You've got guys on snow or ice, who have to perform under difficult conditions, showing grace, balance, skill, and yes power all together.

I LOVE it.

The wild exuberance of the snowboard folks. The grace and skill and balance of the skiers, who perform at astonishing speeds. The grace and artistic beauty of the Ice Dancing women who are stunning. The sheer guts of the cross country endurance folks or the speed of the speed skaters.

Kevin Drum doesn't like it because the sports emphasize balance and grace and the athletes are recognizably human instead of comic book physiques.

For me, in all this, there's also a strong resonance with the subtext of the movie "Strictly Ballroom". In a telling moment, one of the apoplectic superannuated but highly-situated-in-ballroom-dancing figures says in a mixture of fear and outrage, to his equally outraged cronies, "If you don't know the steps, you can't teach the steps!"

...meaning "We'll all be out of jobs! (if we let this whippersnapper do whatever he wants and win the Pan Pacific Championship)".

For the would-be top figures in dancing in that movie, "making it" meant that they could stop having to work their day jobs as landscapers, hot tub salesmen or what have you, and open a dance studio where they could bask in their glory, maybe crank out a few high-priced "secrets of winning ballroom" DVDs, and coast.

Having FUN? Grow UP.

Do see the movie if you haven't. It's a fine piece of work (for a chick flick :) )

And don't get me started on the cannabis + snowboarding tip. What're the athletic unions going to do? claim that it enhances performance? Hmmmm.

There is literally only one "sport" in the winter Olympics that I recognize as a sport. Biathlon.

By the way, "Strictly Ballroom" is on my top-ten list of all movies -- much better than the whole lot of ballroom dance movies that followed -- unlike any other dance movie, it takes itself so unseriously, and whatever message it has to the ballroom world, that message equally applies to the figure skating, gymnastics, competitive cheerleading, etc. worlds. The people in the movie were serious, but the movie was unserious about the subject to serve as serious satire.

As to the seriousness of sports and games, there is this phenomenon of the adult world I called "Hey, look at me!" If I were ever to do a serious social-cultural documentary on this, I would chronical 1) the National Flute Association Convention, 2) a model railroad show, and 3) the EAA Oshkosh fly-in of experimental aircraft -- these three events are really all the same thing. But if I did that, it would be my "Hey, look at me" for making the documentary.

"Hey, look at me" dawned on me one fine August afternoon in Oshkosh, Wisconsin when the antique air racers made exhibition passes over the airfield. After the third pass, we all kind of got the idea what the antique air racers looked like in flight, but no, the air racers were not through until the 7th, 8th, or more pass while the audience started to get bored with the whole proceeding. There was one air-racer plane with a hornet's buzz coming from the propeller that was faster than the rest of the air racers; the plane kept passing everybody and he got in 9, 10 or 11 passes.

The idea was no longer to entertain the crowd. The concept was "Hey, look at me!" I put my life savings into this antique air racer, I am within a hair-breadth of divorce on account of all the time I put in, and I have slaved for hours restoring this thing, it is my time slot to show off at EAA and get the envy of fellow pilots, so I am just going to keep flying orbits around the field until the audience is fidgeting waiting for the next act.

I am not sure if the Olympics, however, are "Hey, look at me!" They were at one time, but they have become, "Hey, look at my kid!" The idea of the "Chariots of Fire" style amateur Olympic athlete has been gone for at least 50 years if not more. The modern athlete is kind of like the Saturday Night Live satire of Tiger Woods where the pretend Earl Woods Sr. proudly talks about his son while the pretend Earl "Tiger" Woods Jr. complains about the time his dad glued the golf club to his hands. If the Olympic athletes seem joyless, it is probably on account of "Hey, look at me" by proxy for their parents.