I wrote up some satirical Definitions of Olympic Events last year, figured it was about time to write the second part. Living in Oklahoma, I don't know much about most of these things, which takes away most of the fun...
Anyway, let's try this refresher course...
Alpine Skiing - First of all, skiing is strapping a pair of sticks on your feet and pushing yourself along. The downhill portion is sailing along on these sticks down a hill as fast as possible. The slalom is doing the same thing, but weaving in and out of brightly-colored poles. If you miss a pole, there's a penalty.
Biathlon - A mix of skiing and target-shooting. If you miss, you have to ski in huge circles for a while as a penalty, and the first person across the finish line wins.
Bobsledding - Two or four people leap into a souped-up sled and sail down an iced waterslide at fifty miles an hour. WHO thought this was a good idea?
Cross-Country Skiing - Using skis to get from one place to another. In the individual competition, starts are staggered, and the fastest clock-time wins. In the mass-start, everyone begins at the same time and the first across the line wins. There are also relays in this.
Curling - This must have been invented out of necessity to prevent someone from dying of boredom(and also to get the house clean). Bowling on ice, with rocks for balls and pins, and there's lots of ice-sweeping. Takes longer than baseball, too. You get points if after every frame/inning/section you have more of your rocks inside the target area than the other guys.
Freestyle Skiing - "Skiing" always looks like I've spelled it wrong. Anyway, freestyle skiing is the type where you do all these tricks, skateboard or snowboard-style. Moguls is a race down an extremely bumpy slope, with two jumps somewhere along the way. Aerials is like moguls, but all about the tricks. High scores win. Ski slopestyle is doing tricks on rails, jumps and whatever other random obstacles are thrown onto the course. Ski halfpipe is pretty self-explanatory, doing tricks while wearing skis on a massive snowy halfpipe.
Figure Skating - This is the Winter Olympics' version of gymnastics, except it makes a little more sense as far as practicality goes. Still, that's not much. Consists of leaping and spinning and kicking your leg wayyy up into the air, skating to a piece of music, and each step has a special name that means somethin'. The women's event is the best to watch, the pairs can sometimes be interesting. "Ice dancing" is extremely dull, and men's figure skating is almost as horrendous as men's diving, and also should be outlawed by the FCC.
Hockey - Violence! Action! Sharp skates! Flying rubber! Mullets and beards. Cool sweaters! And wearable murals on the goalies' helmets! And it gave us the Mighty Ducks movies. It's also the favorite sport of MacGyver and Joey Gladstone, and pretty much hockey is soccer on ice, with neat stickswords. Tow teams of six players try to get the puck into the net, after an hour or so, the team who does this more often is the winner.
Luge - A French word meaning "sled", jumping on a Radio-Flyer sled and hurtling down that icy waterslide at fifty miles an hour. Again...WHO thought this was a good idea?
Nordic Combined - A boring cousin of pentathlon for the wintertime, combines ski jumping with a 10 km ski race. Probably to give you a good long time to think about the stupidity of jettisoning yourself through the air very fast without a parachute.
Speed Skating - The most basic of all winter Olympic sports: If you can skate, you naturally want to see if you're faster than anybody else. Same principle as track. Racers clad in Spandex onesies race against the clock for 500m, 1000m, 1,500m, 3,000m(women only), 5,000m, 10,000m(men only) and team pursuit events.
Short-Track Speed Skating - Take speed skating into a hockey rink, and an extremely high-energy event follows, great for TV. The closest thing we humans have to Jack Russel hurdle racing. 32 skaters race four at a time in an elimination tournament-style bracket, collisions and wipeouts are quite likely. A team relay is - never mind, you guys know what that is.
Skeleton - Named for what you become after taking that Radio-Flyer down the icy waterslide head-first. ...WHO would have thought this was a good idea?
Ski Jumping - Parachuting sans parachute with skis on down a killer mountain incline, then launching oneself into the sky. The farthest distance, assuming nobody died on landing, wins. Who thought thiswas a good idea, either?
Snowboarding - This sounds awesome, just sayin'. Never had a chance to try it, but it sounds great. The halfpipe competition is just like with skateboards, sliding around a gigantic bowl and doing physics-and gravity-defying tricks. Scored on style points. The parallel giant slalom is a head-to-head tournament-style series of races down a mountain while weaving between brightly-colored poles, and the last person left standing wins. Boardercross is like dirt bike racing on snow; sailing down the mountain four at a time in a race over a course filled with highly-banked turns and unexpected jumps.
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