The Winter Olympics are back!
And not just back on TV, but BACK in a much broader cultural sense. Here's what Club Sportico is excited to see from Milan & Cortina.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today we’re talking about the OTHER major sporting event of the weekend.
While many sports fans in the U.S. gear up for the Super Bowl, eyeballs across the globe are focused on a different event that’s just begun in Italy.
There are high hopes for this Olympics, which comes after a slew of Winter Games that presented time zone challenges, geopolitical strife, infrastructure chaos, or all of the above. Here’s how our new Sportico colleague—and veteran Olympics correspondent—Sara Germano described it on a recent episode of our Sporticast podcast.
To preview the Games, we asked our colleagues to write a little about what has them most excited. Cue up the John Williams theme song!
Eben on Ice Hockey:
NHL players are back in the Olympics. And if this clip from last year’s Four Nations Faceoff doesn’t get you amped about a possible USA-Canada rematch, I don’t know how to help you.
From a business standpoint, I’ll be curious to see how the NHL capitalizes on this moment. There’s a web of agreements already in place between the league, the NHLPA, the IOC, the IIHF, NBC and CBC. And while the too-small rink and the injury risks get the bulk of the attention, the league’s new Olympics promotion rights are the secret unlock that helped get the world’s best players back to the Winter Games.
Senior Editor Bette Canter on the “Quad God”:
I am looking forward to watching American Ilia Malinin climb atop the mountain of figure skating and win Olympic gold. The 21-year-old from Northern Virginia has dominated the sport since he started landing quads when he was 17, and his popularity is poised to take off. His Instagram handle is QuadG0d! He does backflips on the ice! He will wear the same skate laces as NHL great Alex Ovechkin at the Olympics!
Malinin wasn’t picked for the Beijing Olympic team four years ago because he had just moved up to senior level and didn’t have the resume to back his selection. The seven quads programmed into his routines this season makes his skates so much more technical than his competitors’ routines. At the U.S. Championships in January, he beat silver medalist Andrew Torgashev by 57.26 points; for comparison, Jacob Sanchez missed out on bronze by .09 points. Malinin should be on the same mantle as Katie Ledecky, Michael Phelps and Simone Biles as athletes who compete at a different level than their competitors.
It’s been said before that at their best, those athletes—Ledecky, Biles, Phelps—are their own biggest competitors. Malinin is the same way. Will he perform his routines perfectly, landing all of his quads, nailing his backflips, sponsors on their knees begging to sign him? Or will he fall or mess up somewhere along the line, opening up a redemption storyline for the next four years? To be clear, falling doesn’t immediately take Malinin out of medal contention, because of how technical his programs are. But I’m psyched to watch this bit of figure skating history play out.
Also, this is a slight homer pick. Malinin is from Northern Virginia, where I live. I recently voted in a special election at his middle school. My almost 4-year-old has skated at the same rink where Malinin’s parents once taught lessons. (Obviously, I’m raising the next great skater.)
Jacob on PenisGate (and a more wholesome ski jumping angle):
While everyone else watches the ice and snow, I’ll have my eyes in the sky this weekend.
Ski jumping is a competition of millimeters, with athletes training in wind tunnels and on plastic jumps to perfect their launches before flying upwards of 300 meters. That has also led some competitors to seek out an unfair edge—including, allegedly, injecting their genitalia with filler so that they can wear a slightly baggier suit on jumpday to hang in the air that much longer. Welcome to Penisgate.1
Meanwhile, in a slightly more work-friendly storyline, Slovenian siblings Nika and Domen Prevc are among the favorites in their classifications. Their two brothers won medals four years ago in Beijing.
Executive Editor Tom Lowry on Tech:
I will be looking at many business threads from these Olympics but one in particular is the Games as an incubator. How many new tech and digital innovations, beyond just smart stadiums, will we see go beyond Milan and Cortina from companies that are not headline sponsors? Will it be an analytics platform? Or new AR/VR applications for training or fan engagement? New ID platforms? Will cybersecurity become a story? Can the Winter Olympics be a launchpad for Italian and Euro tech ventures?
Sara on Ice Dance:
For the past year, I have not been able to shut up to my family and friends about ice dance. It is possibly the most unpredictable discipline of the Winter Olympics’ marquee sport, figure skating, and this year is no exception.
Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates are the ostensible favorites for gold, having won three consecutive world championships. But the highly political judging system in ice dance (real sickos know about “levels,” aka the tiered system of difficulty assigned to elements in ice dance programs, like twizzles) has been remarkably inconsistent this year, and what’s more, defending Olympic champion Guillaume Cizeron of France came out of retirement this season with a new partner, scrambling the competitive field.
Even if you’re not obsessed with studying every program to compare deep skate blade edges, like I am, this year’s rhythm dance theme is music from the 1990s. So grab your friends on Wednesday, pour some Hi-C, and get ready for a lot of Jock Jams and RuPaul.
On the same Sporticast episode referenced above, Sara spoke about changes she’d like to see to how NBC packages the Olympics to U.S. audiences 👇
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
I didn’t realize the -gate construction had made it to Europe? American scandals stay winning.