A reason to root during the Winter Olympics

Kirk Ericson | Feb 03, 20220

The Olympics opening ceremony starts Friday at 3:30 a.m. That’s the middle of the night for most of us, including me. Still, I’m getting up to watch this one so I can see members of a particular team walk into Beijing’s Olympic stadium.

I was once a sports-spectating fan. I had favorite college and pro teams. I had a favorite AAA baseball team, the Spokane Indians; a favorite boxer, Muhammad Ali; a favorite play-by-play announcer, Kevin “Achtung Baby!” Calabro of the SuperSonics; and a favorite speed skater, the boy with the golden soul patch.

I’ve had several conversations with fellow fans about the mastery, mystery and incivility of former M’s outfielder Ichiro Suzuki.

I’d be happy when my teams won and sad when my teams lost, but attaching myself to outcomes beyond my control left me sadder more often than they made me gladder. Your teams’ seasons almost always end in a loss, especially in this part of the country. The odds of gladness are long, so why bother?

The highs weren’t canceling the lows, so my affection for sports spectating slackened to the point where only the Mariners remained, like an opioid addict landing on Suboxone or methadone. The M’s allowed me to quit fandom altogether four years ago without severe withdrawals.

I had given up the Olympics by then, too. I’d watch the opening and closing ceremonies with Mrs. Ericson, because she has a fondness for spectacle, but that was about all I’d watch. Mrs. Ericson watches figure skating, too, but I can’t. I worry too much that those skaters — many of them just teenagers — will fall. It’s too nerve-racking for me.

This Olympics, though, I’ve decided to watch and root, and the team I’m rooting for is team Ukraine. I like the team’s chances this year. The women’s biathlon relay team has several members returning from the squad that won gold in the 2014 Sochi Olympics, and the gold medal winner in 2018 in men’s aerials freestyle skiing, whatever that is, is returning to defend his crown.

Part of fandom’s delusion is believing that cheering for a team, even from inside your house, can affect the outcome of a sporting event. But, delusional or not, I plan to root, root, root for team Ukraine this Olympics.

Having more than 100,000 Russian troops poised on your borders is the kind of distraction that could affect an athlete’s performance. Still, reading and watching interviews with Ukrainian soldiers on the nation’s eastern front shows they’re solid like madrone trees on a Pacific bluff. They don’t posture or speak in slogans. You sense that they know their only job is to slow a Russian advance, likely dying while they do.

The prospect of Ukrainian athletes beating Vladimir Putin’s Russian athletes is another reason to root for Ukraine. The more you read about Putin, the more you appreciate the degrees of awful he is.

The departed Canadian comedian Norm Macdonald could have been speaking about Putin when he said this about Adolf Hitler: “The more I learn about that guy, the more I don’t care for him.”

I’ll be paying particular attention to Ukraine’s 10-member biathlon team, the sport that requires cross-country and riflery skills. In my fandom delusion, I imagine that if the Ukrainians do well in biathlon, Putin must consider the possibility of facing insurgents on skis, soldiers who can move quietly and quickly, and shoot deadly. There’s a history to this. Soviet troops suffered mightily at the hands of cross-country-skiing soldiers when Joseph Stalin sent his army into Finland in November 1939. It’s called the Winter War.

Biathlon events — there are 11 of them — run from Saturday with the mixed relay (that would be men and women, as the schedule at Olympics.com felt the need to qualify) to Feb. 19 with the women’s 12.5km mass start.

I’m likely naïve about the virtues of Ukraine’s athletes and soldiers, but so what? I’ll continue to be naïve until proven otherwise. That’s how fandom works.

■ Contact Kirk Ericson at [email protected]