I have a deep love of the Winter Olympics. There are so many wonderful things. German doubles luge teams in rubberized suits. Jamaican bobsledders. Steve Cram commentating on curling. American teenage millionaires on the halfpipe.
Above all there is the exoticism of snow and ice-based sports that, for me as a casual viewer, are a once-every-four-years treat.
Granted there are downsides – it was only when I was once laid up with a hip injury during a Winter Olympics and had nothing else to do that I realised 60% of the coverage is figure skating, which is a sport for people who aren’t interested in sport.
A lot of the rest is ice hockey, which is, despite its simplicity and violence, almost impossible to make sense of if you’re not Canadian.
Michael Hutchinson is a writer, journalist and former professional cyclist. As a rider he won multiple national titles in both Britain and Ireland and competed at the World Championships and the Commonwealth Games. He was a three-time Brompton folding-bike World Champion, and once hit 73 mph riding down a hill in Wales. His Dr Hutch columns appears in every issue of Cycling Weekly magazine
The question for cyclists is, could you improve it with the addition of cyclocross? This is an idea that’s been drifting around for years, rising and falling with the sports politics tide. There are obvious attractions. It would extend the reach of cycling, and as we all know, the long game is for all sports to be some variety or other of bike riding. Also, it would promote one of our oldest but often overlooked disciplines. It might even displace an hour or two of figure skating from the schedules.
From a UK perspective, it would give Tom Pidcock the chance to become the first person since 1932 to win Olympic gold at both the Summer and Winter Games. The last person to do this was American Eddie Eagan, who followed a boxing win in 1920 with a four-man bobsleigh win in 1932. (Eagan went on to break the world record for circumnavigating the world using scheduled airline flights – so if Pidcock ever wins a Winter Olympic medal I hope he’ll follow up with something similar.)
However, I’m still not convinced. I appreciate that I’m letting down the cycling side here, but first and foremost, the key to the winter games is the snow and the ice. Sure, you can start a cyclocross race on a snow course, but unless the snow is very deep indeed, within a lap what you have is a mud course. Lovely, of course, but not quite the same thing. Even on a deep snow course, it’s a rolling game, not a sliding game. And when I watch the Winter Olympics, I want to see sliding in all its forms.
The difficulty of providing deep snow is at the root of this. Climate change is making traditional winter sports harder to stage. Hence the logic of switching the emphasis from “winter sports” to “sports you do in winter”. It’s not actually that long ago that track racing was switched to a winter schedule by the UCI, with a vague ambition to get that into the Winter Olympics too, because it would free up athlete numbers and allow more events and medals.
It’s probably as well we gave up on that – it would have clouded the matter so much that we’d likely as not have ended up with an Outdoor Olympics, for athletics and road racing, and an Indoor Olympics, for track cycling and Connect 4.
There are more practical reasons not to want cyclocross in the Winter Olympics. I have no desire to spend a week every four years explaining to non-cyclists the difference between cyclocross and MTB cross-country (“Well, the tyres are a little narrower…”), or why getting off and running isn’t cheating.
And, after we’d added it to road racing, time trialling, BMX, track and MTB, it would be the final nail in the coffin of our having any right to tell swimmers that butterfly, breaststroke and freestyle are functionally the same thing, and they should just bloody pick one and stick with it.
