Icy and snow

The Winter Olympics are Olympicing, and it’s quite nice to see Australia compete in something we are so effortlessly terrible at. Australia is not generally a snowy place, except in the mountains and then only in the wintertime – not for us the year round snow of some places, or the slushy streets of others. So therefore, a wintery sporty person is pretty unusual, and our standards are uniformly low.

I don’t want to cast aspersions upon our Aussie Athletes, mostly because doing so would result in my being deported.  We are, for some reason best known to someone who isn’t me, a Sporting Nation and therefore we Glory in Sport in a way that would be creepy if it wasn’t so damn National Pridey.

Coverage of the games over the last couple of days has focused almost entirely on one of our sporting gals who landed herself a gold medal by not falling over while landing, which is nice for her. Well done lady.

I enjoy the winter games usually, because it’s stuff we don’t tend to see, and there’s a far higher chance of amusing falling over than there is in say, cricket. Nothing warms my heart like a lass in a tiny dress landing on her bum on the ice. I’m a terrible person, but you knew that. Sadly, coverage this year is mostly things we’re okay at, with miffed commentators barely holding their dismay as we are placed 9th.

Really, as a nation, we should be happy they even let us play. Since most of our wintery sports people train outside Australia most of the time (due to the aforementioned lack of snow here), much of the population has never heard of them.  The only reason anyone remembers the gold medal of Bradbury is because he got it when the rest of the field fell over.

The commentators of the ice skating are so amazingly bias toward Australia too, which is part hilarious, part irritating. A flawless skate by another nation might be greeted with a “excellent” or “well done”.  If they fall over, the commentators will scream “Oh they’ve lost it, they’ve lost it!”. Our skater lands on her arse and slides practically off the ice and we hear “Slight slip up there”.

I’m having terrible trouble finding a highlights package of the falling over bits though.