I love the Winter Olympics. Love it. I watch almost everything. I watch the hockey, I watch the alpine skiing events, I watch the sliding events, I watch the cross country skiing and the biathlon - it’s skiing AND shooting! I watch the speed skating (note to Sven Kramer: “What are you stupid?”). I even watch some of the curling. “The USA has a curling team? Awesome, TiVo it I’ll watch it while I’m running on the treadmill!” (Side note: Why is men’s and women’s curling segregated? Can women curlers not hold their own with the men? Keep it segregated I say, all the more curling events for me to watch). I watch the snowboard cross and the ski cross, I watch the aerials, the moguls, the ski jumping, and the halfpipe. It’s all very good. I do draw the line at the ice dancing though. When the ice dancing comes on that’s when I catch up on the other shows I’ve been neglecting in order to watch the Olympics.
The other night I was watching... I don’t even remember what event I was watching but I had a thought. You know what the Winter Olympics needs? A marathon. The marathon is the pinnacle of the Summer Olympics, you can argue that the 100m is watched by more people or that the swimming gets more coverage, but none of the other events have their medal ceremony incorporated into the closing ceremony. Only the marathon winners get to receive their medals during the closing ceremony of the Olympics. It’s like a tip o’ the hat to the marathon as the original Olympic event, so why not have a Winter Olympic Marathon too?
Now the Winter Olympics likes to have a bit of an X Games feel to it and we’d have to make some changes to the Winter Olympics Marathon course to keep with that theme. The race would be held in and around the host city so it would be a cold weather marathon. Perhaps the race would actually be an ultra marathon, what’s more X-treme than that? The course could traverse deep snow fields and treacherous frozen lakes, maybe it would even have transition areas so the runners could change into snow shoes or spiked shoes for the different sections. The runners could run up one side of a mountain and down the other side, it would make Heartbreak Hill look like a pimple. I think it would be a great event, but unfortunately we will have to wait for the next Winter Olympics to incorporate this idea because the Canadians would have tried to make the down hill portion of the race faster and more dangerous, eh.
Sounds good to me!! Would love to see them running in the cold and snow...better them then me. :)
ReplyDeleteIce dancing makes pairs figure skating look like a tough-man's sport.
ReplyDeleteI think all the running events should have a cross-country skiing correlative. The sprints would be comical and the marathon would be brutal ... and probably deadly.
Horrible idea. The Winter Olympics already sucks throbbing animal appendages - we less events, not more!
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ReplyDeleteI like everything about the Winter Olympics too! How can you not like an event that goes by the name of 'Skeleton' and is there anything more hilariously out of control than 4 persons flailing downhill on a ski cross race? As for a marathon by all means yes but of course it would have to be a full 26.2 cross-country skiing marathon.
ReplyDeleteI think we need a running biathalon in the summer games. Running and shooting - that's teaching survival skills for after the apocalypse.
ReplyDeleteAs a daredevil Canadian we don't need a marathon in the Winter Olympics...we have our marquee event in the Men's Hockey Gold medal game. It's the last event and usually has so much excitement and is shared by a team, and nation not by just one individual.
ReplyDeleteGo Canada :D
you Americans are just too pansy-assed to handle our downhills ;)
ReplyDeleteI love this plan! My only request be that they wear some sort of wacky "uniform" since it seems that is the tie that binds the winter olympic sports together. What a crazy mix of outfits- both within and between events!
ReplyDeleteThey should make one of those cross country skiing events into a marathon-like event. That would be something!
ReplyDeleteThe marathon wasn't the original Olympic event.
ReplyDeleteOnly for the Olympics in the modern era was the marathon an original event. I say we go back to the original Olympics and bring back chariot racing. There's so much more chance for bloodshed in that. Now that's entertainment!
ReplyDeleteIf we are gonna harken back to "original" events, should the athletes then be nude? THAT would make for some outstanding NBC coverage!
ReplyDeleteA marathon might be too safe for the winter olympics. There has to be something life threatening involved. Maybe the marathoners could shoot guns in the middle (at each other?) and do some ariel flips down hills. I bet Ryan Hall would be great at that.
ReplyDeleteWinter marathon. Genius. Marathons span the seasons, so it could fit in both. We runners are that good. We span seasons.
ReplyDeleteSounds good to me!
ReplyDeleteThey do hold the 50km cross-country skiing event on the last day, so I think that counts as the marathon, no?
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