Maybe they should air these Winter Olympics on the Hallmark Channel, because man, they sure need a feel-good story right about now.
And no, it needs to be better than Shaun White, the Flying Tomato who was ripe in 2008 and remains the only athlete in those extreme snowboarding thingies that any of us can name.
Whether it’s the dreadful TV numbers – ratings for the opening ceremony were down almost 50% from 2018, and Sunday’s action drew roughly 4 million fewer viewers than the Pro Bowl, for Pete’s sake – to all of the hand-wringing and hypocrisy of dealing with the host country of China, heck, we’d settle for even a feel-mediocre story right about now.
And that was before these Olympics became as synonymous with the DQ as victorious little league teams.
All right, this DQ is a far cry from the tastiness of a Blizzard or the comfort food from the Grill and Chill.
These Olympics DQs are disqualifications, and they range from missing slaloms on skis to the most famous sports wardrobe mishap since Janet Jackson. That’s how Clas Brede Braaten was headline news earlier this week.
And while Clas Brede Braaten certainly sounds like he could have been one of Hans Gruber’s henchmen as they were fending off John McClane in the fight for Nakatomi Plaza in “Die Hard,” he’s actually the Norwegian ski jumping bigwig. So there are a couple of shockers here.
First, how does Clas not have a ‘ä’ or a ‘ô’ or one of those crazy vowel things that no one knows how to find on their keyboard in any of his three names?
Second, why in the world are we discussing Clas and ski jumping?
Let’s focus on the second question. Clas has our attention because five ski jumpers were disqualified from the Beijing Games on Monday for noncompliant uniforms.
I wish I was kidding. Especially in China. And rest easy the violators were not shot or tortured by Chinese officials. At least not that we know of. (Just to be safe, though, we may need John McClane involved after all.)
Seriously, the skiers were booted from their sport’s Super Bowl for loose-fitting clothes.
Feel free to insert your “Kids these days with their baggy jeans” jokes here as you curse their rock ‘n’ roll and shoo them from your lawn.
But extra material could create lift, which in pickup hoops is meaningless, but when you are soaring through the air in a ski jump, well, it matters.
Still, five DQs in any event in which all of the competitors know the rules and spent years if not decades preparing for this moment seems surreal, right?
“We stick together no matter what!” German jumper Karl Geiger posted on social media in support of a disqualified teammate. “Nevertheless, I have to ask myself whether the regulations for the women were changed overnight, with so many disqualifications?!? It was neither the right time nor the right place to disqualify so many athletes from different nations.”
Fair question that deserves an answer, because again, this is not one. It’s five DQs, which seems high even in China.
Yippee-ki-yay indeed.
Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com.