Shane KiteMost with a satirical take on the Winter Olympics find an easy target in curling – that shuffleboard-on-ice gambit mixing elements of vigorous housecleaning with schoolyard physics first popularized by Caledonian monks and Flemish stonemasons dying for distraction on the frozen ponds of 16th century Scotland.
But winner this year of the most bizarro Olympic curiosity in host city Pyeongchang, South Korea is hands down: “mass start” speed skating.
No, this is not a metaphor for the evening rush to Worcester on the Massachusetts Turnpike, but it’s probably just as dangerous.
Mass start speed skating is essentially, this:
Up to 24 skaters line up to await the sound of an electronic starting pistol, whereafter a swarm of 48 elbows and razor-sharp, cutlass-sized blades begin to jab, swing and slice forward, as each one of the skin-suited, helmeted horde vies to get to the front of the pack.
What lies ahead for the sliding herd is 16 laps of skating around a 400-meter oval. Points are awarded to the top three finishers in three intermediate sprints. But the most points are claimed in the fourth and last sprint, which is also the final lap, so that the first, second and third place racers to cross the finish line win gold, silver and bronze, respectively.
The remaining racers who are out of medal contention are ranked by points too, also based on how they placed in each of the sprints, but the last lap matters less because fewer points are awarded. This allows for situations where a non-medal contender who beats another non-medaling racer to the finish line on the last lap may place behind that competitor in the final results.
The system places a premium on stamina and strategy by forcing racers to position themselves well in the intermediate sprints, yet save their fastest kick for the end of the race.
Staggered sprints also work to keep the drama heightened throughout (an NBC specialty), with a spike in audience anticipation rising over the last quarter of the circuit, from the third to the last sprint, as skaters make their final efforts to win.
And yes: Incidental contact is inevitable so crashes are frequent.
The near certainty of such mayhem, baked into the race by the inventors of the competition, offers viewers a promise of appreciative “spectacle” on the level of Roland Barthes.
The French philosopher described succinctly our involuntary, ecstatic reactions to the value-add of perceived chaos, no matter how preconceived, in his famous discourse on professional wrestling: “The public… abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.”
Maybe NBC can make this its new tagline.
Skating as “ultimate Barthesian art form” was the case made by Linnet Fawcett in her essay “In-Between Spaces in Sport: Corporeal Re-creation and the Trick Skater.” She describes skating as a “beautifully fluid notion of community.”
And so too is mass start speed skating. We think the sport offers a near perfect visual depiction of the struggle, strategy and poise required to survive or simply endure the daily rat race.
Heads down, arms swinging, competing for space on a crowded commute, replete with the elegant dance of torso shifting and lane changes that is collision avoidance. The skaters evoke well the workaday toil where we’re never alone, always harried, accelerating and slowing as a swarm, all trying to make it wherever we’re going if not on time, then at least alive.
And so the crashes, attention grabbing as they are at some animal level, trigger our deepest empathies, because we know it could certainly be us sliding into the wall on our arses in turn three. There but for the graces of our skates and sheer luck go we. And “go wee” in our polyurethane skin suit we might after slamming into a barrier at nearly 35 miles per hour.
Indeed.
We will be rubbernecking the mass start races for all of the above reasons when they air Feb. 24 on NBC. But set an alarm and program the coffee maker: Livestream coverage starts at 6 a.m. EST on NBCOlympics.com. But if you want to sleep in, NBC will air the event tape-delayed at 3 p.m EST.
By the way, expect more like this, meaning events with an emphasis on the sensational to enter the Olympic fold in coming years, especially after NBC, which is the top patron of the International Olympic Committee, shelled out $7.75 billion for domestic rights to cover the games through 2032.
Any claim that nearly $8 billion fails to get NBC a seat at the table in determining what new events make it into the program is pure horse hockey (which is also played on ice).
Sidenote 1:
Since a Fin first began to glide over a frozen lake 5,000 years ago on a pair of sharpened animal bones strapped to his feet with leather loops, skating has been a fairly accessible pastime taken up by all classes of the social strata, from peasants to nobility. That mostly holds today as one can rent blades and skate at community rinks at daily rates for under $20.
Sidenote 2:
“The grandiloquent truth of gestures on life’s great occasions. -Baudelaire.”
This is how Barthes begins his famous essay on professional wrestling, by trying to pass off as a direct quote his interpretive paraphrasing of the poet Baudelaire’s description of a painting by Delacroix.
This type of heavy editing for space often leads to a never-ending game of academic telephone where original words are lost to more recent, abridged text. However, Barthes seems to capture the core of the poet’s reverie.
Yet, what Baudelaire actually wrote about Delacroix’s depiction of “The Capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders,” could well describe an Olympic mass skating race:
“…the city stretches out into the distance, a miraculously true evocation; and, as always, glittering waving banners, their luminous folds unfurling and flapping in the clear atmosphere; as always, movement and anguish in the crowd, the clash of arms, the splendour of vestments, emphatic gestures, as gestures are in the great moments of life!”
