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The Winter Olympics are here! And by that I mean they actually, quietly, started last Wednesday. If you’re into preliminary mixed doubles curling or men’s singles training group luging, YOU BLEW IT!
Meanwhile the Opening Ceremony occurred Friday morning in America and aired Friday night in America. Olympics in a faraway timezone, like Beijing, always screw with our space-time continuum. It’s confusing, and that’s okay!
I am not here to parse out when all that stuff happens because I don’t work for NBC Universal, and I don’t have one of those crime procedural cork boards handy (they are all filled up with some things I’m currently looking into).
What I am here to disseminate to you dummies is the stuff that you should most be watching at this month’s games.
Without further ado, here are the 10 Best Olympic Sports to Watch!
Let the games begin!
10. Ski Jumping
We watch this dumb event every four years, and it’s 90 percent hoping you don’t see someone break their leg into smithereens and 10 percent realizing it’s just a dramatic physics lesson. While ski jumping can be exhilarating, it’s mostly repetitive cringe. GIF-ing is the ideal form of ski jumping, because you never have to get to the terrifying part! It’s like if Jack Nicholson kept swinging the axe into the door but never made any progress!
9. Figure Skating
Yeah, I am that guy. Figure skating is generally overrated. Oh, you disagree, and you love it so much? Okay, then tell me what the difference between an axel and a toe loop is. Go ahead and watch any of those jumps and tell me what the difference is. How about you watch the jump and tell me if it’s a triple or a quad. I’ll bet you can’t. If you watched figure skating without the sound on you’d be lost. It’s nice and dramatic but it’s not a better watch than anything below.
8. Bobsled/Luge/Skeleton
I know there are enough stand up comedy bits on this but this one comes down to preference on how you like your vehicular manslaughter. Do you want it via a metal car (bobsled), on a sled (luge), or on a sled head first (skeleton)?
I actually really like watching these because they are quick and fun, no matter if the athletes do really well or really poorly. Those little split times on the screen are exciting to track and helpful in making us all experts on each turn. “OOOOH I THINK THAT ONE WAS A LITTLE LOOSE,” says me, King Shit of Sno-tube Mountain.
7. Snowboard/Skiing Halfpipe
This event rules. You get lots of jumps and tricks, and it’s straightforward. Work your way through the halfpipe nailing a sequence of tricks, spins, and grabs. What happens if you fall and get stuck at the bottom of the pipe? You pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work your way back to the top!
6. Hockey
A sport that is much more fun in-person than on television. It may be unfair to call this the sixth best thing to watch when Olympic hockey has pretty much given us the greatest overtold underdog story and sporting moment of all time. But unless we get a U.S./Canada or U.S./Russia match up, men’s and women’s hockey isn’t your Cold War grandfather’s hockey and lacks the excitement compared to some of the shorter-form events. It does get bonus points for the rarely still usable “U-S-A” chant.
5. Snowboard/Skiing Slopestyle
Slopestyle basically means obstacle course. Skiers and snowboarders make their way through the downhill course, executing jumps and tricks off of built-in ramps and rails. It’s a judged event, which takes away some of the greatness, but still gives us a nice hybrid of speed and style.
4. Downhill Skiing
The creme de la creme of downhill events. This one is fast, dangerous, and has the fewest rules. Whether or not you are a skier, you’ll get it immediately. You don’t need to slalom anything. Just stay within the lines, and see you at the finish line. Keep your eyes on the screen as they occasionally flash the speeds of the skiers.
3. Short Track Speed Skating
This used to be my favorite Winter Olympic sport. Like downhill skiing, it’s a simple race, in premise. But when you pack the ice with skaters in close proximity, grace and balance become as important as speed. You need to be aggressive but also able to get the hell out of the way of others when their aggressiveness becomes recklessness.
Short track speed skating comes in many varieties, and I would recommend sampling them all. The individuals, the relays, the sprints, and the longer races. A perfectly clean race is just as much fun as a race mucked up with jostling and the dreaded slide out.
Fun fact! The name “short track” refers to the actual length of the lap, and not the length of the race. Short loops are better than longer loops and infinitely better than Fruit Loops, which are a lie, because they all taste the same. Shame on you Fruit Loops.
2) Snowboard Cross
Okay, picture this. A downhill—but not too steep—snowboard race between four people, but there are twists and turns, obstacles and ramps leading to some big air jumps. Athletes have to navigate through these things as they race to the finish line. You get all the high-flying fun of other snowboard events, with the adrenaline of a race to the bottom of the hill.
It’s a fast event that has lots of places to trip you up… if your opponents don’t do that to you while you jockey for position on the inside line. Here is a video of the first year the event was held, and stick around for the incredible final moments!
Without further ado… the number one best Winter Olympic sport to watch is….
Not curling. You thought number one would be curling because the Winter Olympics are the Curling equinox. The one time you remember they exist. Because you love bar shuffleboard. I get that—so do I! And I even teased it in the photo at the top of the article. But NO! Curling isn’t actually fun to watch and is just like losing your virginity: You generally get the gist of it, and the scoring is not as straightforward as it seems. Unlike losing your virginity, matches take an eternity.
Anyways, the number one best event to watch is one I have actually never even watched before, because it debuted at the last set of games, in PyeongChang, and I missed it! Not this year!
1. Speed Skating Mass Start
Take what you know about the awesomeness of speed skating. Add more people! Make it a longer race! BOOM! Speed Skating Mass Start. Here’s how U.S. Speedskater Joey Mantia described it:
“NASCAR on ice. There is bumping, there is drafting, there is strategy… It’s definitely more exciting to watch than standard long-track races.”
Mass Start may give us up to 24 skaters on the ice at once, competing to finish 16 laps as fast as possible, while navigating through a hell of a lot of opponents.
And the best part is, unlike NASCAR, the race only takes about eight minutes. Grab your phone and set a reminder for February 19th, because that’s the day the men and women compete in it.
Interested in Power Ranking of the Scariest Winter Olympic Events? Here’s a guide!)
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