The Winter Olympics
A comprehensively comprehensive preview.
Grab your remote controls, America, because it’s almost time for the Winter Olympics — a chance for you to see, in action, some of the biggest names in international sports competition, by which I primarily mean Snoop Dogg.
Yes, the beloved rap artist and brand spokesperson for an estimated 300 products will once again be part of the NBC Olympics broadcast team, as he was for the 2024 summer games in Paris, where he seemed to pop up everywhere.
I’ll definitely be watching Snoop Inc. and company. I’m a big fan of the Winter Olympics, which I covered as a credentialed media person in 1994 (Lillehammer), 1998 (Nagano) and 2002 (Salt Lake City).
If I had to describe, in one word, the fun and excitement of being a professional journalist at the winter games, that word would be “unpleasant bus rides.” I say this because to get to the competition venues, you often have to travel long distances on winding mountain roads in hot buses filled with members of the international press corps, a group not known for taking regular showers, if you catch my drift. These buses can get very crowded, so you might wind up standing for hours pressed so tightly against an aromatic photographer from some vowel-free nation that by the time you reach your destination one of you is definitely going to have the other one’s baby.
But despite the bus rides, I enjoyed covering the winter games. Once I even got to try my hand at an actual Olympic event, namely curling. This is a sport that originated in Scotland in the 16th century, when some Scottish people, who we can assume were pretty hammered, discovered that if you slid a heavy stone along a frozen surface, and then ran next to the stone frantically sweeping the ice with a broom, you would look like an idiot. From these humble origins curling went on to become hugely popular worldwide, by which I mean in Canada and parts of Wisconsin.
I tried curling at the Nagano Olympics in 1998, under the guidance of the U.S. women’s curling team captain, or “skip,” Lisa Schoeneberg, who graciously gave me a lesson at the Olympic practice facility. It was harder than I expected, because it turns out that ice — nobody warned me about this — is slippery. The first time I tried to slide the stone, I fell down. But after just a few tries, thanks to Lisa’s patient coaching and my natural athletic ability, I continued to fall down. Here I am demonstrating my form as Lisa looks on approvingly.
That was fun, but the best part of the 1998 Olympics, for me, was Police 90. This was a karaoke bar in Nagano that became a hugely popular hangout for both media people and athletes. It was wild scene: You had the international press corps — which in addition to not being known for personal hygiene is also not known for sobriety — and you had actual Olympic competitors, sometimes wearing medals, belting out truly terrible versions of karaoke songs selected from a list of titles written in a language that was vaguely similar to English, so that, for example, the band Los Lobos appeared as “Ros Rovos.”
If you wanted to do a song, you were supposed to put your name on a signup sheet. My fellow columnist Mitch Albom and I signed up to sing the absolute worst song we could find on the list, which was “Johnny Get Angry,” the 1962 hit by Joanie Sommers about a girl who, wanting her boyfriend to be more assertive in expressing his feelings toward her, sings: “Johnny get angry, Johnny get mad! Give me the biggest lecture I ever had! I want a BRAVE man! I want a CAVE man!” And if that’s not enough to convince you of the badness of this song, consider this: It has a kazoo solo.
Needless to say Mitch and I were excited about performing this song, but when our turn came, the karaoke microphone — there was only one — had disappeared, although we could hear male voices bellowing into it from somewhere deep in the crowd. So as the intro to “Johnny Get Angry” began to play, Mitch, with me trailing, plunged fearlessly into this roaring, drunken mob, where he managed to locate the microphone, which was in the meaty grip of what I believe was the Austrian four-man bobsled team. (I am not making any of this up.) The Austrians did NOT want to relinquish the microphone, and they outweighed Mitch by a combined total of roughly half a ton, but he somehow wrested it away from them in time for us to sing almost the entirety of “Johnny Get Angry.” Talk about a proud Olympic moment for America.
Speaking of which: The other highlight of that evening was that I got to hold a silver medal that had been won by an American, Gordy Sheer, in the two-man luge. He was with his teammate Brian Martin, who had won a bronze in the same event. A group of Americans had gathered around to congratulate them, and we decided we should celebrate their medals by singing our national anthem. Unfortunately Police 90’s list of karaoke songs did not include “The Star Spangled Banner,” so we had to settle for singing the most patriotic-American-sounding title they had, which was “The Red River Valley.” It’s not the most upbeat song, but at least it doesn’t have a kazoo solo.
My point is that except for the bus rides, I have fond memories of the Winter Olympics, and I’m looking forward to watching this year’s games. They’re being held in Italy, which is an ideal location from the standpoint of access to Italian cuisine. Unfortunately it’s not so great from the standpoint of engaging in winter sports, because Italy, thanks to — you guessed it — global climate change, currently has approximately the same annual snowfall accumulation as Guam. As a result the organizers will have to manufacture a massive amount of artificial snow, which involves the use of chemicals, although an official spokesperson insists that there is “virtually no risk” to the health of skiers or snowboarders, “as long as they don’t fall down.”
Another potential Olympic headache is the ice hockey arena, which has been plagued by construction delays. This is a chronic problem in Italy, which is littered with unfinished buildings like this one:
As it stands now, the Olympic ice hockey arena will be mostly finished in time for the games, but because of plumbing problems there probably won’t be any actual ice. This means the hockey competition could consist entirely of players punching each other. As a result the current gold-medal favorite is Cuba, which until this week didn’t even have a hockey team.
The good news is, the ice skating arena is finished. This means we’ll be able to watch the most dramatic and telegenic of all Winter Olympics sports: figure skating, with its unique blend of athleticism and mascara. The U.S. team is strong this year, but as always they will face tough competition from the Russians, who reportedly have developed a technique that enables their male skaters to throw their female partners as high as 30 feet into the air. “They’re going to be tough to beat,” predicted one analyst, “assuming they can solve the problem of the landings.”
This concludes my comprehensive preview of the 2026 winter games. Now let’s hear from you paying subscribers, who in my opinion are the gold medalists of subscribers.
If your ears are infested with worms, the best dewormer is Warren Zevon's "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner", a fun lighthearted song about a Norwegian mercenary murdered by a CIA mercenary. It's from the album "Excitable Boy" which has the song "Excitable Boy" about a psychotic serial killer, and also a song about werewolves. Oh, and the Official Miami Theme Song, "Lawyers, Guns, and Money".
How was it even a possibility that you, baked as you are by the FLORIDA SUN, could have been a CREDENTIALED reporter for the WInter Olympics? Do you Own a winter coat ? Can you explain the difference between a balaclava and BAKLAVA? Were you, at some point the official Vodka taster for the US delegation ? And have you written extensively about the primitive conditions in the athletes’ dorms; the cardboard beds, the malfunctioning BIDETS, and the availability of souvenir Olympic condoms in the dorms?