Another Winter Olympics has come and gone. It had some moments.
I’m not a huge Olympics watcher — not even for the big nationalistic showdowns — and honestly many of the events are positively ridiculous.
Like, how many people on the planet are doing luge or bobsled? There should be some minimum accessibility/participation floors for sports to be included, and events that require enormous facilities yet only have a tiny handful of involved athletes worldwide probably shouldn’t make the cut.
Kudos to Norway and the Netherlands on just completely dominating again. These countries absolutely owned cross-country skiing and speed skating, respectively, and should be proud of such a stunning overachievement. And to be fair, cross-country skiing and speed skating are both fairly accessible, or at least the base competencies are.
And congrats to the US on winning gold in both gender divisions of hockey. Great performances, and the US dominated opponents in seeding rounds so thoroughly they looked unbeatable. Did not think those games would make it to overtime.
Though the aftermath of that win, particularly the men’s hockey team, has been…well, unfortunate. From the most unathletic FBI director ever trying to steal some of that glory on the taxpayer’s dime, in just a grotesquely inappropriate “me too!” bit of selfishness, to Trump pushing AI fantasies about how he’d win the gold himself and beat up Canadian players, all while dismissing the women’s hockey team’s accomplishment…good god. Just world-level sore-winner cringe.
Unbelievably pathetic, third-world despot type behaviour. North Korea-level stuff. Teams turned into political pawns to try to scrabble for some win among a year of chaos and losing.
Congrats on the win. It’s too bad a political movement tarnished it for their own gain. These vile goblins try to drag everyone down with them, and anyone foolish enough to help normalize their deplorable, childish behaviour has to be considered a willing participant.