A sign outside a lounge area in the Athletes' Village on Feb. 5.Carmen Mandato/Getty Images
After you’ve done a couple of them, you begin to see the great pattern that forms an Olympics.
There is the initial wave of excitement. There is the initial, always baroque, always bizarre, scandal. And then, near the end, there’s the drunken hijinks.
You can’t have drunken hijinks at the beginning. It would be unseemly. But in the final days? Absolutely fine. Completely understandable.
This time around, the winning ticket was pulled by Australian TV presenter Danika Mason. She did a live hit from the mountains wherein she slurred her way through a word jumble about the price of coffee and iguanas.
My professional medical diagnosis – somewhere well north of tipsy, but I’d still trust her to watch my purse.
Australians being Australians, they loved it.
“Good on her. She’s over in Italy and she would have been tired,” said the Prime Minister of Australia.
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I’m not super up on Australian politics. Is it a utopia in which all social, financial and political problems have been solved? Because that’s about the only reason the person in charge should have a public opinion on this. At least he has the right one.
I can totally see how this happens. Tools down, late night, fun dinner, someone talks you into ordering the grappa. Then head office, which is 10 hours ahead and has no idea how hard it is being a sports journalist and the many sacrifices we all make and how really they should be erecting statues of us, not the athletes, hits you up on WhatsApp for one last live hit.
What are you going to say? “Sorry, I’m pinned to the gills?”
No, you gut it out. That’s what an Olympian does. Then, somehow, it takes a wrong turn into lizards.
The only down note on this story is that Mason felt the need to apologize. Come on. You’ve never found yourself called in to write at the last minute after guzzling a couple too many vodka martinis, very dry and just a little dirty? Yeah, me neither.
Usually, it’s the athletes who go wobbly at the end. You might remember the shenanigans during the last weekend in Pyeongchang. A Canadian ski cross racer, his wife and a coach were collared after “borrowing” an official car to take them back to the village. Their Olympics was over and they were apparently out on the rip.
Again, had that happened at the beginning, the storyline would have been: “Korea is primed for attack from the north. Little did they know it would be [ominous oboes] Canada.”
We’d have spent the whole Games living it down. The poor guy and his wife would have been chased all over the Korean peninsula. Knowing Canada’s foreign policy MO at the time, someone in charge would have offered an official apology for humble theft auto.
But since it happened at the end, the incident elicited a knowing, collective nod. Yes, three weeks sure is a long time.
The real lesson of Olympic scandal isn’t “don’t do it.” It’s “don’t do it immediately after thousands of foreign journalists have just showed up, ready to spill blood.”
At the beginning, every twitch of the body Olympic is news. By the end, I could pass a ski jumper in full uniform throttling the official mascot at the entrance to the Duomo and would step over both of them in my frenzy to secure a seat at bronze-medal hockey.
What everyone can get, whether here in person or watching at home, is that the Olympics takes a lot out of you. By “you,” I mean everyone who is in any way invested in it.
Sports is meant to pull out emotions, but I’m not sure it’s meant to pull out this many. Maybe you’re feeling this – becoming inexplicably teary whenever an Olympian does. Finding yourself feeling the urge to hug everyone you meet, including cashiers. Wondering why we can’t all love each other the way the short-track relay team loves each other.
I watched the notorious video of the daffy Norwegian skier begging for a second chance with his girlfriend when that happened, 10 days ago. Putting aside his motives, I couldn’t get my head around why he would choose to do that at that moment, in that place.
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I watched it again last night. I get it now. It’s the Olympics. If it makes the rest of us forget ourselves, imagine the effect it has on the people in it. I’m not surprised at the competitors who lose it. I’m surprised at all the others who keep it together.
The other day, I watched a group of Korean journalists watch a Korean snowboarder win a gold medal. This wasn’t live. It was on a TV.
They all erupted in cheers, and then they all cried. I’m not talking shed a tear. I’m talking heaving, bent-at-the-waist sobs of relief. Men and women, of all ages, hugging each other like a judge had just overturned a guilty verdict.
They did this in an enormous media centre, surrounded by a couple of hundred other journalists. No one really remarked on it. Most didn’t even bother looking.
If it happened in a baseball press box, the collective contempt would be felt as a physical force. But the Olympics is a free-fire zone when it comes to emotions.
As such, the Olympics isn’t just about winning. It’s also about forgiving. Forgiving our friends, our enemies and, especially, ourselves. It can be a lot, particularly in such concentrated doses.
So come on in. Take a drink. Take two. You’ve been working too hard. You screwed up? No problem. It happens, and no one who matters is judging.
What matters is that you gave it your all. If you feel the urge, have a nice, long, weep about it. It’s good for you. It’s Olympic.
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