A Winter Olympic Apology

I owe the Winter Olympics an apology.

This is not a sentence I expected to write, and certainly not one I intended to write voluntarily.

A couple of weeks ago, I dismissed the entire enterprise as a niche festival of sliding about in specialist sleepwear, observed mainly by Norwegians and the sort of Britons who own breathable base layers. I regarded it as an athletic sideshow conducted in temperatures normally associated with freezer burn and poor life choices.

This position remained intact until it was undermined by an administrative error. While attempting to locate the news, I watched it accidentally.

This was the beginning of the problem.

Because once you actually see it properly, stripped of commentary and preconception, you realise that winter sport is not theatrical. It is contractual. Gravity makes an offer. The athlete accepts the terms.

Take downhill skiing. A human being voluntarily accelerates towards frozen ground at motorway speeds, balanced on two narrow planks, relying entirely on reflex and nerve to remain upright. There is no negotiation available once committed. Only competence.

Biathlon is worse. An athlete arrives at the shooting line in a state of cardiovascular revolt, lungs and heart conducting a private argument, and is then expected to shoot with microscopic precision. And somehow they do. Five shots. Five quiet demonstrations that control can be reimposed on chaos.

And then there is Big Air, which I had previously assumed was a recreational miscalculation. It is not. It is deliberate. A skier accelerates towards an enormous ramp, launches into open space, and rotates repeatedly with such calm authority that the act appears briefly to suspend consequence itself. Four spins. Sometimes five. The body behaves as if gravity were a guideline rather than a law. Then comes the landing. Clean. Final. Undeniable.

There is no panel to persuade. Only physics to satisfy.

Even curling, which I had categorised as competitive tidying, reveals itself to be something colder and more exact. It is not about effort. It is about inevitability. Once the stone leaves the hand, the future has been decided. All that remains is to watch it arrive.

What makes the Winter Olympics so compelling is its indifference. The environment does not care who you are. It responds only to what you do, and whether you do it correctly.

Britain, naturally, remains better suited to observation than participation. Our national winter discipline continues to be switching on the heating and issuing cautious statements about road conditions. We do not negotiate with ice. We avoid it entirely.

And yet, by accident, I witnessed something precise, unforgiving, and completely absorbing.

I regret the experience and will take greater care when operating the remote control in future.

As an amusing aside, I saw a Facebook reel where someone had set their circular, robotic vacuum cleaner off on their kitchen and started sweeping furiously in front of its path with a broom as an homage to curling.