Sochi Winter Olympics made for spellbinding viewing

There is something missing from the TV screens this week.  Yes, the Winter Olympics of Sochi are gone. I’ll miss it. For someone who knows next to nothing about winter sports, this may seem an odd statement.  Indeed, the very mention of skiing as a hobby immediately suggests to me images of broken bones.  I was never a fan of snow growing up in Blackburn as a kid.  It was okay when it first fell and we jumped on sledges down the hills in the fields at the top of Ramsgreave Road.  But it wasn’t proper “European’ snow that lay around in Switzerland , Italy and other exotic places for ever.  English snow didn’t last.  Within a day or so, it would melt and be transformed into some kind of grey liquid sludge. My sport editor on the Shields Gazette, the late great Bill Bawden summed it up succinctly. “White shite,’ he called it. But Sochi had real snow.  Or at least real snow and ice with some manufactured products dumped on top to keep things ticking over.  From the mind-blowing opening ceremony on Channel 10, you knew something special was going to unfold.  I haven’t been so impressed by lighting since the manic strobes of the Hawkwind gig I went to at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall as an awestruck 16-year-old in 1972. Status Quo were support band so it shows you how hip the Hawk Lords were at the time. Sochi had the Russian protest band Pussy Riot in action too, but the Cossack security guards seemed to have been less than impressed.  As the various events came and went, I found myself marvelling at the speed, majesty and indeed the sheer danger of everything from aerial skiing to speed skating.  The figure skating was strangely hypnotic.  The Aussie critics seem a bit miffed by the Games medal haul of three.  Yet, the glowing reactions of David Morris (silver for freestyle skiing), Torah Bright (silver for snowboarding) and Lydia Lassila (bronze for freestyle skiing) radiated sheer joy from each of the trio. Apparently Britain had our best medal haul since the Games of 1924. Lizzy Yarnold captured everyone’s hearts by striking gold in the skeleton skiing.  Then the men’s and women’s teams turned curling into an overnight mass spectator sport throughout the living rooms  of  the UK by capturing silver and bronze medals in their respective events.  So well done to all involved.  And congrats to the Russians for staging such a spectacular show. The closing ceremony was even more barking mad in the best sense that the opening extravaganza had been.  But the lingering question for me was in relation to the risk factor.  Nay, let’s call it the threat of death factor.  Most of these sports are plain dangerous. What possesses somebody to take up the luge or jump on a bobsleigh?  The women at Sochi on the luge hurtled along with their noses a sniff away from the ice at speeds above 80 miles per hour. What happens on your very first lesson? How do you actually start?  How far do you go? What speed do you aim at?  I personally would not like to find out those answers first-hand. But a big hurrah to those who do. The zest, spirit and bravery of the Winter Olympians made great television.