The start of the Olympics seems as good a time as any for a post about the meaning of sports games. Lets start by layout out what the modern Olympics represent:

• A contest among nations, since the teams are selected by National Olympic Committees (NOCs) to represent their countries.
• A political platform for host and participating nations (and sometimes athletes). Any number of examples may come to mind, because politics has been embedded in the idea of hosting and attending the Games from the beginning. See https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/history-political-activism-olympics-rio/
• A ‘brand’ that is controlled by the International Olympic Committee. Every four years, the IOC awards some country the privilege of spending huge sums of money to build what often becomes a financial boondoggle. Advertisers, media outlets, and sponsors pay to be associated with the history and legacy of the Games.
• The most widely-covered venue for elite athletes, especially in little-known sports like XC skiing. Athletes want to be recognized for their work and achievements just like anyone else. And see their face put on cereal boxes.

To paraphrase von Clausewitz on war: The Olympics is politics by another means.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that for the IOC, money and politics have top priority, the sport is third, the athletes and competitors last.

Points and competition

Ninety-two nations are participating in the Milan-Cortina Olympics. Of 66 nations whose athletes will be taking part in cross-country races, only 15 qualified a team. Thirty-three have just one or two athletes competing, and another 26 are sitting out the XC races. Rules of qualification for cross-country skiing allow no more than 16 athletes, 8 male and 8 female per nation. Qualifications are based on World Cup points in certain races. For those nations with many athletes who are fully qualified, the selection is harsh. Most nations struggle to exceed the minimum.

At the same time, the rules also allow qualification by athletes who aren’t competitive with the professionals. This troubles some  racers, including the hosts of the Skirious Problems YouTube channel. The IOC’s rules set a lower threshold for cross-country skiers compared to other sports (eg, running), and this may mean some pro athletes don’t get a chance. A corollary argument is that the Olympics is a platform for athletes to secure sponsorship and promote the sport in their home countries.

There seems to be some reasonable concern about the seriousness of some participants, from the perspective of a World Cup athlete:

• In past Olympics certain competitors may have used entry to the Games as a form of adventure tourism, ie, participation for a one-time personal goal.
• Some governments or National Olympic Committees may have seen advantage in the publicity of a remarkable or unexpected entry, shrugging off developing worthy competition as well as the Olympic spirit.

We might recall pre-Instagram/Tiktok wildcard entries like Eddie the Eagle and the Jamaican Bobsled team. IMHO calling them out is unkind because their dreams seemed authentic if outsize. For that reason they remain uniquely, even fondly, memorable. More recent wildcard entries feel somewhat performative, a problem that might be perceptual as well as actual.

Competitive athletes want to test their strengths and capacities. The way to find out is to compete with their peers. To them, the less skilled might seem unworthy, or perhaps just unpredictable.

Politics

In order for the Olympics to retain its brand as a festival of international friendship through competitive sports, all nations have to have a pathway to participate. But it’s not easy to develop world-class athletes in any sport, and low-snow or no-snow nations have cause to ask what relevance skiing has for them. If an individual approaches a small country’s NOC and offers to represent them (and if necessary receive some kind of residency status), then this might be seen as cost-effective PR.

The price of entry for nations without a ski culture is steep, and not just because of the money. Athletes from smaller countries may move to Europe for training in order to qualify. Add in the ancillary costs of waxing, coaching, diet, absence of crucial emotional support, and it’s clear this is a real threshold problem for Cross-country ski racing individually, proportional to distance from European venues and cultural heritage.

Nordic skiing is a highly developed sport, by which I mean the equipment, techniques, and places to do it have evolved in concert with commerce, infrastructure, and a specific sensibility exemplified by Scandinavia and (to a lesser degree in the case of XC) the Alps. For example:

• The greatest number of XC skis sold are for use on groomed trails or prepared terrain. The industry has grown to primarily serve the needs of recreational tourism and sport at resorts in Europe.
• Technique and skills as taught reinforce the above. Teaching, sport, and recreational skiing up to the intermediate level have an expectation they will be done on well-groomed and prepared trails.
• FIS rules for race course design specify certain types and percentages of elevation gain/loss and other qualities. The process of ‘homologation’ results  in race courses that are similar and also tough to ski. They’re designed as race courses, not for skiing the way a person would across a natural snow covered landscape.

Touring centers separate the competition trails from the regular ones, so the recreational and athletic tourism end of XC is still a fun activity, and useful to learn the subtleties of technique. A skier can then take skills from trails to wilderness and have a better time than one who is unschooled.

Standards are needed so that the athletes from different nations know what to train for, no matter where they come from. Setting aside what I think may be a bit of gatekeeping by professional and elite athletes about this, there’s a valid point to maintaining a level of equivalence in racing.

Nordic skiing admittedly has a history and culture tied to the attitudes of Europe and Scandinavia since around the 18th century (13th if we want to use the story of the Birkebeiners as an origin). Distant as modern cross-country ski racing is to its mythos, we still want Olympic participants to do respect to the sport.

The politics I can find some fault with are in the very acceptance of things as they are:

• Mixing the popularized ideal of the Olympics with the points system of professional cross-country ski racing. Overall it feels false and uncomfortable.
• That the evolution of Nordic skiing in one small region is what it should be for everyone. It ignores the most likely true origins of skiing and the ways people continue to travel over snow on foot.

I truly enjoy skiing with all its influences from Scandinavia and racing, but it’s also possible to see some aspects of it as exclusive and limiting, to the detriment of the sport.

Play

The Olympics presents itself as something more than just competition. It’s also called the Games because in some way it’s supposed to be for the fun of seeing what people from different cultures can do.

According to the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, games are fun when detached from real stakes. We have the freedom to choose how to play a game and which game to play from many choices. Think for instance about variations of rules for playing board games or  cards. Universally adopted metrics (eg, scores, finish times, medals) on the other hand, lead people to focus on improving the thing being measured, something Nguyen calls ‘value capture’. The prestige of competing in the Olympics and winning a medal has real value for individual athletes. This begs the question: are athletes playing to see how they do or for an external reward? It’s both, but the fun is all in the precise balance of values, and there are many stakeholders in the Olympics.

There was a moment in the 2018 Pyongchang Olympics when the winner of the men’s 15k race extended a bridge of acknowledgement to the losers. The Swiss skier Dario Cologna won the race then hung out at the stadium for 36 minutes (longer than it took him to complete the course), in order to congratulate the last-place finishers. He greeted skiers representing Morocco, Ecuador, Portugal, Tonga, and finally Mexico. Through his gentlemanly act, he demonstrated fellowship with everyone who came out to play.

Every four years a snow-rich nation invites snow-poor nations to try and compete outside their home turf, in sports that are unfamiliar to their climate and culture. This seems like a strange way to promote sports and friendship. What is a snowsport in areas with little or no reliable snow? How do people in those regions get to play and have fun with something in which they have little or no direct experience or history? How could their representation at the Olympics become something more than performative PR?

I’ll try to put a positive take on those questions using experience in my region of the United States. You rarely find anyone in the NYC metro or suburbs saying they love winter. The popular opinion is winter is terrible and to wish we could get away from itt. New York City dwellers have a multitude of reasons to dread a large snowfall like the one we had two weeks ago. It makes sidewalks narrow and icy, corners messy with slush, and trash piles uglier. Parents of small children destroy their strollers bashing them through the leftover piles of snow. And despite the reprieve from parking rules if your car is buried in drifts pushed against it by snowplows, it’s a heck of a chore getting it out.

Yet right after that snowstorm there were tens of thousands of families, adults and teens out in parks to play in the transformed landscape. People took literally anything that might slide – slabs of cardboard, lids from plastic storage containers – just to see what they could do on snow.

Imagine what might happen if they understood there were other ways to move and glide on snow with the joy of play?

Still to come: alternative pathways for the best sport ever.