World Cup champion Bode Miller, a five-event racer on the U.S. Ski Team, reports regularly from the tour for The Denver Post.
Sestriere, Italy – The old-school version of the Olympics shared a lot more with my beliefs than the way the Games are staged today. I don’t know if my ideal for the Olympics has any chance of success in the modern world. People are a bit too shallow to try to look at the Olympics as a true gathering of humanity.
They could use the money the Olympics generates to show all the different athletes in all the different events, to show a bit more of the cultural stuff from different countries and to have a bit more of athletes interacting with one another.
It is a sporting event, and you want to make sure you do a great job of covering the competitions, but it would be good if they did a better job showing the things that separate the Olympics from any other sporting event – the different countries and cultures all coming together.
That’s what I like about the original idea of the Olympics. Other sporting events these days are entirely about winning. If a football team is behind 50-0 at halftime, the fans leave. They’re not there to watch the sporting event, they’re there to find out who wins. It’s really a strange phenomenon. I don’t see why you wouldn’t just look at the newspaper for the scores.
I think it’s just a confusing time right now for fans. I think they are having trouble identifying what it is they like about the entertainment value in athletics. It’s not like a movie or a sitcom, it’s real life. The athletes are out there competing.
When I watch football, I like watching the players, the athleticism, the dynamics of who digs deep, seeing guys express their desire and their passion on the field. If a team is way behind, it bothers me when people leave, because a lot of times that’s when you see the most impressive plays.
Of course you have athletes who stop competing as enthusiastically when they know they’re going to lose, but the Olympics isn’t about that. Most of the guys who go to the Olympics know they’re going to lose, or they’re not going to win medals, but they go and they try hard anyway. I think that’s something that needs to be highlighted.
There are the stories like the Jamaican bobsled team, the guys from Mexico, the guy from Brazil in the Summer Olympics who never swam before. Those kinds of things are inspirational to me just because they’re different.
