It’s snowing again here, but the Spousal Unit wants to go out for dinner, if only to the hotel ‘pub’ a mile down the road. In case of accidents, I leave you with Brian Phillips, in Grantland, meditating upon winter sports in general and skeleton in particular:
My favorite thing about the Winter Olympics is the way it generates elaborate performance rituals out of an understanding that cold weather makes you want to fucking die…
Now consider: skeleton, the Olympic sport in which you throw yourself face-first off a mountain.
In the same way that certain styles of dance simulate sex, the Winter Olympics simulates scraping one’s February-chapped nostrils against the surface of a Kleenex whose aloe content is useless and reaching out for the warm escape of death. It’s an art of failed suicide attempts. Think about this. There’s ski jumping, where you launch yourself off a massive ramp toward what I imagine as a rapidly-growing-less-and-less-distant tree line. There’s luge, where you carom down a kilometer-long water slide at 90 mph while lying supine on a bladed Frisbee… People like to talk about how the Olympics is this shining symbol of human unity blah blah, and it’s all true, but only because nothing unites humanity faster than our shared desperation over the almost unbelievable attention to detail with which winter manages to suck…
What does skeleton mean to me? I’ve been a professional skeleton journalist for quite some time now (last Tuesday), so naturally it’s a question I think about. I’ve filled my free time with skeleton videos; I’ve contemplated skeleton during my bleak snow-shoveling season. Among all sports competitions, the Winter Olympics has always had the highest quotient of “Why would anyone even think to try that??” events, but even in this field, skeleton stands out for its fusion of radical danger and senseless awesomeness. The real question might be: What would compel a person to dress up like the Earth’s realest Power Ranger and swan-dive down a frozen track at such screaming speeds that s/he experiences the same g-force as a Formula One driver?
To be a skeleton slider, what you do is, you take a steel-framed sled with metal blades and no steering mechanism. (Repeat: no steering mechanism.) You start at the top of the course. You sprint out on the ice pushing your sled in front of you… Once you have built up enough speed, you hurl yourself prone atop your sled, pinning your arms and legs to your side and stretching yourself out like a human ICBM. There are other things you could compare this shape to, I’m just saying. You can control the sled a little by sort of tilting your head and wiggling your feet, but from this point to the bottom of the track, your strategy is basically just to be the comet in your own imagination. …