Groundless Predictions, 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics Edition

What’s that? Is that the sound of snot flying from off the face of an exhausted cross country skier? No! It’s groundless predictions, Winter Olympics edition!

Even as the Olympic flame in Vancouver begins to flicker and fade like a forced metaphor for life in a tear-jerking romantic comedy, our eyes turn to the future, to the next Winter Olympiad four years away in a Russian town that, since it has never been a setting for a Bond film, we have never heard of.

With an eye to the future and beyond, here are groundless predictions post Vancouver games.
The 2010 games also saw athletes breaking new ground in their sports, notably figure skaters performing jumps once thought impossible and female figure skaters lifting their male partners with increasing regularity.

In the coming years, figure skaters will continue pushing the boundaries of their sport. At Sochi in 2014, pairs skaters will be allowed to jump through hoops of fire as part of their routine, and in 2018, an enterprising Estonian female skater will bring a trash bag full of poisonous snakes and used needles onto the ice as part of her routine.

Inspired by the newfound success of the US Nordic Combined team and hoping to end northern dominance of winter sports, many southern states will mandate that their school systems add ski jumping and cross country skiing to their middle school physical education curriculum.

Most will adopt to the change poorly, building wobbly, unstable wooden ski jump ramps atop condemned Dairy Queen stores and installing awkwardly large tread mills inside cafeteria freezers as a means for students to practice their skiing.

While unduly expensive and more than a little dangerous (a montage of awkward tweens skiing off the ramps into soggy pits of discarded Blizzards will become a YouTube sensation), the program will bring great success, with Johnny Ray Wilcox of Denton, Texas sweeping the Nordic Combined events at 2022 Milwaukee games, the 2026 Dubai games and the 2030 Antarctic games.

In a completely unrelated story, 2030 will also mark the death knell of America’s competitiveness in a wide array of sports, including soccer, basketball, tennis, dodge ball and floor hockey.

The rise of Americans in Nordic Combined as well as their record number of medals won at the Vancouver games will lead to an outcry in those countries traditionally dominant in winter sports. In 2011, a group of European sportologists (in 2011, that will be a real word) will convene a secret meeting beneath a Norwegian fjord to begin creating and popularizing new winter sports that Europeans will be able to dominate.

While some will fail to catch on (most non-starters will feature athletes performing amazing feats of strength in cable knit sweaters), several will be introduced at the 2018 Helsinki games, including Flanger-Luge, which will be contested on the luge run but will use a block of cheese instead of a sled, and Flook-Ball, which combines the fast-paced excitement of team handball with a 42-lbs curling stone.

But the most popular new sport by far will be Ursa-Ski, where competitors will ski the downhill run while riding on the back of a live polar bear, who will also be wearing skis. This event will be dominated by Norwegian Jens Johnsrud Flarkenskroom for more than a decade under his tragic-yet-completely-foreseeable death in the jaws of his polar bear Moop-Moop.

Beyond creating new sports, Olympic officials will seek to make other events more competitive, including attempts to limit the transcendent power of Shaun White in snowboard halfpipe.

White will be forced to cut his hair in the hopes that doing so will take away his power, just as it did for the biblical hero Samson. Officials will also limit the height competitors are allowed to fly outside the half pipe by hanging a rack of iron spikes and poorly-fed alligators above the pipe’s edge.

Oh, and one important note. After the 2030 Antarctic games, there’ll be no more ice left on the planet, so all winter games after that will take place in the vacuum of space. See you on the Moon in 2034!