Is there any reason to get excited about the Winter Olympics?
Jan 30, 2018, 3:22 PM | Updated: 3:22 pm
(AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
Quick — name an Olympian besides Lindsey Vonn.
I bring this up because believe it or not, the Winter Olympics start in a little over a week in South Korea.
I am not feeling the buzz —at all. Am I on the outside looking in here? Are there a bunch of US athletes that I should know and care about?
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Admittedly, I don’t closely follow figure skating or competitive luge. But I usually catch the Olympic bug and have a working understanding of who to root for.
Not this year. Not for the Winter Olympics.
I recently went to see the Oscar nominated movie “I, Tonya.” It’s a quasi-documentary style take on the Tonya Harding vs. Nancy Kerrigan saga from the 1990s. It’s a really good movie, you should go check it out just to see Allison Janney play Tonya Harding’s mother, but I digress.
What makes part of the movie work is that you can name drop Olympic skaters, even three decades later, and people have heard of them. Katarina Witt, Oksana Baiul, and the aforementioned Nancy Kerrigan. I don’t know if they were household names, but people definitely knew who they were.
We are one week away from, supposedly, the greatest spectacle in sport, and I have no idea who is representing the USA. Where are the Apollo Anton Ohnos and Dan Jansens? Where are the Michelle Kwans and the Travis Moselys?
Is that Flying Tomato Can dude still doing his thing on a snowboard?
Maybe there’s been a bazillion commercials, and I just don’t watch enough network TV anymore. Maybe we really stink this year, and we’re not going win any medals.
I’m scratching my head as to why NBC paid $963 million dollars for the rights to broadcast the Winter Olympics games. Supposedly, they will be streaming more than 1,800 hours of coverage.
Maybe I’ll get into it this week. Can someone tell me who to root for?
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