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Subjectivity is everything in judging ski ballet, which resembles figure skating on skis and snow rather than skates and ice, and aerials, a form of skiborne gymnastics. The men's ballet winner, Fabrice Becker of France, wore a red sash around his waist and did a dancerly tango. Lane Spina of the U.S., who won a silver demonstration medal at Calgary in 1988 and a bronze this year, has a more robust style and wishes his sport would rename itself ski acrobatics. Says Spina: "It's a lot more acrobatic than figure skating." He has the battle scars, from five knee operations, to prove it.
It is easy to dismiss most of the aspirant sports as upstarts. While curling can trace its formal heritage to a club formed near Glasgow in 1510, and speed skiers cite competitions in late 19th century California, free-style skiing took off in the 1960s and short-track skating in the '70s. Free-style ski competition began to be regulated only after two U.S. aficionados were paralyzed while attempting double backward somersaults in 1973; the sport did not hold its first full-fledged world championships until 1986.
Yet in truth this arriviste nature is in keeping. Unlike their summer counterpart, the cold-weather Games had no classical antecedents. Moreover, some elements now considered traditional were afterthoughts. Luge, the quintessential Winter Olympics sport -- in what other context does it ever arise? -- entered the Games only in 1964. Ice dancing came along in 1976.
Despite the claim of being a worldwide event, moreover, the Winter Games reflect, far more than the Summer ones, the Eurocentrism of the early Olympic movement. Just once has the competition been held outside Europe or its erstwhile colonies, the U.S. and Canada (at Sapporo, Japan, in 1972). Nations like Norway, too small to be a dominant factor in the Summer Games, win a fistful of medals time after time in the winter, while the world media regularly fasten on such symbols of this imbalance as Jamaican bobsledders and Senegalese downhillers. The formal criteria for inclusion in the Winter Olympics specify that a sport must be "widely practiced in at least 25 countries and on three continents." But "widely" means having a national governing body. Thus luge qualifies as widely practiced in the U.S. with about 50 serious competitors and one accredited track, at Lake Placid, in a nation of 250 million.