OPINION: I can be sporty - kind of

In the office, I’m known for being clueless about sports. This always makes me laugh, since in high school and college, I was the “sporty” one of all my friends.

The truth is, I understand the rules of most popular sports. If someone throws it on TV or wants me to go to a high school game, I know what’s going on. The problem is, I generally find much of it boring. Of all the most common sports, I enjoy watching tennis, volleyball and basketball and that’s about it. I’ll watch an occasional football game, mostly because I think the environment with the fans are fun.

I also think college sports are almost always much more fun than professional sports. I’ve been to one NFL game and countless Badger games, and I would choose the college environment every time. College fans are rowdy but don’t take it too seriously, while NFL fans have literal tantrums and get mean. No thank you, this is supposed to be fun.

All that being said, I become a major sports fan during the Olympics. The atmosphere is all excitement, not antagonism, at least for the fans. There’s so many different and exciting sports to watch, not the same old we get when it’s a baseball game every single day for half the year straight.

I think part of my love for the Olympics is that people who don’t usually get the recognition they deserve are finally in the limelight. There are 1,696 active players in the NFL at a time and they are always getting plenty of love and money. Suddenly the Olympics come along and it’s a new crop of athletes that are the best of their kind in the country and they finally get some attention, even if only for a week or two.

The 2026 Winter Olympics officially begin Friday, Feb. 6 and take place in Milan, Italy. The sports competing in this year’s Olympics include alpine skiing, the biathlon (cross-country skiing and rifle shooting), bobsleigh, cross-country skiing, curling, figure skating, freestyle skiing, ice hockey, luge, nordic combined (cross-country skiing and ski jumping), short track speed skating, skeleton, ski jumping, ski mountaineering, snowboard and speed skating.

I would happily sit down and watch any single one of these competitions - except maybe curling, can’t say I find that one very exciting. Maybe my appreciation is also partly because I spent much of my teen years skiing, and so I know just how impressive some of the feats people perform are.

I’ve attempted parts of alpine skiing, and I’ve got to say, slalom runs are scary. Sometimes my skis continue in the grooves without me having any control and I immediately want to bail. When it comes to the freestyling or ski jumping, I can tell you from the straight away that I could never. It takes an infinite amount of guts for me to go over even the smaller jumps when skiing, and my only goal in that is to stick the landing. (Although maybe part of my fear comes from my dad giving himself a concussion one of the first times we went skiing because he decided he could still do the tricks he used to do in his early 20s.)

While all of these are fun, I think my absolute favorite event to watch is the same as everyone else - figure skating. I’m no dancer, and I can barely stand in skates, so the idea of putting those two together is insanely impressive to me.

Again to combat the idea that I don’t like sports, I even have favorite athletes. I loved the “Shib Sibs,” who won two bronze medals in 2018. Nathan Chen was also incredible to watch, winning a gold in the 2022 Olympics. Unfortunately, none of them will be competing this year.

At the next summer Olympics, I am unfortunately going to have to do something my coworker Mandy called “treasonous” and cheer for a non-American to win. I’m a major fan of Carlos Alcaraz, the Spanish tennis player who just become the youngest person to ever complete a Grand Slam, aka winning all four major tournaments in a single calendar year, at the age of 22. Don’t worry, that’s the only time I plan to commit athletic treason.

In the U.S., NBC takes care of the Olympics streaming, so if you’re a big fan like I am, you can catch it on the TV channels NBC, USA Network or CNBC, or find all events live and on-demand on the streaming service Peacock.