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Short track speed skating is easily the greatest of all the sports the winter Olympics have to offer.
However, the first thing that we have to address are the catsuits worn by the athletes. It’s the elephant in the room, the resonant fact that simply cannot be ignored. Whenever we’re talking about speed skating—the strategy, the danger, the speed, the sheer ridiculousness of it– we’re also talking about how goddamn sexy the competitors are in those outfits. And yes, it is true, I’m not at all against sexually objectifying beautiful athletes I’ll never encounter. In fact, it’s pretty much the main reason I watch the Olympics these days. The human form– full of potential and ambition– performing stunning feats in it’s most perfect earthly manifestation? Yes, I’ll take two helpings please!
Make no mistake, this is the subtext to every speed skating viewing experience you have.
Beyond that there is the fact that the speed skaters, with their helmets and visors, armed with a razor sharp foot knife that’s about as long as a forearm, look like superheroes come to skate for truth and justice.
These people are weaponized, and the fact that it’s short track speed skating ( to say nothing of the positively insane short track speed skating relay) means that they’re CONSTANTLY wiping out.
It’s so unpredictable that luck is almost as important as skill. It’s a last-person-standing kind of sport, one that’s so cruelly constructed you’d think it was invented by a sadistic gym teacher.
No matter, the fact that a wipeout is almost a certainty, and that a wipeout is usually a tangle of kicking razor blades, a crash could have very dire consequence. And so when you see one of the athletes cross the finish line, know that they have just skated through death, and when they take off their helmet and throw back their head, elated and forever, know, too, that they are one of us, and that for a moment at least, we are all beautiful and immortal.
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Well Michael Murray you may enjoy watching sexy athletes court death (because?!) but give me a performance I can watch later via Robyn Doolittle’s tweeted emojis any day.
Or night.
Because we don’t have cable and I don’t want to watch sexy athletes court death, but I don’t want to watch English villagers disappearing one by one on TVO either.
We get it, TVO. English villages are full of old people and old people are murderers so do not move to an English village unless you’re old and want to murder people. The end.
But speed skating? Seriously? Speed skating?? What’s that – one emoji? Done. Well I’m sorry, Michael Murray, but that’s not a story. So not sorry. Figure skating, though, figure skating is a sportstory (yes, that is so a word!) that a reporter can emoji (yes, that’s a verb – I emoji therefore I amji) for people who can’t watch the Olympics BECAUSE OF THE COURTING DEATH THING, MICHAEL MURRAY!
And it’s just like being there on your couch watching Patrick Chan do his short or long or whatever – but faster. My emotions totally ran the gamut, but like in one second.
Don’t believe me? Here it is.
Ms. Doolittle called it, “Watching Patrick Chan: An Emoji Journey” – so right away a heads up that it might be a bumpy ride. Fortunately, I had a cup of mint tea right here beside my computer, just like I do now. Then there was a Canadian flag, which, you know, I’m actually a down-with-borders type but okay. Then a pair of ice skates (well duh, Robyn). But then, oh my Gord – a laughing emoji! Yay! Wait… what? A grimacing emoji!? Nooooooo! Not again! Too soon! Too soon! Oh sweet Jes – a crying emoji? Already? What the – SWEATING?! Oh now come the eff on – screaming? Really? We’re screaming now? In agony? Or maybe… Ah, never mind. Looks like we’re weeping buckets.
Okay. Well. Glad that’s over. <schhhlurp> Ah, mint tea. So refreshing. And just one more week…
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The Leafs are on TV, but they’re losing again and nobody much seems to care, instead, they focus on the consoles in front of them, concentrating on the trivia game unfolding on the monitors above the bar.
“Which film features a man living the same day over and over again?”
The guy to my right, who is still in his FedEx uniform, is startled to attentiveness by this question, “Groundhog Day, Groundhog Day!” he shouts as if sounding an alarm.
The other men, slowly and silently, reluctantly even, nod—tell them something they didn’t know.
To my left is a man who smells like cigarette smoke and is wearing the sort of sweater that invites fascination and curiosity. How old is that sweater? Was it a gift? If not, what was it that attracted him to it? He’s the most animated person in the bar, giggling nervously and speaking quickly, his eyes always darting. He and the bartender, an efficient but world-weary bald guy, have a rapport, a banter, and they’re trying to stump one another with arcane Simpson’s trivia and forgotten players from the OJ trial.
Mark Furhman!
Nicole Simpson’s dog was a white Akita!
Can I borrow a feeling by Kirk Van Houten!
All night the conversation jumps about in this way. They’re no longer the people that they became, but are now floating free, inhabiting a nostalgic landscape where they remain limitless and ascending. O, there are just so many details to untangle and isolate, to cherish… Episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, what country was the best to build your base from when playing Risk, and later, the naming of all the Replicants from Blade Runner, each one uttered with tenderness and respect, as if each one a kind of miracle, like a love from the past who was never to be seen again.
Anyhow, like every Saturday night, I was at the Quail and Firkin on Yonge Street drinking a half liter of white wine while playing my Scratch N’ Win tickets. You should know that this bar is on the cusp of Rosedale, an immensely wealthy district in Toronto, and is typically filled with the hammered offspring of very rich people. Normally I’m entirely ignored, but this week a massive guy who must have been about 6’2 240 bullied up to the bar beside me, and seeing me scratching and not winning, derisively said to his buddy, “ Look, Elvis Costello there is hoping to win some cash for his next drink!” And then they were all “Bro” about it, laughing and giving one another high fives, before ordering themselves and every waitress in the place, shooters.
I gave them a sour look.
“Jager Bombs, good choice,” I said, “the gold flecks make it classy.”
The big guy fixed me a look.
“You gotta problem, besides being you, I mean?” There was a high-five followed by the big dude putting the littler dude in a headlock, both of them letting out a beer ad yell, and then another round of shooters.
“Look, I’m just trying to scratch n’ win here, okay?” but instead of looking away after I spoke, I looked right at them and held their gazes. I was almost finished my half- liter of wine. Feeling pretty confident.
“Do you know who I am?” the big guy asked.
“ Were you a contestant on the Canadian version of Survivor?”
The smaller but still huge guy said, “ He plays in the NHL, he led the league in penalty minutes in 2006-07. An Oiler. He could buy and sell you, low rent man. A chick flashed him at a game. He’s a stud.”
Suddenly it all clicked into place.
“Ben Eager?” I asked.
He tilted his head and looked at me, somehow managing to make his face look bigger. “That’s right, I’m not the guy you want to be messing with, understand?”
“You were in my hockey pool last year! It was like a dead pool, only for guys we thought were in the closet!”
At this point NHL enforcer Ben Eager slapped me really hard across the face, knocking me to the ground. He then spit on me. It landed on the back of my head, I think. A bouncer charged over to break-up the altercation and was immediately beaten to a pulp by Eager. It was ugly and the police were called, whereupon both Eager and his brother were charged with assault.
It’s clear that the NHL lockout is hurting us in ways we never even imagined.
]]>Another woman, less shy, seemed encouraged that somebody had actually spoken and started a conversation with me about geography. The man she was taking her daughter to visit was a big football fan and loved Brazil’s national squad. “I’d love to go to Brazil,” she said to me.
Her daughter was probably about 16 or 17, had a dollar sign tattooed at the base of her right thumb and having squeezed herself into an outfit that wasn’t much larger than a sock cut off at each end, was dressed to please. Ever since 9/11 she’s been scared to fly, but if she could drive anywhere in the world she told me she’d visit either Australia or Newfoundland. As she was telling me this two very tough looking men in their early 60s approached the building. They looked like they knew trouble and what to do with it– like they were born angry. One guy, covered in tattoos and with a powerful, wide upper body, pulled his shirt on as he entered the room, as if a statement of violent intent. The other man was in a sleeveless, white undershirt, his ashen hair greased back. They sat there like furious, black clouds.
The girl who was scared to travel passed slowly in front of them and then back again, at which point her mother grabbed her by the arm, hissing, “ Jesus Kat, you really gave those two an eyeful, didn’t ya?”
Walking into the prison visiting area is a little bit like passing through security at the airport. You empty your pockets and then walk through a metal detector while largely disinterested officers idle by. Once inside there are two U-shaped seating areas with the red-suited prisoners on one side of the protective glass paneling and the visitors on the other.
A woman who was wearing a hijab began to weep after speaking with her son. She was emotional and talking with her hands, her husband trying hard to steady her from beneath a heavy, masculine mustache. A young man blew streams of kisses at his infant daughter. The child’s mother, waving the little girl’s hand at her imprisoned father, was backing out of the room, stealing as many moments as she could. Nearby a prisoner sat waiting for his visitor. The man had vulnerable, heavy eyes. He was just sitting there in front of the phone, his mind God knows where, and the pull toward his loneliness was so vivid and intense that I had to stop myself from just picking up the phone and starting a conversation.
On my way out of the building I passed through a cluster of people smoking. One woman said, “I thought for sure that my other boy would be here, too, but at 24 he still hasn’t been incarcerated, praise be.” And then she added, “But he’s still just 24, so I gotta keep my prayer on!”
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