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Boycott the OlympicsWhy the United States should skip the Salt Lake City games.

By David Plotz
Posted Friday, Dec. 14, 2001, at 11:43 AM ET
Illustration by Keith Seidel

In 1980, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the United States boycotted the Moscow Summer Olympics. Afghanistan has been invaded again. The United States should seize the opportunity and boycott our own Salt Lake Winter Olympics in February.

The Winter Games, after all, are an embarrassment to sports in general and to the United States in particular. Why should we bother with an event that has managed to produce only a single compelling moment in 76 years? (The U.S. hockey team's defeat of the Soviet Union in 1980—the "Miracle on Ice." The miracle was that something interesting happened.)

There are several wrong reasons to abandon Salt Lake City. Some idealists object to the Games because they're morally tarnished. The slugs on the Salt Lake Organizing Committee dispensed $1 million in payoffs to the fascist symps, avaricious Third World functionaries, and inbred royals who comprise the International Olympic Committee, bribing them with college tuition for their kids, Wal-Mart shopping sprees, free prescription drugs—everything but the kitchen sink (though they did pony up for other furniture). Even so, the Olympic bidding is always a sewer, and Salt Lake's behavior was not much worse than that of competing cities.

Nor should we abstain simply because the Olympiad is being held in the wasteland of Salt Lake City. That fun-free zone is not significantly more tedious than Nagano or Lillehammer or the other icy gulags where Winter Olympics take place.

No, the Winter Olympics must die because its sports—and I use that term loosely—range from the merely dull to the unendurable. The marquee event is figure skating: Ice Capades with awful classical music and worse costumes. Nothing can be called a sport that depends on the whimsy of "artistic impression" and the opinions of nine judges. (Believe me, the Supreme Court makes better theater.) Downhill skiing, snowboarding, luge, bobsled: These are gravity, not sport. Suggestion for improving biathlon, that soporific merger of cross-country skiing and riflery: Make them shoot at each other. Hockey is the only Winter Games event in which competitors make physical contact, in which they play defense, in which they have to think. Not coincidentally, it is the only Winter Games event worth watching. Sports drama depends on human interaction: Winter Olympians interact with a clock.

Some of the events defy explanation. Curling combines the worst of shuffleboard and housekeeping. The contestants use brooms to sweep a path on the ice for a sliding stone. According to The Complete Book of the Winter Olympics, 94 percent of curlers are Canadian. Enough said. The Salt Lake games are reviving an old sport called "skeleton." Sounds exciting, doesn't it? Like some exceptionally dangerous extreme sport? Skeleton is sledding. They are giving a gold medal for sledding.

The winter Olympic events are not merely bad sports, they are bad television. Even the activities that are thrilling when you do them yourself—alpine skiing, snowboarding—wilt on television. The Olympic downhill is hours of waiting, punctuated by moments of incomprehensible blur (zip, shoosh, zip, shoosh, game over). Most of the events play so poorly on the air that NBC doesn't bother to cover them. The Winter Games broadcast—even more than the summer one—is a traffic jam of lachrymose up-close-and-personal profiles: the Norwegian cross-country skier whose mother just died of cancer, the Italian bobsledder who survived a scary gondola accident, the courageous Finnish biathlete who struggles every day with the trauma of a vestigial third nipple.

(Sept. 11 promises to concentrate this sap to unimaginable sticky-sweetness. They are already lining up their terror sob stories, though the roster does not impress so far. The best the official Olympic Web site can manage is a coach who serves in the Reserves and a skeleton slider—should that be "skeletor"?—who drove some supplies to Ground Zero.)

The United States should boycott the Winter Games for a selfish reason as well: We're no good at these so-called sports. It's humiliating to celebrate an eighth-place finish in the luge. It's un-American to place eighth in anything. Are our boys fighting in Tora Bora so that we can finish eighth? If we're not pulling gold medals, we're letting Osama win. Why are the Summer Games so much fun? Because we rule them.

We should also quit so we don't have to pay attention to the dreary teams that do dominate the games. The countries that have won the most winter medals—besides the fourth-place United States—are Russia, Germany, Norway, Austria, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland—not a one you'd want to spend the afternoon with. Their Olympic heroes are instantly forgettable. Who remembers Matti Nykanen? Bjorn Dahlie? The Protopopovs?

The Summer Olympics allow underdog nations to sneak a few medals: a gold for Senegal here, a few for Thailand there, a fluky bronze for Guatemala. But the Winter Games are just one more opportunity for the overdogs—as if they need another—to lord it over the poor, the dark, the Southern. (The Winter Olympics did not have a black competitor until 1976 or a black medal-winner till 1988.) Small-time countries never win anything at the Winter Games.

The Cold War used to coat the Winter Games with at least a veneer of drama: the Manichean face-off between us and the Commie ice devils. Now that's vanished. What's the joy in playing Estonia? The closest the official Olympic site can get to national conflict is: "Cross-Country: Norway vs. Italy a Heated Rivalry." By Winter Olympic standards, I suppose it is.

The Salt Lake Organizing Committee, in one of its sole acts of wisdom, is keeping the slopes at Park City and other Olympic ski areas open to the public during the Games. While the Olympians hurtle down the black-diamond slopes, regular folks will be allowed to ski other trails on the mountain. If the United States doesn't boycott the games, here is how you can still protest. Let other suckers fork over 100 bucks for the chance to shiver in a grandstand while rockets on skis blur by at 80 mph. You should travel to Utah, skip the games, buy a lift ticket, and spend the day snowboarding the slopes next door. The only Winter Games worth paying attention to are your own.

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David Plotz is Slate's deputy editor. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at .
Illustration by Keith Seidel.
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Notes From The Fray Editor:

Don't mess with the snow people, David. Winter sports enthusiasts were outraged at the boycott suggestion, and were anxious to point out how wonderful their events and athletes are. As Michael put it, "who could forget the Japanese sumo wrestling team doing pirouettes on the ice at Nagano?" Meanwhile, Salt Lake City defenders are not doing a great job: Deb T had a strange experience there, and the attempts by locals to argue with her didn't exactly make the area sound welcoming. And then there is George's claim that using the words 'fun-free zone' about Salt Lake City might be "a semantic whisper of support for Manson Family Values." We liked Dolph's (possibly not entirely serious) post: "On the battlefield of sport we separated the chaff from the wheat, the superior nation bringing glory to the motherland, the vanquished lay cowering at our feet. As for the winter games, we could eliminate the skating events--only the Danes care for them--and have you ever tried to fire a rifle on skates? Believe me it is nearly impossible." Al wants to add a new event: nude snowball fighting.

Comments:

What about biathalon's military connotations, finally appropriate again? The great powers have always fielded military ski squads. For a human interest story, there's the ski team that foiled the Nazi nuclear nightmare, by blowing up a heavy water factory.

The U.S. team can wear camo. uniforms.

--CK

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


So David Plotz doesn't like ice skating. I don't particularly like sports that are all about who's the fastest--so what if one person is 1/18 of a second faster than the next? With ice skating, you have everything you could want in one event--it's a costume ball with cliffhanger suspensefulness (will they land the quad toe?) and amazing feats of strength and flexibility.

There are so many funky sports at the Olympics--both winter and summer--that it seems like a cheap shot to pick on ice skating. I'm totally befuddled by the horses leaping, the I-own-a-Toyota jump on skis , dancing around with ribbons and balls--but, at the same time, it's part of the Olympic fun to hear the announcers talk in awe about "splashless entries" and start to care about who has the best "iron cross." Isn't it part of the general Olympic spirit that you take the time to see what kooky things people around the world train their bodies to do?

--Cowper

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


Yeah, but on the other hand, have you ever heard of a Winter Olympic athlete getting a medal revoked for flunking a steroid test?

Have the Winter Olympics ever been marred by the kind of officiating screwups that have regularly characterized the Summer Games? Like, the '72 men's hoops final, Zola Budd v. Mary Decker, last year's women's vaulting horse competition where the horse was set too low and the officials just decided to let it go because too many competitors would have to redo their jumps, but they weren't done ... oh no! They had to disqualify the Romanian gold-medal winner for, in all innocence, using the wrong cold medicine! The IOC makes the NFL look at least reasonably competent.

Against that, I'll take an Olympics where nine not-quite neutral people pick the winner, thank you very much.

--Daniel Case

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

(12/17)

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