
As for me, I’m just going to stop reading the news and go back to writing those cute dog and cat stories.
