Vives les Jeux Olympiques!

For some reason, it seems appropriate to praise the Olympics in French.  If my spelling is wrong (it usually is in French, and increasingly in English), tell me soon.  Or let it ride and make fun of me privately.

I love the Olympics.  I have a special affection for the Winter Olympics, having grown up in Siberia--I mean Southeastern Idaho.  We watched the Summer Olympics with a large dose of jealousy.  We knew we could never compete in the summer games because we could never play summer sports long enough to get good at them.

But winter sports!

I mean, I played hockey outdoors.  None of this wimpy, ice dancing in an indoor rink.  Indoor ice was always soft and squishy and just a little wet.  When outdoor ice got that way (sometime around May), we gave up hockey for our summer job of gaining weight for the coming winter.

Those of my friends who could ski (I never successfully did that on snow) could do it year-round in Idaho.  When the snow turned to water, they water-skied (I did that successfully--once).  Maybe that's why so many great skiers were born in Idaho (Picabo Street, Christin Cooper, Jeret "Speedy" Peterson,,  and Sage Kotsenberg).

But for me, it's all about hockey.  When the games were in Salt Lake City in 2002, I paid to send my daughter to watch obscure hockey games (the only ones we could afford) and made her report back to us so I could vicariously live the moment.  When Russian hockey coach, Zinetula Bilyaletdinov, said that no other medals were as important to Russians as the gold in ice hockey, I thought I had truly found a kindred spirit.  Idaho really is a part of Siberia.  Idahoans and the Siberians truly understand each other.  Yeah, figure skating is really nice, and last Olympics I really got into curling (there is a large part of my heart devoted to all things Canada), and I understand the hunting roots of the biathlon (see my last blog about Bambi's mom), but it's really all about hockey.

I mean if we're talking about the Olympics only in terms of sport.

But they're not really just sports are they?  They are all sorts of things:  cultural exchange, international love-fest, war-prevention strategy, travelogue, history lesson, geography lesson, foreign language lesson (isn't the Cyrillic alphabet fun?  don't you love the idea that "Sochi" can be spelled c--o--upside-down h--backward n?).  I think if I spent the rest of my life just learning every language in the world, I could die in the midst of a spree of fun (all right, I'm an admitted nerd anyway).

As long as I can pause every once in awhile for the Stanley Cup and the Olympics.