Fun Times at the Winter Olympics

How would you like to be in the Olympics? Unless you are an extremely fit and talented athlete, then there is no chance. There was once an exception to this rule: the Winter Olympics. While most countries had spent millions of dollars training their elite athletes to compete in the summer games, the Winter Olympics had for the longest time been ignored by many countries outside of ice skating events. The reason being that only one-third of the countries were located in regions where it snows substantially enough to have winter based sports, and out of those countries only a few had a long enough snow season for professional games to occur. The end result was a handful of countries that dominate the sports making it pointless for the rest of the world to compete. So while most countries sent athletes to the summer games they barely bothered to send any athletes to the winter games. So there is no way you can get on your countries track and field team? Well, if it turns out no one from your country is competing in the downhill skiing events then you can be the skiing team. You would by default be the top athlete from your country competing in the event. Sure you would probably get eliminated in the first round, but who cares, your in the Olympics baby!

For the viewers at home the occasional unqualified athlete provided fun and entertainment in what was otherwise sporting events they would not be interested in. I can recall once seeing in one Winter Olympics a young African, which I seem to remember being an actual prince, who wanted to be a downhill skier. Before his qualifying run the network aired a brief taped story about his road to the Olympics. It showed that he lived in a country where it never snowed, so to practice skiing the prince would strap on a pair of skis and holding onto a rope have an ox pull him around in the grass. I imagine he must have gone to a ski resort or two in Europe, being a rich African. There is no way someone would be competing in downhill skiing after the only practice he had was being dragged around by an ox. And yet that is what the human interest story said. After the network aired the piece they cut to the African on his skis at the gate waiting for the beep that would allow him to begin his run. And guess what? He crashed. Spectacularly. The guy went out the gate but nowhere neat the flag he was suppose to ski past, and continued straight into the treeline where he finally wiped out on the safety barrier.

Perhaps the most celebrated of the under-qualifying athletes was the Jamaica National Bobsled Team who first appeared in the 1988 Calgary Olympics. The coldest it gets in Jamaica is about 68 degrees Fahrenheit, with their mountain peaks getting no colder than 40 degrees, which means it has not snowed there since the ice age. The idea for the bobsled team came from American businessmen George Fitch and William Maloney who after watching some Jamaicans race each other in pushcarts thought why not train them to do the same with bobsleds. It turns out it was not that simple. During one of their runs they flipped the sled over and went through a turn on their heads. The team returned in 1992 for the Albertville Winter Olympics without crashing but still showing a slow time. The next Olympics saw a vast improvement and in the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer the Jamaicans came in 14th, doing better than the United States which came in 15th and Russia who came in 24th.

The 1998 Winter Olympics had another interesting competitor who was known to fans as Eddie the Eagle. Eddie Edwards was a ski jumper who was overweight, nearsighted and was rumored to be afraid of heights. He was actually a very good downhill skier who nearly made the Great Britain ski team. Deciding he still wanted to be in the Olympic he found out that no one had entered as ski jumper for his country. To qualify he entered for Great Britain at the 1987 World Championship and stunned everyone with his underwhelming performance. Instead of sailing hundreds of feet through the air as other ski jumpers were doing he dropped like a rock. At the Olympics people watched to see if his performance would be just as bad, and it was. Eddie came in last in both events he entered, plopping onto the ground withing a few yards of the ski ramp. For millions his tale of persistence even with no hope of winning was inspirational. But for the Olympic committee the publicity brought by both Eddie and the Jamaican bobsled team were making a mockery of their respective sports and the Olympics itself. New stricter rules were put into place making it impossible for novices to qualify for the Olympics. The Jamaican bobsled team just barely qualified for the 1992 Olympics, while Eddie never again qualified for ski jumping. Meanwhile other nations including tropical nations began taking interest in entering athletes in all of the Winter Olympics events and began spending the money to send prospects off to ski resorts around the world for proper practice. Inevitably it became impossible for novices to participate in the Olympics, but for a while there something fun existed.