Rant for the Gold

The Rant decided to play an Olympic drinking game. Every time an announcer said Quad God, coined for figure skater Ilia Malinin’s quadtacular jumping ability,¹ and easily the most rapidly overused sports nickname of all time, The Rant downed four shots of tequila. We woke up in the back of an El Camino outside of Tijuana. We also discovered a a tattoo of Johnny Weir covering our entire back.² So worth it.

While The Rant revels in all Olympic offerings, the winter Olympics add a layer of the surreal because of the many sports that appeared to have been invented during a drunken meeting at the ski chalet. How about sliding rocks on ice? Not good enough; add brooms. And make sure the rocks are so esoteric they can only be mined on one tiny heap of granite. And make sure it’s near the Firth of Clyde, because who doesn’t like to say Firth of Clyde?

And so it came to pass. All Olympic curling stones come from Alisa Craig, “fairy rock” in Gaelic, in the Firth of Clyde, a tiny islet of 245 acres. Once used as a hideout for pirates and a prison, one side of the craig has rare Blue Hone granite and the other green granite. The granite combo platter creates perfect igneous sliders. But it gets better. In 1991, 3 tons of rat poison was helicoptered to the craig in hopes of eradicating rats that had arrived via ships and were eating enormous quantities of seabird eggs and chicks. Mission accomplished. Researchers know this because they set out lard-saturated wooden spatulas all over the island and see if they discover teeth marks from rats gnawing on them. This also works to discover any adult children still living in your basement.

Shooting rifles while skiing? Done. They call it the Biathlon. In Oklahoma we fire rifles at people for skiing. Lousy liberal elites. A subtle yet very important distinction. Now if we can just extend the sport to shooting rifles while ski jumping. You will now be thinking of how awesome this would be for the rest of the day. You’re welcome.

The Olympics are broadcast by NBC and hosted by America’s know-it-all uncle, Mike Tirico. The condescending, pretentious, explanation of even the most mundane fact drives The Rant to consider throwing our curling broom like a javelin through the set. The only relief occurs during the delightfully awkward interactions Tirico has with America’s fun uncle, Snoop Dogg. Please, please, Tirico practically begs, stay in the studio so I can remain in your orbit of cool. But Snoop has all of Italy to shower with his enlightened, and lit, presence.

NBC appears to operate under the mandate of, choose a few athletes, put them on a hype train approaching the speed of light, and then hope for a derailment . . . gold, we mean gold. So we get the aforementioned Quad God, Lindsey Vonn’s midlife crisis³ ending in a gruesome crash and broken leg, and the tale of poor Mikaela Shiffrin. Easily the greatest women’s alpine skier of all time, Shiffrin has dominated the sport in Jordan-like fashion, being the first skier to notch over 100 victories. But then the Olympics arrive. At the height of her powers in 2022, Shiffrin entered six events, failed to win a medal of any of them, and crashed out of her most dominant disciplines, the slalom events.

NBC reveled in the mayhem. Shots of Shiffrin crahsing in slow motion; shots of Shiffrin sitting forlornly in the snow; a bewildered Shiffrin searching for answers in interviews. And then to start this year’s Olympics, a Theater of Cruelty piece in which NBC showed Shiffrin all her Olympic failures while she provided a commentary. NBC has become Shiffrin’s merciless confessor, devising ever more bizarre acts of penance.

This Olympics seemed to dawn brighter, as Shiffrin’s first event was team competition, with Shiffrin skiing slalom and gold medal winner Breezy Johnson going first in the downhill. You’re paired with a woman named Breezy! She’s already won gold! The skiing gods have lobbed you a softball. After Johnson posted the fastest time in the downhill, all Shiffrin needed was an average run in the slalom. Incredibly tentative, Shiffrin looked like your plucky Aunt Gladys just trying to get down the hill in the Senior Games. They finished out of the medals. Once again NBC turned on the cameras to document Shiffrin’s wrenching apology to Breezy at the US Olympic House.⁴ Might we suggest less psychodrama and more of The Rant’s drinking game, Mikaela?

But not even NBC can see every wreck steaming down the tracks. After winning a bronze medal in the gun shootin’ Biathlon, Norwegian athlete Sturla Holm Laegreid used the pinnacle of his career to tearfully admit to the entire planet, wait for it, of cheating on his girlfriend while pleading for a second chance. Laegreid’s teammate, Johan-Olav Botn, won the gold medal, but let us speculate he did not receive the adulation or attention he expected. Laegreid apologized, stating, “I am not quite myself today, and I am not thinking clearly.” Tell that to Botn’s parents Sturla, driving in the dark to the shooting range, nearly freezing to death waiting in the car for practice to end, going broke on ammunition and skis. Suddenly your child’s moment of glory turns into The Real Biathletes of Norway.

Requesting anonymity, Laegreid’s jilted girlfriend told a Norwegian tabloid (the mind reels at what fills each issue),⁵ “It’s hard to forgive. Even after a declaration of love in front of the whole world.” Does The Rant detect a glimmer of hope for Laegreid? “Hard,” but perhaps not impossible to forgive? Is that some grudging admiration there for the audacious gesture? Laegreid clearly isn’t giving up, turning into the Norwegian Buddha:

“It was the choice I made. We make different choices during our life, and that’s how we make life. So today I made a choice to tell the world what I did, so maybe, maybe there is a chance she will see what she really means to me. Maybe not.”

Listen Sturla, take a deep breath, pop off the skis and empty the clip of your rifle. Find a bottle of tequila and go find Mikaela. Last one standing after the Quad God’s long program maybe wins an honorary gold medal. Maybe not. But that is how we make life.

1. the deified quad does not refer to Malinin’s legs but to the four rotation jumps he executes. There is a dizzying nomenclature: Quad Loop, Quad Toe Loop, Quad Flip, Quad Lutz, and our favorite, the Quad Salchow. Malinin can also land the diabolical Quad Axel, which requires 4.5 rotations. Malinin is a unicorn athletically, but his overall look suggests he might have recently been kicked out of his Whitesnake tribute band
2. Weir, a former Olympic figure skater, along with his partner, gold medal winner Tara Lipinski, form the greatest commentating team in the history of sports. They embody the Platonic Ideal of fabulous. Their clothes (NYT reported Lipinski brought 11 suitcases); their hair, with Weir’s often resembling a fantasy architectural rendering; the bling. And the sublime commentary filled with gasps, hyperbole, the choking back of tears, and the constant nuanced delivery that suggests figure skating may be the highest form of human achievement. The Rant reports with all seriousness that Lipinski appeared to question the very nature of reality and existence in response to Malinin’s short program on Tuesday.
3. You can think what you want of Vonn’s comeback attempt, but in The Rant’s mind she did everything but try to drive a Ferrari to the starting gate and have “PLEASE LOOK AT ME!” etched into her snow goggles.
4. Breezy required no apology. She was too busy keeping it, um, Breezy. She has a gold medal, her boyfriend just proposed to her, and every situation appears to genuinely delight her.
5. On second thought, let’s offer some possible Norwegian tabloid headlines: “Norwegian Pop Star Said to Reek of Lutefisk Before Collapsing on Stage,” “Norwegian Cross-Country Skier Shocks Nation by Applying .0000001 Millimeter Wax Above the Legal Limit,” “Candidate for Parliament Drops Out of Race After Ranting On-Camera that the Sauna is So Overrated,”