I can kiss all my free time for the next two weeks goodbye. The Olympics are here. True, there is also the Super Bowl (which is local this year) but that’s just a few hours on Sunday. And it’s not like I care which teams wins. If it was a draw I’d be totally fine. The Olympics are almost 24 hours a day.

I’ve been to Milan. Only for twenty-four hours, and I was severely jet-lagged at the time. I remember the Duomo, though. There was a festival going on in the square, and it reminded me of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

I watch sports I don’t even remember exist for four years (biathlon). Although in reality I have never been an athlete, sports break into those I would never been dexterous enough for (figure skating, Alpine skiing) and those I’m not crazy enough to have ever tried (skeleton, ski jumping). (Ski jumping has always struck me as a “Hold my beer” sport. As in, it began when two guys (it had to be guys) were throwing back shots in a pub, and after a lot of vodka or whatever one says to the other “Betcha won’t jump that cliff on Old Man Mountain” and the other replies “See you tomorrow at the top of the hill.”)

And then there is curling.

I love curling. People I know love curling. I actually have started watching curling between Olympics. On the face of it, that seems incomprehensible. It’s a slow sport, to say the least. Stones sliding down the ice lack the excitement of a quad axel, or a Super-G run.

It looks, on the face of it, that *anyone* can take up curling. In fact, after the Beijing Olympics I researched where the closest curling club that gave lessons was, and it was simply too far to go every Saturday morning. Curlers don’t really look like other athletes. They look like… just people. Some of them have dad bods. And it doesn’t look hard, does it? Until you think about how difficult it would be to slide a 25-pound rock over a hundred feet of ice. You have to have knees of steel to be the lead (who “throws” the stone) and arms of iron to sweep. And placing stones strikes me as almost a science.

So I watch the curling matches. The other advantage to the sport is that no one is risking their life or their health playing. People have been paralyzed in snowboarding accidents, you could die in a bad skiing accident, and there are fears that bobsledding can cause long term traumatic brain injury similar to that experienced by football players and boxers. I guess if you curled long enough your knees might give out (like a baseball catcher) but that seems like a minor risk.

My second favorite sport after curling is ice dancing. Yes, it lacks all the jumps. But it has an elegance and grace all its own. I have friends who claim ice dance is not a sport, but they’re wrong.

To totally change the subject, why isn’t women’s hockey more widely broadcast? Or maybe it is, and I just missed it. It’s not like I generally watch ice hockey anyway.

There is a hierarchy among the nations for me. I root first for Team USA, and then for South Korea, and then for Ukraine, and then for whatever nation has never won a medal in X sport. I always root for the Jamaican bobsled team because… why not? They’re not a joke anymore. Although they failed to qualify in 2022, in the 1994 Olympics they finished 14th, ahead of the U.S., Russia, Australia and France.

Well, I need to go. There’s a hockey game on.