Dialogue: All play and little sport

The Winter Olympics are made up of games not worthy of the title sport, says PAMELA WADE.

So, nineteen winter Olympiads, is it? This is political correctness gone mad: the International Olympic Committee hijacked by the Scandinavian nations and forced to let them turn to their advantage the rigours of their subarctic winter.

Nobody ever comes anywhere near Norway in the medals tally - such a refreshing change for them after so many long years of getting nowhere in the Eurovision Song Contest.

With the competition including entrants from such noticeably snow-free countries as the British Virgin Islands and Kenya, this is not likely to change.

This is not about bad sportsmanship, like complaining that nations such as Australia and America do so well at particular sports because they cheat by spending money on their promising athletes and then send teams as big as armies. This is about the Winter Olympics not being sport at all.

Let's get real here: cast your mind back to Sydney two years ago. Think about the focus and power of the men's 100m, Cathy Freeman's final glorious burst, the frenzied white water of the swimming medleys, the straining muscles in the rowing, the phenomenal spring of the high-jumpers. Now, that was sport.

We could see the effort involved, we could feel the excitement, we could appreciate the years of dedication and training it took to get to that level.

What is more, these are activities that have been literally a matter of life and death for us in our ancient and more recent history. They were how we hunted our food and escaped or conquered enemies. They deserve our respect.

Compare them with the frankly quite silly events being enacted in Salt Lake City, and you'll see that there is no comparison.

I mean, moguls: give me strength! Watch the so-called athletes fling themselves off the top of a slope and, to the undoubted smug delight of orthopaedic surgeons in their home countries, test their knees to destruction over a course comprising umpteen mini-igloos and finally leap into the air a couple of times, getting extra points for waving their arms and (I can hardly believe this) wiggling their bottoms. They cannot be serious.

Nor is it easy to give any credibility to the cross-country skiers, waddling up the slopes like a great flock of Muscovy ducks, and about as exciting to watch, and then meekly stepping into pre-cut grooves to glide back down again in strict single file. Not much in the way of competitive cut-and-thrust there, I'm afraid.

The speed skaters are presumably extremely fit and certainly well-honed, judging by the bulge of muscles under their skin-tight suits, though their similarity to Spiderman is unfortunate and makes the whole thing seem less than real.

It's the same with their actual racing: they may be scooting along, scattering world records as they go, but there's no sensation of speed. Quite the opposite. They glide along in their deceptively leisurely way, clasping their hands behind their backs like Prince Charles, with the same soporific effect he has.

Would you consider bungy-jumping a sport? Of course not. Yet, in their basic elements of foolish bravado and senseless risk-taking, the luge and its madder variation, the Skeleton, are very little different. Watch me hurtle headfirst down a super-slick chute full of chicanes and sudden dips, on nothing bigger than a tea-tray. Is this really the sort of behaviour we should be condoning?

The figure-skating is entrancing, admittedly. The sparkly skirts fluttering in the breeze, the bright colours against the pure white ice, the flash of the blades, the stirring music. It's dramatic and spectacular and thrilling. But it's not sport. It's theatre. It's the Icecapades with an international cast.

You would happily pay to go to see it with the family, buying ice-cream and souvenir pennants at intermission, and go home humming the catchy tunes. It's not real competition, which gets your pulse racing and stops your breath and whitens your knuckles. It's just a fancy skill.

The thing is, all of these activities are descended from one ancestral event: the first step onto ice or packed snow and discovering that it is slippery. It must have been a virtually simultaneous discovery that slipping and sliding, while alarming, are also wonderful fun.

And that is why the Winter Olympics are a farce.

However much you surround them with all the ritual and solemn mumbo-jumbo of the real Olympics, we all recognise, if only subconsciously, that these are just people playing.

It may be entertaining, but it isn't sport, it isn't proper competition, and it really doesn't deserve the honour of its title.

And if only the IOC had the gumption to stand up to 5 million or so angry Norwegians, we could all be spared the absurdity of a 20th repetition.

* Pamela Wade is an Auckland writer.