Watching the Winter Olympics made me realize what a wimp I must be!
Slopestyle snowboarding and freestyle skiing are crazy. Those sports are so extreme they must take some special brand of guts that I’m positive I don’t possess. I can’t see myself flying down the steep side of a mountain at 50 mph doing huge triple and quadruple flips 70 feet in the air and coming down right-side-up with no broken bones.
I kept trying to decide if the young practitioners of those sports were courageous or just plain crazy. I mean, I love roller coasters that do loops and twists, but come on, I’m fastened into the car with unbreakable safety belts as I scream through the coaster’s gyrations!
The downhill skiers, the slaloms, the super G, whatever — 70 miles per hour down an incredibly steep run without any body armor. Are they nuts?
And what about the half-pipe snowboarders? Are you kidding me? What would possess someone to do that? How crazy do you have to be to go flying down a slope with huge moguls and jumps that pound your knees with amazing force in freestyle skiing?
The Olympics also made me come to grips with just how much strength and grace I don’t have. Did you watch the figure skaters? (BTW, in my humble opinion, the rest of the Olympics are just window-dressing for the figure skaters!) Well, anyway, especially in the pairs events, those athletes are endowed with a special amount of power and poise.
Can you imagine being the male skater in a pair, lifting your partner high above your head on one hand and spinning around the ice at 20 mph? Or likewise, imagine being the female, trusting your partner not to go crashing into the judges’ table while you’re cruising helplessly high above the ice.
Take the American pair of Marissa Castelli and Simon Shnapir, for example. He’s 6-foot 4-inches, and she’s 5-foot tall. When he has his arm extended, she’s probably over nine feet in the air. Wow!
And how strong are those guys? They lift those girls as if they weigh nothing. (They probably weigh less than a hundred pounds, but still!) They make it look so darned easy. And the girls; they get thrown in the air, doing rotations and flips, and come out of it on one skate with smiles on their faces. I’d be screaming for help!
And then there’s the ice dancing. They’re like high-speed ballet dancers, performing intricate dance steps, spins and whirls that would be difficult on a ballroom floor, but they’re doing it on ice on thin little blades of steel at amazingly high speeds and with unbelievable synchronization. The style and grace of those athletes is incredible.
And let’s not forget the singles. The axels, lutzes, toe loops, whatever, which demand a particular kind of takeoff and landing in order to score points. The triple and quadruple jumps, which have to be rotated 1080 or 1440 degrees and landed on a specified edge of the blade. What kind of crazy sense of body control does that take?
Then there’s the luge and the skeleton! And the two-man luge! How’d you like to be the guy on the bottom in the two-man luge? Lying face-up with another guy lying on top of you and hurtling down an icy trough at 87 mph. I don’t think so!
OK, so I’m a wimp! But maybe my own lack of all the characteristics and traits that make all those young people so special is what makes the Olympics so much fun to watch. Their dedication to practice and their fortitude make them special athletes, and I was proud of all of them, not just the Americans.
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