"Wake up,” I said. “It’s 3:45 a.m. The triplets are in the moguls final.”
“They’re sisters, not triplets,” she mumbled.
“I know,” I said, “but ‘triplets’ and ‘moguls’ makes it sound like a Hollywood scandal.”
“It was yesterday,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“The three Dufour-Lapointe sisters skied yesterday.”
So they did. Won gold and silver, too. Would have been nice to see it. Alas, it’s easy to get confused with the time change between here and Sochi. (The good thing about these Olympics is they make insomnia seem patriotic.)
Easy to get confused about the sports, too. Take the one in which Canada won its first medal: If you had not heard of snowboard slopestyle (not to be confused with ski slopestyle, also a thing), you are not alone. But we like it a lot, because Courtenay’s Spencer O’Brien was to be in the final this morning.
READ MORE Sochi 2014 Winter Oympic Games coverage
It is one of a dozen new events at the Winter Olympics, along with team figure skating, luge relay, biathlon mixed relay, ice fishing, hit-to-pass dogsled racing, snowmobile jousting (silver and bronze awarded posthumously) and frozen flagpole licking. Or something like that.
The Winter Olympics are full of out-of-the mainstream events that, new to the Games or not, are baffling to those of us who wouldn’t know a triple Salchow from a double-double. In any other circumstance we would flip right past them while clicking through the channels on our way to American Idol. But once every four years, when they stick a Maple Leaf on the uniform, we conjure up an instant passion and expertise that conveniently defies our total ignorance. We may not understand the sports, but we know our kids have poured their hearts into getting to the Games.
So here, as a viewing aid, is a guide to the Sochi Olympics:
• Slopestyle — Snowboarders do tricks on rails and jumps, just like skateboarders, except you don’t call the cops on snowboarders.
• Ski jumping — They’re letting women jump in the Winter Games for the first time. Next thing you know, they’ll want book learnin’ and voting.
• Skeleton — One of the many gravity-assisted sports. Sledders race down an icy track before chugging a jug of beer à la Jon Montgomery in 2010. Which raises the obvious question: Why isn’t Rob Ford on our team?
• Bobsled — The Feb. 16 “two-man heat” has been cancelled because Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t like the sound of it
• Long-track speedskating — The food in the athletes village must be really bad, because they’re all doubled over in pain. Or maybe they’re just embarrassed by the full-body condoms.
• Short-track speedskating — Dutch NASCAR. More spills than last call at the Legion.
• Alpine skiing — Divided into downhill, slalom and Super G, which I thought was an Austrian rapper. More cowbells than a Blue Oyster Cult song.
• Cross-country skiing — Want to know why tiny Norway, with a population equal to that of B.C., could top the medal standings? Cross-country skiing and biathlon account for 23 of the 98 events. Hockey accounts for two.
• Biathlon — Skiing with a gun, what could go wrong? Olympic event not as edgy as the Canadian version, which adds a flask of rye and the question: “Is that a man or a moose?”
• Nordic combined — Cross-country skiing and ski jumping. Or moguls and luge. Or curling and synchronized snow angels. Not sure.
• Figure skating — I once wrote that this sport had “more corrupt judges than the Corleone family” and was told that no, no, no, modern skating was as squeaky clean as Justin Bieber (this was a while ago). So I won’t say it again. Even though a French magazine alleged more vote-fixing Saturday.
• Team figure skating — No idea. It might be like square-dancing?
• Curling — Once again: The game Mormons would play if they drank. Curlers are wholesome, do not have bench-clearing brawls, get busted for steroids or murder people/get murdered in the off-season. They can party, though.
• Women’s hockey — Two weeks of irrelevant preliminaries culminating in a Canada-U.S. final, just like in 19 out of the last 20 Olympics and world championships. At least the two teams broke the monotony with two end-of-game brawls during an exhibition series in December.
• Men’s hockey — Our lugers might lose, our figure skaters can get shafted in some back-door deal and our biathletes can shoot themselves in the boots. Never mind. What most matters to Canadians is winning hockey gold, or at least beating the U.S. (“Do you believe in miracles? No!”)
