NATIONAL CHAUVINISM AND MEDALS TABLES: WINTER OLYMPIC NOTES IV

I've written before about Olympic medal tables, and one of the best things about the Winter Olympics is that they are so balanced, especially in light of the event-inflation (35 to 98 medal events from 1980 to 2014) which helps some of the less winter-centric sports nations. So it's interesting to see how various nations report the overall medals, which, remember, is never an official IOC statistic--the Olympic Committee says it would encourage nationalism, something the raising of flags and playing of anthems, or indeed the grouping of athletes by national teams of course doesn't do.

Russia 'won' the games by any measure, and in fact, IOC president Thomas Bach was quite candid in his closing speech, attributing part of the 'success' of the Games to the success of the host nation's team. Just as happened in London 2012, the triumphs of the host nation--a feat repeated regularly at Olympic Games--helped get that nation's viewers wrapped up in the competition, and the 'feel-good' factor pushed many wider issues, including those of costs of the games, financial needs elsewhere, persecution of gays, and growing crisis in Ukraine, out of sight and mind.

As well as making everyone forget the horror stories filling the world's press before the games started about hotels, transport, communications and the like, which as I pointed out at the time are also de rigeur for a bored, hyper-critical, and often unfamiliar press corps to the build up of an Olympics.

So Russia, to Bach's, Putin's, and millions of Russians' delight, 'won' the medals table. They won it no matter how you stacked it. And how you stack it is important.

In 2012, the British press inevitably ranked the table by gold medals--putting team GB & NI in third place, ahead of Russia. Here's the breakdown of the top five nations in order of golds: USA 46 China 38 GB&NI 29 Russia 24 Germany/France 11.

But if you saw a Russian paper, you might have seen the table listed by total medals, or by a simple points system; the most common being 3 for a gold, 2 for a silver, 1 for a bronze. Here's the top five nations again, listed by points (medals in parenthesis). USA (46-29-29) 225 China (38-27-23) 191 Russia (24-26-32) 156 GB&NI (29-17-19) 140 Germany (11-19-14) 85. If you weight the gold and silvers higher, using a 5-3-1 system, Russia still tops GB&NI 230-215.

Obviously, a points system favours bigger nations, with more depth of talent. There are so many anomalies already: team sports like basketball or ice hockey which produce only a single medal for the top three, sports like swimming whose gradations encourage multiple medalists, sports that have tight limits for each country's entrants and those that don't, and many many more. But if you're talking about who 'won' an Olympics, surely you need to consider all the medals? Why not consider 4th place? Or 4th through 10th?

The thing that jumps out at the 2012 games is the distance between first and second, between second and third/fourth, and between fourth and everyone else. But when you look at the Winter Games, stacked with more esoteric sports fiercely dependent on access to facilities (like mountains, snow and ice), the picture is wonderfully balanced.

Here's the gold medal table: Russia 13, Norway 11, Canada 10, USA 9, Netherlands/Germany 8, Belarus 5, Austria/France/Poland 4.

But if you're in the USA, you're more likely to see a total medals table, which looks like this: Russia 33, USA 28, Norway 26, Canada 25, Netherlands 24, Germany 19.

And if you're in Canada, I defy you to find a paper listing the medals in anything other than a points format, in which the Russians run away with the title, but Canada comes second by a nose over the arch-enemy USA. Here's how it looks in 3-2-1: Russia (13-11-9) 70 Canada (10-10-5) 55 USA (9-7-12) 53 Norway (4-5-10) 48 Netherlands (8-7-9) 24

It doesn't really matter, though, because the Olympics is all about encouraging us to get beyond national chauvinism and compete for the sake of competition, right? And if you believe that, I've got copies of the protest letters over the years about things like seams in the lycra bondage costumes speedskaters wear.

On the topic of rising above chauvinsim, recall the wonderful Dutch speedskating coach Jillert Anema (he ought to have his own sports talk show in America, Sports Anema) who accused the USA of 'failing' at the Winter Olympics because they concentrate only on their own sports which the rest of the world doesn't play. It appeared that Anema's definition of failing was 'failing at speedskating' not least because of the 24 Dutch medals, 23 came in speedskating, which has a rather limited reach in most of the world without specialist speedskating rinks, in other words, most of the world. That doesn't say much for the breadth of Dutch winter sports success.

Remember too that speedskating success is not unknown in the US (Eric Heiden, Bonnie Blair, Shanti Davis etc) though it is concentrated on one track in West Allis, Wisconsin. And Jillert was also wrong when he said the US wasn't ranked in the top 30 in the world in football (soccer), which is the (only?) other big Dutch sport (apart from korfball and fierljeppen). The US is ranked 13th in the world. Holland is ranked 10th. And we've won exactly the same number of World Cups as the Dutch.

COMMENTARY AS EMOTIONAL INQUISITION: WINTER OLYMPIC NOTES III

In America, Olympic broadcasting faces a slightly different problem of pitching winter sport than the BBC's, because the Olympic format of building soap-opera 'up close and personal' storylines for every event is a tradition more than half a century old. NBC also has the advantage/problem of doing much of the games on tape delay. This allows them to hold a good story as long as they'd like, up to the very end of their prime-time broadcast, but it also tempts them into playing with the narrative.

In 1992 NBC had come up with the phrase 'plausibly live' to describe their tape delayed coverage from Barcelona, and fair enough, if you keep away from the news and the net you can watch as live. But in Atlanta in 1996 they famously redid their gymnastics commentary to re-order the competitors, thus increasing the tension. They provided new commentary, which I watched them record in the now-empty Georgia Dome (I was in charge of the basketball coverage in the other half of the Dome). I also talked to one of the commentators, Elfie Schlegel, as she and John Tesh walked in to do their voice-over. I wrote about this for the Herald-Tribune after the games, and NBC's Dick Ebersol wrote an indignant letter of protest denying what was obvious to anyone who watched the show. Apart from the order, you could hear the basketball horn go off. Ebersol claimed disingenuously that the horn was being tested, which was true; what he didn't say was that we were not allowed to test it until after the gymnastics was finished! Our half of the Dome was required to be both dark and silent throughout actual gymnastics competition.

Anyway, this time NBC gave into temptation on the men's figure skating. With no American left in the running, the story was Russian veteran Evgeni Plushenko, but he unfortunately had tweaked an injury during warmups, and withdrawn from the event. But when, many hours later, NBC went on air in prime time, they not only teased Plushenko's performance throughout the night, but when it came to the moment they actually feigned surprise at his withdrawal. Obviously it's not like re-editing events' it's just a cynical exercise in manipulating the audience to sit through more commercials; eminently cynical. Though probably not as cynical as the bits that were cut from the Opening Ceremony speeches, in particular IOC President Thomas Bach's call for the games to be held 'with tolerance and without discrimination for any reason,' NBC probably feared tolerance and non-discrimination might have offended much of their audience.

But the biggest controversy reflected NBC's overweaning determination to cast this sporting event into the template of human-interest. Bode Miller, who's now 36 and nearing the end of a magnificient, if sometimes controversial career, had just taken a bronze in the Super Giant Slalom, salvaging a medal after a disappointing downhill. He had told NBC, in an interview with news anchor Tom Brokaw, that he was racing at this Olympics for his brother Chalone, a snowboarder, who had died last year, aged 29. During the race, NBC even had Miller's wife miked up, and after the finish he was interviewed by Christin Cooper (left), a former US skier whom I'd met a few times in the 80s.

Miller's answer to Cooper's first question said he had a 'lot of emotion riding on it', and she then followed up with a question that was classic action news at 8 stick the microphone into the crying victim's face and ask: 'Bode, you’re showing so much emotion down here, what’s going through your mind?' I don't think Christin, who was friendly, articulate and smart as a skier, was wrong to ask that question—she commented on his emotion. But the question itself is far too lax—what's going through your mind?—to necessarily get a good answer. Bode's answer was general, so Cooper had to press on, trying to get him to mention his brother. And as tears began to appear, Miller produced an amazing response: he didn't know if the emotion was for his brother or for himself.

Done, brilliant, he's given you gold, he's crying, now move on, or out. Instead, Cooper started fishing for an angelic moment—Miller had been looking into the sky before his run. She was asking him to become part of a daytime TV movie. Miller was unable to answer, but the camera zoomed in on him, and his tears, holding him in extreme close up as if trying to focus on each individual droplet. They then followed Miller as he went off to be by himself, and Dan Hicks picked up and tried to explain the situation. Hicks did his best not to pander, but having built up a soap-opera scenario, there was no way NBC were going to desert the soap opera money shot: tears are the currency of voyeurism, the ultimate proof of 'real' emotion on the screen, and they need to be seen up extremely up close and personal.

I'm not criticising Christin Cooper for what was Oprah-esque overkill—and neither did Miller, who defended her afterwards and spoke of being caught up in the emotion of the moment. NBC, of course, immediately used that as a justification, saying that they supported 'the line of questioning' (no mention of sticking with his reaction) and claiming Miller had been 'supportive of ...the overall interview', which he wasn't.

The producer in the truck could have left the scene gracefully, dissolved to Miller's run perhaps, or simply moved on to the next story.  Cooper got a human reaction from Miller, but no one was content with that. There had to be more, so the audience could get their vicarious pleasure. It was great TV for an instant, and it became embarrassing for a lot longer.

COMMENTARY AND CHEERLEADING: WINTER OLYMPIC NOTES II

The Winter Olympics is a good way for us to test the quality of commentators, because in both the UK and USA most of the sports are not things television covers regularly, and they are not sports with which the audiences are familiar. Figure skating has a wide appeal; when I worked for ABC and we were programming the Calgary games, we aimed for figure skating and the US hockey team for our prime times every night. The skating would rate about 50% higher—remember hockey is basically a regional thing in the US, while skating has the broad, cross-gender appeal that made gymnastics such a big thing in the post-Korbut, Comaneci era.

Figure skating is basically bowling alley ballet, a sport with the dual drawbacks of first requiring make-up, sequinned costumes, music and choreographers to perform and second being subject to judging, with all its attendant history of corruption and fraud. Yet if anything, skating is more popular now than ever, thanks to 'talent' shows like Dancing On Ice. When you think about it, the Olympic format is almost as close to Ted Mack's Amateur Hour as Dancing, or Strictly, or X Factor. The biggest difference being the figure skating judges are locked into a 1950s aesthetic, and susceptible to bribes, but are not fed clever lines by the producers for the audience's entertainment. If anything though, the 'kiss and cry' area at the Olympics is even more OTT than X Factor.

When I covered Lake Placid, there were 35 medal events; in Sochi there are 98. Sports have been expanded, not often for the better (cf: classic vs freestyle cross country skiing; 'team' figure skating) and new sports have been added, including more judged sports, like freestyle skiing and snowboarding. Of course there are also a couple of events that excite me the way roller derby did when I was 11 years old: short track speedskating and snowboard cross, which are basically the same kind of Ben Hur races, one on ice and the other on snow. But with new sports has come a new, younger audience and a problem for commentators, as I've been discovering watching the BBC coverage.

Snowboarding is analogous to surfing, and the lingo seems to have been built on a gnarly surf base. But surfing has never been in danger of reaching the Olympics. Snowboarding is one of the few sports at the Winter Olympics where the competitors don't dress in lycra bondage gear, and the only one where a competitor (in Vancouver) was barred from the games after testing positive for marijuana, which would imply that it is the only sport where pot is a performance enhancing drug. So it's a young, groovy thing, which means BBC commentators appear to be determined to do the verbal equivalent of a 1440 Yolo flip on every routine. This Jonathan Pearce approach might work on radio, and attract a lot of attention, but it doesn't do much to enlighten the audience. On the other hand, I once asked a snowboarder, while I was doing commentary at the 2005 Winter University Games, what 'huge air' meant, and he said, 'well, like, the air, it was huge'. So now we knew.

On the other hand, you'd think curling would be a natural fit, partly because the Scottish (whoops, I mean British) teams are quite good, and partly because it has the same sort of appeal as snooker, lawn bowls, or even darts. Which means the BBC commentators approach each end with a sort of genteel calm, regardless of how tight the competition is, and even in celebration of a British win have all the reserve of Phil Drabble commiserating with the second place finisher at a sheepdog trial. What would be instructive would be to swap the snowboarding and curling commentary teams around, if only for a day.

Meanwhile, Great Britain & Northern Ireland picked up its first gold medal Friday, in skeleton, and I watched Lizzy Yarnold's impressive win to prepare myself for chat on Saturday morning's World Service Weekend programme. Skeleton bob is basically going down a bobsled run on a sled, head first the way you would on your own Flexible Flyer as a kid. It's been in the Olympics before, on the Cresta run in St. Moritz, and it's probably the most accessible and human of the bob run events: the bobsled itself being conducted inside a bumper car, while the luge, in Tony Kornhesier's great phrase, resembling Dracula going downhill in his coffin.

I caught the last of the four skeleton runs, and it was gripping stuff—with the difference of third and fourth places coming down to .04 seconds (four one-hundreths of one second) over the combined FOUR runs. But when it got to Yarnold and the final run, there was little grip left. She had built up a huge (0.78 seconds!) lead over the first three runs: all she really needed to do was get to the bottom without crashing to win.

This was pointed out, hesitantly by Amy Williams, the skeleton expert commentator, which then set Colin Bryce off into a mad effort to rebuild the tension. Fair enough, because the pair had been pretty good in explaining how the event worked, and the way in which Britain, just like East Germany thirty years ago, had identified athletes to draft into the sport and concentrated on sled technology, so despite not having a track of their own to practice on they had achieved remarkable success. They also drifted into those areas that make you wonder what 'experts' are for. Yes, the racers will enjoy the podium, they will be happy, and yes, they'd really like to win. You do not have to have raced at Olympic level to provide such insights. But once the race started, all explanation was off anyway. 'Speed will be crucial here,' said Bryce, which was self-evident enough, but actually wasn't the most crucial thing. Then he pulled out the commentator's greatest enemy, the cliché's cliché, just before the start. 'Lizzie GOES FOR GOLD FOR BRITAIN' he said, a verbal tabloid headline simple enough for any audience to understand.

The rest of the run was basically Amy Williams cheering Lizzy down the course. This raises the interesting point of why you need an expert commentator to cheer. Why not have Lizzie's husband, or grandmother, or next-door-neighbor, or Brian Blessed instead? At one point Bryce interjected 'she's flying now', which was daring in the sense that he didn't have David Vine's Ski Sunday tape delay to prove him hundreths of a second right, but basically anyone going down a bob run on a skeleton is figuratively flying. It is a difficult thing: momentum means some bumps will slow you down less than you might think, and there's no way for the naked eye to calculate how many hundreths of a second may have been gained or lost. Yarnold won by almost a full second (0.96) but remember that's a full second after FOUR runs. And as she celebrated, Amy Williams was 'crying for her, crying for everyone' which maybe Brian Blessed could not have done better, and I appreciated her tears for me.

Yarnold herself seems completely likeable, a great person for a great story, and I suppose we can expect the Seoul Hockey Syndrome to mean she will appear on a lot more BBC in the future than she has in the past. But I was amused by her nickname, which is 'The Yarnold'. I have written before about the remarkable flatness of British nicknames. If Mean Joe Green had been British, his nickname would have been 'Greeners'. Cool Papa Bell would have been 'Bellsy'. And Broadway Joe Namath would have been lucky to be 'Joe'. Or maybe 'The Namath'.

SOCHI AND SOCHI: SELLING THE WINTER OLYMPICS

I was on BBC World Service Weekend yesterday, (one can find it with great difficulty at the new look IPlayer for the rest of this week) and one of the topics we discussed was the Winter Olympics--the focus was on the language of snowboarding and freestyle skiing, and I was able to describe my experience working with a barely articulate snowboarder as my analyst at the 2005 Winter University Games (this is the only Olympic sport where a competitor has been banned for testing positive for marijuana as a performance enchancing drug) and I also mentioned how many changes to the programme there have been since I first covered the games, shooting on 16mm film, at Lake Placid. To prepare for the show, I'd also made sure to watch Britain's Lizzy Yarnold win the skeleton bob.

Then I managed to get home, despite the best efforts of South West Trains, in time to watch the last period, overtime, and shootout of the Russia-USA hockey game, which was the kind of brilliance that reminded me why I've loved hockey, which my dad played, for most of my life. A friend who was watching her first-ever game was texting me with questions (and score updates) on the train, and the sport picked up at least one more fan.

So for the next few days I'll post a few thoughts on the Winter Olympics,starting with an overview now....

THE WINTER OLYMPICS:

The ten Olympics I've covered include three winter games (Placid, Sarajevo, and Calgary). I also did hockey commentary on a fourth Olympics from a studio in Paris, as well as virtually all the sports at those University Games in Austria. I worked on the 1980s full spectrum of winter sports for ABC, everything from the downhill at Kitzbuehl to ice speedway to a Brian Boitano/Katarina Witt version of Ice Capades (ah, the stories I could tell...)

Before every Olympics the media's stories are always the same, especially because the huge press corps descending (or ascending, in the case of skiing) on the games is made up of people who aren't necessarily used to covering such events. Hence the usual pre-Olympic make-news stories, like accommodation (none for the public, substandard for the press), weather (too hot in summer, either too hot or too cold but never just right in winter), snow (too much/not enough/artificial), security (the increase in Sochi reminds me of the steps 'forward' in Sarajevo, and ties in nicely with the NSA/GCHQ trend of modern life) and of course transport (traffic nightmares that didn't happen in LA and Seoul, malfunctioning press buses most memorably in Placid and Atlanta) are intensified. That a giant bus system has teething problems its first day, especially in winter conditions, is never an excuse. Dick Young of the New York Daily News was so incensed by having to wait half an hour in frozen Lake Placid the day before the games opened he was still writing about it when the Miracle On Ice happened!

Winter sports have a limited universe, and winter games often took place in small ski resort areas used to providing skiers with a good time (cf Lillehammer). But when I covered Lake Placid, there were 35 medal events; in Sochi there are 98. This proliferation demands more facilities and more infrastructure, and insures more journalists venturing into territory like biathalon or luge for the very first time. There are sports like speed skating or bobsled where competitors in bondage costumes race against the clock, there are others where awards for best make-up, choreography, or costumes, if not congeniality, ought to be worth separate medals.

Sometimes, before a games, there is political coverage of the host nation--though it has to be said that historically the IOC has always welcomed what Jeanne Kirkpatrick would call 'authoritarian governments' to host games--allocation of resources is so much easier, specially when they're being allocated to various IOC dignitaries with their hands out and pockets open. Although Russia's repressive anti-gay laws have been a focus of coverage, though rarely with reference to figure skating, the actual presentation of Putinesque politics has been very lean, and in America they've been heavily tinged with Cold War overtones. Maybe they were trying to make the Russia-USA hockey match seem more interesting.

But the odd thing is how quickly that coverage disappears once the sport actually begins. Horrible hotels, bumbling buses, civil rights for gays, Chechen terrorists, all get buried under an avalanche of frenzy as each nation's athletes compete (or 'go for gold' as you are required to say in Britain), and everyone falls in love briefly with slope style, or in the case of Britain, skeleton, which, if Seoul Hockey Syndrome is any guideline, will now slide into BBC TV schedules for the next four years, until disappointment at the next winter games drives it out. After the usual stories about transport, weather, hotels and so on repeat themselves.

PUTIN AMERICA IN ITS PLACE: The British Press and the 2002 Winter Olympics

 While preparing for London 2012, I discovered in one of my Olympic files this piece, which I wrote during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Not surprisingly, I failed to sell it to any of the British papers, who find both winter sport and self-criticism of minority interest. Ten years later, it would have been interesting to revisit Mitt Romney's success in rescuing the games from the Olympic bribery scandal--the latter of which I did write about elsewhere. Salt Lake is now a dim memory, as is curling in the minds of Britons, and some of the discussion of skating judges may still be esoteric, but here it is, basically as written ten years ago....

PUTIN AMERICA IN ITS PLACE
Winter Games Highlight A Double Standard In The British Press

What better place than Salt Lake City 2002 to un-thaw the Cold War? Incredibly, as US-Russian relations went downhill faster than Alberto Tomba, the British press rushed to back Vladimir Putin’s call for a boycott of the Winter Olympics.  Biased judging was victimising the Russians.  Biased drug testing was penalising the Russians.  Partisan crowds (“those whining snivelling Americans,” as the Independent described them) were intimidating everyone from the President of the IOC to the Russian ice-hockey players who lost to the Czechs (though why the Americans wanted to stage manage a win by the defending champion Czechs was never really explained.) To anyone familiar with Olympic history, the most interesting event has often been hypocrisy, and backing Putin’s putsch was merely the culmination of another gold medal performance by Britain.

Who in Britain cared?  After all, the Winter Games are made up of odd sports with odder nomenclature, not invented or played exclusively by Commonwealth nations. But of course a little America-bashing, admittedly all too easy in these days of Bush junior, is just the thing for feature writers who know little and care less about sport anyway, yet still get sent to cover the world's biggest sporting stage. It made perfect fodder for filling a column or two in the back pages, while ignoring the actual competition.

But then Britain struck GOLD! In curling! Cue Curl-mania!  To anyone with a memory, it was a carbon-copy of Hockey-Madness! thrown up by Britain’s 1988 Go For Gold medal in Seoul. At least most people in Britain actually knew what field hockey was. The BBC began showing every curling match available, and taking it very seriously indeed, as if trying desperately to legitimise the sport, now that Britons were world-beaters.  We suffered through seven years of hockey coverage after Seoul; how long before curling supplants snooker on BBC2?

Had not Putin come along, curling might have distracted Britain from whingeing about biased judging, and blaming it on American spectators, which is like blaming the Birmingham Six's conviction on the courtroom gallery.  The attacks on the US for unacceptable chauvinsim began when the Salt Lake crowd booed ferociously after a Canadian skating pair were denied gold, in favour of the Russians. This was portrayed as unacceptable chauvinism, even though Canada was, at last glance, still a separate country, actually competing against the US.  The crowd, of course, might well have contained a large number of Canadians, but in any event, what they were jeering was judging they immediately recognised as biased and politicised. And they turned out to be right. The Canadians had been cheated by a French judge who felt so guilty over what she had done she actually confessed.  In fact, she had been merely following the orders of her federation, who had cut a mutual cheating deal with, guess who? the Russians, who promised to perform a similar cheat in their favour in another event.  No wonder Putin wanted to shift the blame.

The Russians got caught, but their skaters weren’t penalised, beyond having to share the gold with the Canadians. But in the best traditions of political tit for tat, when Russia's Irina Slutskaya finished second in the women’s skating, the Russians tried a similar appeal.  The only problem with claiming biased judged against Slutskaya was that her silver medal was the direct result of the American judge placing her second in the long programme, behind gold medallist Sarah Hughes, but ahead of the American favourite, Michelle Kwan.  Had the American not dropped the Candian Hughes to second, and the American to third, Slutskaya would have finished third. Meanwhile, the Russian judge had, amazingly enough, placed Slutskaya first. And dropped Hughes all the way to fourth. It made for an embarrassing protest. And no sooner had that controversy died down, than Russian cross country skiers were banned from the Games for blood-doping, with the Americans again being accused of bias, even though the IOC runs drug testing.

“It’s changed because of prize money,” says Jayne Torvill.  But the real question was whether it had changed at all, because money has actually been a factor in figure skating going back to the days of Sonja Henje, and more to the point, judging abuse has a long Olympic tradtion, based on factors of nationalism and mutual benefit. In fact, the ISU instituted the current scoring system specifically to try to eliminate jury-rigging.  Instead, the placements system, which eliminated the averaging of scores, actually made it easier for judges to help their own, and hurt anyone else’s, competitors

So we came full circle.  When an American crowd boos because Canadians have been cheated, it’s because Americans are boorish homers.  But when, for example, at Edmonton’s World Athletics Championships, Russia’s Yegerova WASN’T banned for doping, the British press welcomes the Canadian crowd’s jeering her. In fact, British athletes on the track led the booing. Did I mention gold medal double-standards?

We heard similar yelps about American crowds in Los Angeles and Atlanta.  But the Yanks are wimps compared with the abuse Polish competitors faced in Moscow in 1980, or Japanese received in Seoul in 1988. The fact of geography guarantees Olympic crowds in the US are overwhelmingly American, while a European Olympics is more accessible to more countries. Unlike Britain, America produces contenders in many of the esoteric winter sports, and  surprisingly enough, American crowds do prefer to see American winners. Although when they see those winners, unlike British supporters, they don’t invade the playing surface (the scenes after the women’s curling were another replay of the 1988 hockey final, when the pitch invasion was led by Colin Monyihan, then minister for sport).  Lack of nationalism must explain why the British press was filled with stories about the achievements of Ole Einar Bjorndalen, Janica Kostelic, or Simon Ammann, and a curling gold medal was kept in reasonable perspective. That was meant ironically, by the way, even though, as an American (born) I am supposed by the Brits to be incapable of such a thing. The British find American  partisanship far more reprehensible than, say, the idea of football supporters routinely killing people while following “the beautiful game”.  Presumably this is because Americans are not as culturally advanced as Europeans.

The IOC is predominately Euro-centric. The winter sports federations, each of which supervises the judging at its own events, are overwhelmingly controlled by Europeans.   They are happy to reap the financial benefits that American television brings them, and the record attendances delivered by a venue like Salt Lake City.  But when the routine corruption or incompetence which passes unnoticed in their cozy wintry wonderland is suddenly exposed on television screens around world what can they do?  Blame the messenger.  Blame the Americans.  And the British press jumps on the European bandwagon so fast you’d think it was the Ryder Cup.

Controversy in Olympic judging is as old as the games themselves.  British officials didn’t do a bad job of trying to eliminate American medal winners in London in 1908.  What goes around eventually comes around.  Was Kim Dong-Sung unfairly deprived of his gold medal when he was disqualified in his short-track race?  I happen to think so, but the referee (not ‘the judges’ as the British press insisted) who made the decision happened to be Australian, the same Aussie who had refused to take a gold medal away from his countryman after another Korean caused a total shambles in the 1000m race.  Trying to make up for one bad decision, he made another. The Korean Olympic Committee threatening lawsuits are the same people who organised the 1988 Olympics, which featured some of the most biased judging in Olympic history, in favour of Koreans in boxing, karate, and judo?  Or have we forgotten Roy Jones already?

One solution might be to hold the games only in small winter-friendly countries, where partisanship on the cross-country ski course or the ski jump goes unnoticed by the outside world,  and where the host nation has no contenders in figure skating or ice hockey.  Another is to reduce, rather than increase, the number of sports which let judges choose winners. But figure skating is what pulls in the audience which otherwise doesn’t know and doesn’t care about winter sports, so neither solution is likely to happen. I suppose that too is America’s fault.

THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SNOW BUSINESS: THE WINTER OLYMPICS

Because of moving house, I didn't get to see much of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, though I did manage to watch the hockey final, which was an exceptionally good game, marred only by the BBC's decision to have a Canadian colour man on the broadcast, and a Canadian skier (?) providing analysis in the studio, along with host Steve Cram (who kept telling they audience that, although they wouldn't understand what they were seeing, they ought to watch anyway) and hockey expert British rower Matthew Pinsent! When the game went to overtime, no one knew it would be played four on four, instead of five on five, which would likely help Canada's big stars, since the US would be less able to give them extra attention; sure enough Sidney Crosby, quiet in the first three periods, got the game winner.

What was really strange, however, was the presentation, encouraged by Canadians themselves, of their team, overwhelming pre-Olympic favourites for the gold, laden with NHL stars, and playing at home before a partisan crowd, as underdogs to a USA team picked for fourth or fifth before the games started. It was also extremely odd to see this portrayed as the greatest moment in Canadian hockey history, when that was surely Paul Henderson's goal in game eight of the original 1972 series against the Soviet Union, giving Canada a come-from-behind 4-3-1 vicotry in the series, thanks to a come-from-behind win in that final game in Moscow. But that happened nearly 40 years ago, and memory today extends no further than the delete button on teenagers computers.

In Vancounver, the Americans beating Canada 5-3 in the round robin was probably the worst thing that could have happened for the US, but the game certainly lived up to both countries' expectations: the whole of Canada dependent on the win to preserve their sense of national identity, and a thin sliver of the USA that actually follows hockey looking on with bemused disappointment. American diffidence to hockey is part and parcel of the general problem with the Winter Olympics, the games global warming might render irrelevant to even those few countries who now dominate. The games are full of sports that require not only winter, but specialist kinds of winter: mountains, bobsled runs, ski jumps, hockey rinks, speed skating rinks, half-pipes and the like. It's no coincidence most American speed skaters come from an area between Chicago and West Allis, Wisconsin. Last time I looked there were only 9 or 10 Olympic quality luge runs in the world, and when the Canadians refuse to let anyone but Canadians train on theirs, it gives the home side a definite advantage.

In a country like Britain, which prides itself in playing 'world wide' sports but ignores most of the ones that aren't cricket, rugby, football, or lawn bowls, this means coverage of the Winter Games has the feel of the first day of foreign language class in high school. Every Olympic games is like that; the media who cover tend not to be 'beat writers' on the various sports (largely because most countries don't have papers who devote beats to thinks like skeleton bob) and they same stories always crop up. At the winter games that means either (a) too much snow or (b) not enough snow, and at any games, transportation nightmares, which start getting written the first time a media shuttle is late.

When Amy Williams won her gold in skeleton, she became the lead on the news reports, who had to explain what skeleton bob actually was. And spectacular as her performance was, the Brits missed the element of the East German about it (the old DDR used to concentrate on medal intensive winter sports where technology could help, and Williams' top-secret sled was built at a cost of over £100,000), though they did follow the NBC-style 'human interest' lead in trying to create a desperate rivalry between her and her teammate. Audiences can't understand the .001 difference between two bob runs, but they do understand cat fights.

I did get to watch the women's Super G, which was also a fascinating race. The best skier on the day was Julie Mancuso, who went down first on a treacherous course, and held the lead for a long while. Her cat-fight rival, Lindsay Vonn, skiing 17th, then took the lead, before losing it later to Austria's Andrea Fischbacher and Slovenia's Tina Maze. I thought Vonn may have played it a bit safe on her run, but the reality was that the course had been set by the Austrian coach, with a four-deep set of skiers, and the early starters faced faster conditions without any knowledge of how they would play out. By the time the gold and silver medalists went, the course had slowed down a bit, and they were well aware of exactly how to approach the most dangerous gates. It was classic Alpine gamesmanship, but it went unremarked in commentary.

I loved covering the Winter Olympics (Lake Placid 1980, Sarajevo 1984, Calgary 1988) and the winter sports circuit--most recently doing commentary on almost all the sports at the Winter University Games in Austria a few years ago. The atmosphere is usually more relaxed than the summer games, and I can appreciate most of the sport, even the ones where people in bondage costumes race against the clock. I get tired of watching the ski jumping jury decide it's too dangerous whenever a non-favourite jumps too far, and cancels his jump and moves the start down. I worry about figure skating, the bowling-alley ballet where sequins and lipstick are part of the required equipment, Liberace seems to be the aesthetic icon, the 'choreography' never seems to match the skating (except occasionally, as with Torvill and Dean, in ice dance), and the judging seems as fair as Madam Lafarge in Tale Of Two Cities. Snowboarding, the only sport where marijuana is a performance-enhancing drug, at least gives us snowboard cross, which along with short-track speed skating, helps fill the void left by the demise of roller derby. And then there's biathalon, which would improved greatly if the skiers shot at each other, rather than targets.

But the big question is who, in the end, 'won' the Winter Olympics, which is supposed to be all about taking part, and not about nationalistic chauvinism. Hah. Try taking the anthems out of the medal ceremonies. Canadians are claiming 'victory' thanks to their 14 gold medals, the triumph of quality over quantity. Using the gold-silver-bronze points systems, the US triumphs, as you'll see from the top three here:

USA (9 gold 15 silver 13 bronze) 5-3-1 points: 103 3-2-1 points: 70
Canada (14-7-5) 5-3-1: 96 points 3-2-1: 61
Germany (10-13-7) 5-3-1: 96 points 3-2-1: 63

But the real Olympic champions, in terms of medals per population, were Norway, with 9 gold, 8 silver, and 6 bronze, for fourth place in the points table, and, in the 5-3-1 system, one point for every 61,000 Norwegians. Take that, all you temperate zone softies!