Do You Want Ice With That?

And so we have seen off another Winter Olympics, or "nationalism on ice" as the New York Times put it last week.

Of course, it's all about the taking part, not the winning. But those of us who are a little partial to winning now and again can't help noticing that Team GB (which should obviously be Team UK, but let's leave that for another time) ended with a single (silver) medal in the women's Skeleton. I don't want for a minute to diss (as young folks say these days) the brilliant achievement of Shelley Rudman, but the fact of the matter is that the British sporting history books will remember her medal principally for its lack of company.

In case you hadn't spotted this already, one silver medal put us in joint 21st place in the medal table, alongside Belarus, Bulgaria and Slovakia. Despite that, the post-Games quote from the head of the British Olympic team, as reported by the BBC, was: "Overall, we are delighted. But we need to scratch below the surface of the medals table. There is no place for complacency". How precisely, I wonder, does one scratch below the surface of a solitary medal?

In stark contrast, the US team performance - 2nd place overall with 25 medals in total, 9 of them gold - has received a mixed reception here. The American approach is to expect to win and not to settle for anything else.

OK, it's not exactly a level playing field to compare Team GB/UK with Team USA. But is there any reason why we shouldn't compare ourselves with near neighbours of a similar size, such as France and the Netherlands? They finished in joint tenth with 9 medals each, 3 of which were gold.

In discussing this with my kids at the weekend, they wanted to know what the Skeleton was exactly. Once I had fed them with the idea of sliding down the bobsleigh track on something like a tea tray, they suggested that it might be more interesting if the competitors actually had to make tea at the top of the course (see my message of 18 February), and then scored points for the amount of tea that remained un-spilled on arrival at the bottom. There, I thought, was an event where the UK could hit gold.

That led me to wondering whether our chances could be improved by other tweaks to the make-up of the events. For example, the Biathlon (cross-country skiing and shooting) might be problematic, but what about the Unathlon, in which we could do just one event that we were good at, such as curling? On second thoughts, that would just be curling, wouldn't it?

Better still, then, how about Unathlon Freestyle, in which each country could choose a different event and compete against the others doing what it was best at? OK, the scoring would be rather tricky. But we could send David Beckham to represent Team UK in the ancient winter discipline of taking free kicks from just outside the penalty area. On ice, of course.