If you fall, you lose: ice in your knickers, failure in your soul

But by the time Rhona Martin and her immortals went for the Swiss in the final, after an extraordinary underdog win against Canada in the semis, we were all world experts: and when Martin launched the hammer — the final stone — we shared one of the great moments in sport as the great granite block sputtered along the ice to nudge the Swiss stone aside and claim victory at the very last.

Incidentally, some people hold the view that curling is not a proper sport because it is not terribly energetic or dangerous. Alas, deaths at curling are far from unknown. At sub-Olympic level, a Scottish drink is frequently consumed between stone and stone, in brief, fiery swallows. Ice and mild tipsiness is a bad combination: more than one curler has met his end with a whisky-fuelled backwards collapse, head striking the unforgiving ice. Scotch on the rocks, indeed.

But we will watch the Winter Olympic Games for reasons other than mere chauvinism. We watch the Games for their mystery: and for the ineffable mysteries of sport.

Also, for their absurdity. Snow and ice are not part of our daily lives, and the rhythms of winter sport are alien to most of us. Everything unfamiliar is, or seems, a little absurd. And if you seek absurdity, sport of any kind will always oblige you. Four years ago in Salt Lake City, Steven Bradbury, of Australia, won a short-track speed-skating gold medal by letting the other four skaters in the final whiz miles ahead. When all four fell over, he glided around the bodies in a finicky manner and crossed the line gently for the gold.

Figure skating is always absurd, with its subjective judging and its reputation for behind-the-scenes deals. Last time, the Russian pair Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze were given the gold ahead of the Canadians, Jamie Salé and David Pelletier. After a splendid row, the gold was given to both pairs.

Though all this seems comparatively sane when you recall Ross Rebagliati, the Canadian who won a gold medal for snow-boarding at Nagano in 1998, and then tested positive for marijuana. He was let off, however, and allowed to keep his medal, after he explained that he had been the victim of passive smoking. The BBC played an audio tape from the press conference at which the announcement was made, kindly allowing us to appreciate the guffaw that followed. Rebagliati’s event, by the way, was the half-pipe.

But it’s not really sport, is it? Be prepared for that discussion every day of the next two weeks, especially once the figure skating starts. Have no truck with people who hold to the view that figure-skating is not a sport. I recall reporting a major ice-skating event — the return of Katarina Witt, no less, the greatest diva in the history of sport — and my then sports editor asked me what it was like.

“It’s well slippery out there,” I said.

Because that’s the point. Ice is seriously slippery stuff, and if you attempt a jump that involves three or even four full rotations of the body, the chances are that you will fall over. In performance art, it is generally considered axiomatic that the artist is in control of his art.

In other words, skating at this level is not an art. Presumably, then, it is a sport. The gliding about waving your arms about is all very charming, but you win and lose on the number of jumps you land. You pout for show, but you jump for dough.

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And that is the great pleasure of the ice skating: all the frilly cozzies, and the gauze and the thighs and the bosoms, all the eyeliner and the lipstick — the girls wear more, that’s how you tell the difference — and all the Carmens and the Zorbas and the Kalinkas and Odettes and the Little Claras come down to the fact that if you fall, you lose. If you don’t risk a fall, you also lose. So you jump, you spin three or four times round in the air — three and half for a triple axel, remember, the biggest jump the women do — and if you find a clean edge, you’re a winner. And if you don’t, you’ve got ice in your knickers and failure in your soul.

Though perhaps my favourite winter sport is the ski-jumping. All the non-confrontational sports are about flight, or at least the defiance of the law of gravity, but ski-jumping is a naked attempt to turn the human body into a wing. Forget Eddie the Eagle. All that idiot stuff has gone with proper qualification requirements. Instead, watch the succession of daring young men about to become wings. They take to the air, skis V-ed out, the skier’s own aerodynamic nose between the ski tips, arms held slightly away from the body, every sinew striving to create the additional bit of pressure difference that keeps you aloft for that extra metre. And then the landing. Say: great Telemark! And he’s way beyond the calculation line!

Absurd? Certainly. This is sport, after all. All sports are absurd, or none is. There is no room for manoeuvre between those two philosophical stances. If you demonstrate that a Bielman spin and a Protopopov “death spiral” are silly, then by the rules you have already established, you cannot explain why kicking a bladder into a net is sensible.

With winter sports, we are freed from our slavery to the sports we know, and the high level of seriousness with which they are taken. We are freed — Rhona and Chris and Jayne apart — from patriotic distractions. And so we can watch sport as a pure thing: quietly enjoying the curiously anonymous figures who seek a curious kind of glory.

It is all amusingly pointless and intriguingly meaningful. You can watch without fear of much distress and disappointment. Winter sports is oddly soothing as a result.

Then there are the colour values: the white screen, with its multicoloured figure. And then another, haven’t heard of him, either, never mind, here he comes. And they are facing the most important day of their lives, the day for which all others have been a preparation, all of them facing the possibility of humiliation, some of them also facing the serious possibility of injury and death. And yet there is the soothing white screen, and we nod blandly as another coloured figure takes his turn.

At the Winter Games, you hardly ever see any one oppose any one else. The competitions are almost all against the clock, or the judges. Each takes his turn, fills the white screen with a dot of colour, and goes.

And we watch their triumphs and their disasters, their tragedies and their comedies, their tears of victory and their tears of defeat: and we reach for the biscuits.

We watch the Winter Olympic Games without chauvinism, without expectation, without rancour, without intensity. In the absurdity of what we watch, we find a very agreeable sense of detachment. We enjoy the beauties of sport, sometimes caught up in the fray, but more often with a wry smile at the extraordinary things that people get up to.

We have become as gods, and we watch the absurd doings of men and women from the summit of our personal Olympus, a place close by the biscuit barrel, below which the mortals perform Games in our honour. For two weeks in every four years, we are true Olympians.

Three not to miss

CHEMMY ALCOTT

Alpine skiing, GB Alcott, 23, learned to ski when she was 18 months old, won her first race when she was 3, and broke her neck when she was 12. She achieved four A grades at A level before competing in the Winter Olympics in 2002, at the age of 19. Her looks have earned comparisons with Anna Kournikova, and she hopes to work in the media when she retires. She is afraid of pigeons, and imagines walking through Trafalgar Square when she needs an adrenaline boost.

JOHNNY WEIR

Figure skating, USA Weir, who started skating when he was 12, has been US national skating champion three times. Despite his success, the 21-year-old is perhaps best known for his flamboyant costumes. Weir has appeared with fishnet sleeves, a glove shaped like a swan’s head, and a sequinned broken heart on his chest. He was recently criticised by US Figure Skating officials for describing a competitor’s routine as “a vodka shot, let’s-snort-coke kind of thing”.

HERMANN MAIER

Alpine skiing, Austria The 33-year-old Austrian (known as “the Herminator”) had won two Olympic gold medals when he nearly died in a motorcycle crash in 2001. He almost lost his right leg, and had to learn to walk again. He made a comeback in January 2003. Maier, who was dismissed from ski school at 15 because of a knee condition, worked as a bricklayer and trained in his spare time before getting his break in the 1996 World Cup when he was 23.

THE OLYMPICS ON TV

BBC Two and Eurosport

Late morning Skiing

Lunchtime to late afternoon Snowboard and freestyle skiing

Afternoon (2.30-4pm) Curling

Late afternoon to early evening Slalom skiing, luge, bobsleigh, skeleton and ski jumping

Peaktime evening Figure skating

www.timesonline.co.uk/turin