I have the utmost respect for Lydia Lassila. Any woman who makes her living, essentially, by throwing herself off cliffs and doing somersaults on the way down has earned the esteem of all humanity.
But I think she just might be pulling the wrong rein when she scolds Channel Ten for focusing on her crashes.
Lassila wants the media to show a bit less of the plunging-headfirst-into-snowdrifts stuff, and a bit more of the bits where she performs insanely difficult and spectacular feats of athletic prowess that elevate her to unprecedented levels of physical achievement.
Which is, you know, great. Good on you for making history and everything with your preternatural dedication and superhuman determination to maintain excellence in all that you do.
But let’s be honest: we all like crashes.
There is a reason why people, even in Australia where snow is seen as a bit effeminate, love the Winter Olympics and find it an adorable little sister to the Summer games.
That reason can be summed up as the following: someone could be killed.
Look at the events the Winter Olympics puts on.
First of all you have the skiing events, which usually involve people with enormous planks on their feet either hurtling down a mountain or hurtling through the air.
These are activities that were once engaged in only by people who needed to fetch medicine for a plague-stricken village, but here we have people dedicating their lives to practising mountain-hurtling just for the sheer thrill of it.
Then you have your luge, your bobsled, your skeleton. These continue the theme of throwing yourself down mountains, except these lunatics have carved out special slippery chutes to help them go even faster, and have decided that the best way to do it is lying down.
The luge appears to be a sport designed to accurately recreate the experience of riding an avalanche in bed.
This is in stark contrast to the biathlon, a sport which gives competitors the chance to know how it felt to flee the Nazis in 1940s Norway. Combining gruelling drudgery with gunfire, biathlon, more than any other sport, teaches us just how difficult and brutal life is.
And that’s the Winter Olympics for you – brutal, dangerous, dancing on the delicious fringe of death.
Throw yourself into the air and hope you don’t land on your head. Play hockey and get your face bashed in. Make one mistake in a race and crash into rock-hard ice.
Even the portion of the Games dedicated to petite men and women dressed as tropical birds doing ballet involves participants wearing razor-sharp shoes that at any moment could land in the wrong spot and sever an artery.
So though I sympathise with Lassila’s desire that the public see more of her succeeding and less of her face-planting, the fact is death stalks every Winter Olympian, and that’s what we want to see.
And Channel Ten knows that – it is acutely aware that if at any time the audience forgets these elite athletes might be leaving Sochi in bodybags, they’ll switch over to The Block. So it keeps that possibility at the forefront of our minds.
This principle, by the way, applies to all sports in one way or another.
Nobody watches motor racing for the racing – there’s almost nothing in history more boring. The only reason to watch a car race is in the hope of a car crash.
Horse racing is the same, although in that there is an extra attraction: the slight but non-zero possibility the horses will rebel, deliberately throw their jockeys, and stomp their trainers to death.
Likewise in cricket: how much more exciting did the Ashes become when you began to suspect Mitchell Johnson literally wanted to kill Stuart Broad?
And in football, who can deny it’s always more fun when Paul Gallen is throwing punches, or Chris Judd is trying to rip someone’s arms off?
Hell, soccer players are so aware of what the public wants they pretend to have died every time anyone touches them.
Oh, we may say we admire the skill and the athleticism of our sporting heroes, but we know deep down inside what we love more than anything is pain and injury and potential death.
We secretly long to see accidents and brawls and blood. We quietly wish that tennis players carried guns.
So yes, I admire Lydia Lassila. I wish her the best and I congratulate her on her ability to do things with her body that seem impossible for anybody not animated by Chuck Jones. But the blunt truth is if it weren’t for the crashes, we just wouldn’t watch.
That’s just the public for you – we’re nasty, we’re bloodthirsty and we’re just not that bright.
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