Now that the winter Olympics are over, and people are done “celebrating” the amount of medals the US won, I have to ask whether or not you watched any of it? Probably, at least some. But did you watch a lot of it? Were you excited about skateboarding in skis or some random traitorous American who accepted millions to compete for China? Women won a majority of the gold medals, mostly in “games” that are boring to watch and people don’t care about, because women’s sports are boring.
I gotta be honest: I didn’t watch any of the women’s hockey games in the Olympics. In fairness, I didn’t watch any of the men’s games either, at least until the gold medal game, which I watched all of live. It wasn’t because I didn’t care about the men’s team, anyway, but the games were not on when I could watch, or pay attention, because I was working. Were they, I still probably wouldn’t have watched.
Women’s hockey is just not interesting to watch. I don’t say this to be mean, I have two daughters and if they ended up playing hockey I’d watch all of it and enjoy it, but not knowing anyone on the team left me disinterested. The men I’d heard of, as a former hockey player and fan of the NHL, I follow their game.
No, the women’s game was slower, they wear full cages, the checking, to the extent there is any, leaves a lot to be desired, etc. It’s the same game, but totally different. I didn’t watch, even the final game – saw the highlights and was glad for them.
The men’s game was tense. On paper, Canada had the better team – having three of the top four points scorers in the NHL on their top line. But games are won on the ice, not paper. There is no stat line for heart, grit, or even luck. All of which were on the side of the United States that day.
It wasn’t just hockey that bored me about the Olympics, it was pretty much all of it.
As a former hockey player, I can appreciate the skill involved in figure skating – it is not easy. But it’s also pretty boring. How many times can you watch people do the same things over and over, only being differentiated in “skill” when slowed down to a glacial pace on replay?
I did enjoy seeing Alysa Liu win the gold, but mostly because of her joy in the moment. I was happy for her, it didn’t feel like some kind of victory for the country.
That’s the problem with sports where there is judging, it’s arbitrary. Are the “winners” the best? Some people think so. The idea of “style points” in ski jumping or stunts or whatever the hell those stupid competitions were is a lot of things, interesting is not one of them.
I’m not taking away from their abilities, I couldn’t do what they do, but I also wouldn’t want to.
I prefer sports where the fastest, the one who jumps the highest, or scores the most points wins because it’s unambiguous. I realize that might sound contradictory to my thoughts on the women’s hockey team, but it also has to be not boring.
I forced myself to watch large parts of two WNBA games over the last few years. The first was during the hype of Caitlin Clark’s rookie season, because I wanted to see what the hype was about, and then a year later on a random weekend day to see if the garbage I’d seen the year before was an off day or normal. It was normal.
I suck at basketball and can say those teams were worse. Even Clark was missing all the time. Minutes passed without anyone making a shot. I almost felt bad for them, they were trying so hard and it just wasn’t working out.
It’s just a simple truth: women’s sports are boring. I don’t believe men are just inherently better at shooting a ball through a hoop or putting a puck in a net, but we are different in how far we’re willing to go to get that goal achieved. Jack Hughes had multiple teeth broken in the gold medal game and was out there to score the game winning goal in overtime. There aren’t a lot of women who’d do that. We’re just different.
That drive – to play through the real pain and blood because you want to win and don’t want to let your teammates down – is not unique to men, but it is exponentially more prevalent. That’s what adds excitement to sports. It elevates not only the thrill of victory, but the agony of defeat as well. The lower the lows, the higher the highs are. In women’s sports, especially in the Olympics, the two ends of that spectrum were not as far apart as they are in men’s sports. Maybe someday they will be, but they were not in Italy and likely won’t be for a long time.
Derek Hunter is the host of the Derek Hunter Show on WMAL in Washington, DC, and has a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.