Every couple of years it happens: my normal routine is shattered and giant invisible hands pick me up and hold me in my seat as I watch the unfolding of another Olympics.  Indeed, I was one of the hapless few who bought NBC’s ill-fated Triplecast of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.  I have an especially ambiguous feeling about the Winter Olympics in particular—I think that Reihan Salam said it best back in 2006:

While watching a bunch of young, white Olympians zipping and flipping around on their newfangled snowboards the other night, I couldn’t help thinking: What if Bangladesh, my parents’ native land, had the geopolitical muscle to turn an extremely Bangladeshi-friendly activity into an Olympic sport?

Bangladeshis are very good at making things from jute, assembling button-down shirts for export, and organizing crippling general strikes. All of these activities involve tremendous mental dexterity and physical prowess. All can be performed in the bitterest cold.

There is an arbitrariness to the selection of Winter Olympics sports—sort of like affirmative action for white people.

That being said, the Winter Olympics has its moments—last week, my Taiwanese father-in-law and I bonded while Russian pairs figure skaters Mukhortova and Trankov struggle in their short program.  Mukhortova screwed up a triple toe loop and landed on her keister and both of us shouted “Oh!” simultaneously.  This was a real breakthrough for us.

As I found myself sucked into the figure skating world, I was increasingly infuriated by the arbitrariness of the judging.  Some pair would skate in  a manner that appeared flawless and then they’d get low marks.  And the NBC commentators would chime in and note that this particular pair “lacked artistry” or “were just trying to put up a personal best.”  What made it annoying is that all these statments could have been true, but you had to be an expert to know.  Still, it was hard not to get excited as Pang and Tong went on the next day to dominate the long program while skating to a medley of songs from “Man of La Mancha.”  And who could resist the drama of long time Chinese pair Shen and Zhao finally winning gold after years of training in the Chinese sports machine gulag?

Interspersed with skating was the luge—an event darkened with tragedy due to the death of Georgian slider Nodar Kumaritashvili.  I watched the women doing run after run and in a certain sense this was the antidote to ice skating—nothing was arbitrary and the clock determined everything. And yet luge was totally painful to watch—technique boiled down to hundredths of a second.  Flex your legs wrong and you’re out.  German woman after German woman went on to dominate each run.

Some have said that sports are a combination of skill and luck.  But at the Olympics, the real contrast is between the judged and unjudged sports.  Both are unsatisfying.  The unjudged sports represent the triumph of technique, but the differences are so subtle that it’s hard to get into the sport.  And then there’s the craziness of the judging in skating.

It all stinks.  So why can’t I stop watching?