Is it just me, or did the Winter Olympics feel less wholesome this year? (OK, apart from Alysa Liu and some of the figure skaters.) As the Olympic torch dwindles and participants head back to their home countries, either as heroes or as complete failures, it’s natural to pause for some reflection on what the Games have meant.
Honestly, the focus seems to have been less on the grace and determination of athletes, but instead their grudges, their dishonesty and, of course, their crotches.
This year’s bulges appeared not just in the usual choreographed eroticism and snug costuming of ice dancing—even the once-genteel sport suffered from its own scoring snafu—but indeed at the center of the Games’ biggest controversies. Well, technically one of the smaller controversies: a crotch-enlargement scandal that shook the ski jumping world to its core.
In the very-unsubtly-named Penisgate, athletes stood accused of injecting themselves with hyaluronic acid during uniform fitting sessions, temporarily enlarging their equipment. And I’m not talking about ski poles — although I guess, in a sense, I am.
Once shrunk down to their original size, this left an additional flap of fabric in the crotch of the suit, allegedly providing extra lift not only for athletes but also in Google queries for “hyaluronic acid” from curious shoppers worldwide.
In another story of wandering crotches, Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid made headlines after declaring his bronze medal worthless in a post-race interview, having become distraught by the love of his life’s recent discovery that he’d cheated on her.
Though he now says he regrets the stunt, his desperate attempt to gain forgiveness teaches us all that while following your bulge may get you farther in the world of ski jumping, it’s not the wisest course of action otherwise.
For viewers craving more drama in the only open-carry sport at the Games, plenty came on the women’s side as well: French skier Julia Simon finished in first place, beating the rest of the field but not the allegations of credit card fraud of which she was convicted last October. Crossing the finish line with a finger held silently to her lips, an ominous gesture meant for one person—someone who knows who they are, she clarified.
If that one person was the victim of the fraud scheme, her own teammate Justine Braisaz-Bouchet, she was much too far away to have actually seen it, having finished in 80th place, far from any hope of melting down an Olympic medal to finally pay off those bills. Let’s just be glad someone took the rifles away from these two before they met up post-race.
It seemed like everyone was ready for a fight this year. Even the curlers, with a match between Canada and Sweden devolving into expletives and allegations of cheating after the Swedes accused the Canadians of the now-infamous “double-touch.”
Curling’s a sport that could use a little more excitement, although if six men standing around holding brooms and arguing about who touched whose granite stones counts as excitement, it’s clearly a low bar. I’m personally all for it, even if Canadian Marc Kennedy, who himself sent the first f-bomb sliding across the ice, did dramatically declare that “the whole spirit of curling is dead.”
Oh, and of course there was fighting in the ice hockey competition. While players typically put their love of melees in the rink aside in honor of the Olympic spirit, a brawl broke out in the last minutes of a Canada-France game, giving viewers a look at some of that heated rivalry they’ve been hearing so much about.
Our very own Kash Patel arrived in Milan on the taxpayer-funded wings of his FBI jet just in time for the men’s hockey gold medal match, drawing some criticism. I think it’s beautiful, though, that he’s going to such lengths to see a real-life hockey game after binge-watching the HBO Max breakout.
We might be able to expect a spinoff series soon starring competitors in the men’s double luge, after up-close-and-personal images of pairings made the rounds on social media just in time for Valentine’s Day.
And honestly, it seems like love was in the air for athletes across the board: In an anonymous report that seems to emerge from every Olympic Village, one competitor shared that the supply of thousands of free condoms provided to them had run dry after just three days. Cool, guys. Congratulations.
So maybe the Games really are a little trashier now. But then again, aren’t we all? This might be the start of a new era. I can’t wait to see what heights athletes reach (and what sordid depths they plunge to) next time around, in the French Alps in 2030.
What’s important is that we take the time to come together once every four years to focus on the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, and, of course, belittling those around us using whatever knowledge we’ve gleaned about bobsled and curling—by the way, that was definitely a double-touch.
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