Let the Games Begin!

By Denis Horgan | Last updated Feb 12, 2010, 8:09 pm

I’m laying in the tissues and hankies.

It’s Olympics time: The Winter Olympics, and not even that strange offshoot we are seeing in Washington DC and Maryland and other climate-whacked locales better used to toasty Februarys than the igloos of the moment. The Games in Vancouver.

I don’t ski. I never understood why it is fun to get cold and hurt. I can accomplish the same enjoyment by flinging myself down the cellar steps, and save a bundle. I don’t skate, having twiggy ankles that sprain quickly as a finger snap, or an ankle snap. I prefer being warm to being cold.

But I will watch the Olympics as much as I can. It’s all just so beautiful and fun and silly.

The hankies?

I have a small forest’s worth of tissues at the ready because I know that the TV will feed me story after story about skin-tight athletes who have overcome so much to compete. They find or create more sob stories than a hurricane or earthquake or meteor strike or a week’s soap operas generate.

Every athlete has overcome some horrid illness. Each has gone through personal tragedies — mothers lost to wild rampaging rhinoceroses in Alaska, fathers swallowed up by giant squid in Switzerland, siblings who vanished in a Vermont sandstorm. Limbs have been lost to crocodiles and marmosets, plagues and avalanches and comets have struck them low.

Yet they always bounce back to skate and ski magnificently, leaving us crying like babies at their pluck and resolve and red-white-and-blue glory. Apparently such things never befall athletes in other lands because we are never told that about them.

You could wonder how we ever manage to field a team with so many of our athletes coming through such devastations, one after another. A skater who survives a piano’s falling on her head contracts beri-beri then loses a leg in a thresher and sees all her parents unto the ninth generation falling low with awful illnesses. All her pals have been raised in gulags or by wolves, have endured multiple bone breaks, a Gray’s Anatomy of sicknesses, trials and tribulations galore. You would think this is Bangladesh or Sierra Leone rather than a land of such plenty and opportunity. For athletes, they are almost nothing without a good tear-jerker to tell too.

Yet they are all beautiful and peachy clean and beaming and happy and patriotic and god-loving and 100 percent behind all that is good and wonderful and …

And so, unsuspicious, I will be all Olympics misty once more.

It’s such fun.