OFF THE MARK: Thoughts on the Winter Olympics

There’s just something about the Winter Olympics.

Somewhere in between the skiers doing backflips 30 feet in mid-air and the lugers cracking 80 miles per hour, it hit me. They are so much more interesting!

And I figured out why.

The sports that comprise the summer games are ones that we grew up doing—wrestling, track, swimming...you name it. Most of us aren’t Olympians, but we know the rules and the basics and can emulate them to some degree.

The winter sports, though? Not so much.

Sure, most of us have been skiing or ice skating, but the idea of flying more than 100 meters through the air off a ski jump or landing a triple Axel is completely foreign to the American population.

It also seems as though the winter games tend to create longer-lasting stars than their warm-weather counterparts.

Granted, we do hear pretty regular references to folks like Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt in the sports world, but Apollo Anton Ohno and Lindsey Vonn seem to stick in our minds (or at least in mine) much more easily.

You don’t even want to know how many people I heard reference the Norwegian curling team’s pants prior to the Sochi games.

Another component of the Winter Olympics’ charm is that it tends to be in more interesting places, or at least in places we’re less familiar with as Americans.

In their 90-year history, the cold-weather games have never been hosted by a city of more than 1 million inhabitants.

By contrast, the Summer Olympics hosts have only been under the 1 million population mark twice since 1980’s Moscow games, and those two occasions—Athens and Atlanta—are both globally known urban areas.

That doesn’t seem to be a trend that will change, either. The next two host cities—Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo—both rank top 30 in the world in population.

It should be noted, especially after the horror and hilarity surrounding Sochi’s under-preparedness for 2014’s edition, that this aspect is perhaps not always in favor the Winter Olympics’ charm. It does, however, certainly make them more interesting.

The Sochi Olympics snuck up on me this year. In fact, I probably didn’t think once in January, “I’m really looking forward to the Olympics.” But once they got going, I was glued to NBC every night I could get home in time to watch them. (Yes, I even watched some ice dancing.)

With the exception of swimming and soccer, I doubt that I’ll say the same for Rio in two years.

There’s just something about the Winter Olympics.