Hate it or love it, the Winter Olympics lack luster.
The 2006 Olympics in Turin, Italy ranked behind “American Idol,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Lost,” “Survivor,” a “CSI” repeat, “Desperate Housewives” and“Dancing With the Stars,” on various nights according to USA Today. The Winter Olympics – the supreme contest of frigid athleticism that only comes around once every four years – got fewer viewers than a “CSI” repeat? But come on! You already know the killer! Let's face it: only some events in the Winter Olympics are interesting. Who really wants to watch the 15-kilometer classical cross-country skiing race? At least the Summer Olympics has swimming and track – two sports that capture the public’s attention every time around. Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps owned mainstream media for two weeks in the summer of 2008 while dominating their respective sports in Beijing. The most prolific Winter Olympian ever? Bjørn Dæhlie, the Norweigan skier who owns eight gold medals from the games.
Only a handful of American winter olympians have been important enough to receive mainstream coverage, and a lot of them got it for bad reasons. Lindsey Jacobellis was leading her race, tried to pull a trick on the penultimate jump, crashed and lost the gold. Skiier Bode Miller was infamous for declaring on “60 Minutes” that he enjoyed training while intoxicated, and proceeded to disappoint in the 2006 games (picking up a fifth place finish, a sixth place finish, two incompletions and one disqualification in his five events).
There is one thing that the International Olympic Committee can do that would generate at least some level of interest, especially among teenagers, the audience from which NBC desperately needs a boost.
What is the one contest that everyone remembers from winter as a kid? The perfect combination of athletic skill, strategy, timing and humiliation: snowball fights.
That the Olympics still do not contain snowball fights after 86 years is one of the world’s biggest mysteries. I cannot come up with a rational reason for why they don’t have it as an event. They could simply set up a tournament (akin to the way they run ice hockey) and let the athletes run loose. There would be a medium-sized field of snow sanctioned off, teams would have 45 minutes to prepare their side (making the snowballs, setting up forts and trenches) and it would be a dodgeball-like contest. You get hit, you’re out. Team with the last man or woman standing wins. Simple.
Everybody would watch this. It’s television gold. I surveyed a decent number of people, asking them how they’d feel if the Olympics included snowball fights. Responses ranged from, “that would be pretty sick,” to, “that'd be siiiiiiiick.”
I sincerely doubt that any members of the IOC are regular readers of my column, but I implore them to introduce snowball fighting to the Winter Olympics.
NBC knows they need it. According to General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, NBC Universal will lose an estimated $200 million in this February’s Olympics.
I guarantee that that number could be cut in half if the grumpy, uppity old members of the IOC embrace their inner children and include this event. The holiday season is over, but it’s going to be on my wish list next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, and the year after that, and on and on and on until I get to see some big, awkward, unathletic Slovak get overwhelmed by a barrage of 70 mph snow missiles.
