Winter Olympics offer little fame or fortune but athletes and stories make them great | Andy Bull

Winter Olympics offer little fame or fortune but athletes and stories make them great Andy Bull There is often not much elite competition but purity elevates what were once derided as ‘useless’ sports I t was the Olympics of politics and penises, of JD Vance being jeered and of Ukrainian bobsledders being banned from the competition, of a convicted criminal beating the teammate she was guilty of defrauding, of Lindsey Vonn crashing out 12 seconds into the race and of Ilia Malinin making one mistake too many , of the internet became momentarily obsessed with slow‑motion videos of a Canadian stroking a curling stone with the tip of his finger, and it was the Olympics where the Norwegian ski‑jump team refused to dignify questions about whether or not they were injecting acid into their genitals. Like I said right at the beginning, Pierre de Coubertin never wanted a Winter Olympics. If that line sounds a little familiar it might be because you read it here a fortnight or so ago . “The great inferiority of these snow sports is that they are completely useless,” Coubertin wrote, “with no useful application whatsoever.” But it’s true, too, that over time he changed his mind. And by the end of the International Olympic Committee’s very first Olympic “winter sports week” at Chamonix in 1924 he gave a speech in which he told his audience that “winter sports are among the purest”. You had to hold both these ideas in your mind at the same time at Milan-Cortina. By and large the Winter Olympic sports are, yes, “completely useless”. Unless you live in one of the handful of countries in the world where one or another of these pastimes actually counts in popular culture, the way speed skating does in the Netherlands, or cross-country skiing does in Norway, or ice hockey does in Canada, they’re not going to inspire mass participation. A decade from now, no one except a handful of future competitors will ever say they grew fitter, stronger, or more sporty, because they took place. An...