Sporting Madness

Everyone will be focusing on hockey for most of today, but I wanted to say a few words in praise of Canadian curling skip Kevin Martin before talking about the imminent Hockeypocalypse. For me, it was fantastic seeing Martin pick up his first Olympic gold medal in a hard-fought game against the Norwegians yesterday, the same country that beat him in the final in 2002. To me, Martin is the quintessential embodiment of Canada. He doesn't look like an elite athlete; in fact he looks rather like a middle-aged insurance executive. He plays a sport not many people worldwide have heard of, and far fewer understand. Plenty of Winter Olympics sports have exposure issues, but most of them are simple enough to understand and appreciate on first glance when people do tune in, whether it's the high-speed thrills of bobsled or luge, the ridiculous hang time found in snowboard cross or the halfpipe, or the artistry of figure skating. To the uneducated, men's curling in particular often...

The International Olympic Committee continued their long history of dubious decisions last Thursday, when president Jacques Rogge made the brilliant comment that including women's ski jumping would dilute the value of an Olympic medal . "If you have three medals, with 80 athletes competing on a regular basis internationally, the percentage of medal winners is extremely high," Rogge said. "In any other sport you are speaking about hundreds of thousands, if not tens of millions of athletes, at a very high level, competing for one single medal. We do not want the medals to be diluted and watered down. That is the bottom line." You'd think the head of the IOC would be compelled to educate himself on the sports his organization offers, at least. Most Winter Olympics sports have nowhere near the hundreds of thousands of athletes Rogge so glibly mentions competing. Consider ski cross, a much newer sport that the IOC has deigned to include . According to the Globe a...