The Word Show

One of the best things about watching the Olympics is seizing the opportunity to become an instant fan of a sport that merits your attention for only 2 days every 4 years. That’s a level of fan commitment that even the most disinterested sports fan (read: me) can get behind. Compare that to baseball fans, for instance, who need to sit through some 162 ass-numbing games per season, and all the sacrifice that goes with that (the junk food intake, the sacrificed human relationships, the mental cataloguing of useless trivia), and suddenly becoming a biathlon or skeleton fan for a couple of days seems very appealing.

But even for the more obscure sports, there exist super-fans, even if they don‘t necessarily wear their passion on their sleeves. Take the guy who sat next to me and my dad during the Vancouver Olympic Women’s Fgure Skating Semi-final. Sporting a ball cap, a Habs jersey, a beard affixed to a leathery face, and a gruff voice bellowing out a fine, Joual accent, he looked and sounded like your typical French Canadian long-haul truck driver.

So with his atypical appearance (at least for a figure skating spectator), it was all the more surprising that this guy proceeded to wax poetic on the beauty of “le patinage artistique” for the better part of 10 minutes, educating us on all the minutiae; from the scoring system, to the estimated cost of the outfits, to why the triple axle was no longer sufficient for medal contention. My dad and I just sat there in total amazement. The guy new literally everything there was to know about figure skating. It was not unlike listening to your flamboyantly gay hairdresser tell you how excited he was to undertake his upcoming weekend project of installing a four barrel Holley carburetor in his classic ‘69 Camaro – you know, so the big-block motor he installed the previous weekend could breathe better.

I can’t say I became a bigger fan of figure skating on that night, but I definitely realized then and there that a Habs jersey can be worn pretty much anywhere.