Dialogue: Feeling good about coming in 27th

By DIANA WICHTEL

I was never much good at games. Not unless the game in question involved something like knowing the entire lyrics to the theme song from Mr Ed. (Don't scoff. Believe me, there are traps for the unwary in that little ditty.)

But I just don't get sport. I'm reminded of this by the withering looks I get when I brave the testosterone-laden atmosphere of our living room during the cricket to inquire, "Are we winning?" As I now realise, you have to analyse many factors in cricket - how many runs to how many wickets, how many overs left, the state of the pitch - before you watch our team lose.

Which is why I quite like the Winter Olympics, in a masochistic kind of way. It's the only international event where we can feel good about coming 27th, and it confuses everyone.

Take Australian Stephen Bradbury's gold medal in the speed skating. Such headlines as "Parents thought he'd come last" have confirmed that he wasn't exactly a favourite. The Aussie battler's strategy, he later admitted, was to sit at the back and hope everyone else fell over. They did! An inspirational story, really.

Even the experts often find it all perplexing. "What that has to do with skating and a sporting event is completely beyond me", spat an exasperated commentator as a couple in the figure skating free dance cavorted to a speech by Martin Luther King.

I think it was the same guy who huffed, "I have to say that borders on being quite nonsensical", at one judge's wildly inflated score during the men's figure skating short programme (and those programmes can't be short enough for me).

You can't blame him for being grumpy. There was the messy business of the Canadians being initially done out of their gold medal by the Russians in the figure skating. Even I could see the Canadians were the best. When the Olympic ideal of fostering ties between nations was formulated, I don't think bribing each other's judges was quite what they had in mind.

Figure skating may look like Mills and Boon but it's more like The Sopranos. There was that nasty incident in 1994 when Nancy Kerrigan got her knee whacked. I blame all that spinning. It isn't natural.

At least the skaters provide some glamour. It's hard to be glamorous in all those other events, which essentially involve falling downhill while encased in a novelty condom.

Bodies are, after all, a major part of the Olympic tradition. The Ancient Greeks competed in the nude, though at least one historian believes this is only because an Ancient Greek athlete's shorts slipped down and he fell over, allowing an Australian to win.

Women figure skaters are bravely doing their bit to maintain the classical ideal by getting their kits off. There was a Russian competitor in the free dance who wore a sort of thong and little else. The couple's entire routine seemed designed to point her backwards at the camera while her skirt flapped around her waist. Still, I suppose there's a limit to how many clothes you can wear when you're clamped upside down to a man's leg. Or being tossed across the rink. Or being used to mop up the ice.

My theory is that winter sport is a sort of evolutionary cul de sac, the result of peoples adapting over eons to living in places that were largely unfit for human habitation before the invention of strong drink. Those who could move fastest across the ice in the opposite direction to something huge and hungry survived to become the ancestors of Stephen Bradbury.

This accounts for the luge. It allows you to move fast while confusing predators by appearing to be dead. Curling, on the other hand, makes no evolutionary sense. Who needs brooms and stones when you can use a woman?

If you've ever wondered what it looks like to do the luge without a sled, this year the Venezuelan competitor in the women's singles obliged with a demonstration. Youch. Then there's the aptly named skeleton, where some lunatic decided it would be much more fun to do it head-first, like a sort of jet-propelled rebirthing experience. Watching a New Zealander compete in this event raised that perennial question: are they mad?

Take ski jumpers. These nuts are airborne for so long they must qualify for air points. Then there are the aerialists, who launch themselves 70 feet into the air, then point their heads at the ground. On purpose.

Which raises another perennial question. Is it sport? These days, the question should really be, what isn't? Few things are important enough to disrupt normal television programming for days on end. Among them are the death of the Princess of Wales, a terrorist attack on New York, and curling.

Sport has taken over from the circus, vaudeville and bear-baiting as the main entertainment of the masses. Once, reality television meant following people around with a camera. Now it means putting them into teams and making them compete against each other. The world increasingly resembles a giant, electronic coliseum.

The upside is that modern technology could soon allow viewers at home to judge the figure skating. We could hardly do any worse.