When Road to the Gold Is Bumpy, It’s Awesome

The blonde babe bopped around on the bumps.

I am not sure if she shredded the gnarl.

But she did go big.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of “Name That Sport.” I am your host, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, and 100 years ago, when I fathered the organization of the modern Olympic Games, nobody mentioned nothin’ to moi about just how modern these things intended to get.

Some American Goldilocks won an Olympic gold medal here Thursday in an event I didn’t organize, described in a language I didn’t recognize. Her name is Donna Weinbrecht, her sport is something called “mogul skiing” and the only reason I knew it was skiing is that there was snow and she wore those long pointy things on her feet.

But am I unhappy?

Au contraire, mon frere. I am much too dead to be unhappy.

And inasmuch as a couple of my compatriots placed first and second in the men’s mogul skiing, all I can say is “Vive la France!” dudes, and pass the Grey Poupon. These guys are, ‘ow you say, ze ‘ot dogs?

Never in a hundred years did I imagine anybody winning an actual Olympic medal for anything like this. Mon Dieu, I thought curling was strange. I thought we were supposed to keep the Olympic Games simple--you know, like when Hercules threw the discus.

All I can tell you about this mogul skiing, in language you can understand, is this: Men and women in warm clothing do splits and somersaults and flap their wings like bald eagles while descending a bumpy hill that resembles the bottom of an egg carton.

We already have one Olympic event called biathlon in which you ski and shoot a rifle. This one I can understand, because you never know out here in the wilderness when you might get hungry and need to plug a moose.

But mogul skiing?

What next--skiing on one foot? Indoor skiing? Uphill skiing? Slope-on-a-rope?

Even so, I am trying to keep an open mind, even being dead.

Back in the previous ‘90s, when I was lecturing at L’Ecole Monge, I smiled at my young pupils through my white walrus mustache and said (true story, loosely translated): “A bunch of grumpy old fogeys and scientific has-beens are going around saying that your education will suffer, that you will be nothing but ignoramuses and failures. Do me the unspeakable pleasure of forcing them to admit that horse-riding, playing cricket and boating make for clear minds and good memories.”

See? I’m dead, but I’m not stuffy.

Even on my deathbed, I said: “Sport should be seen as an occasion for art.”

I simply wasn’t expecting anything quite this abstract. Hey, I wasn’t even all that wild about Picasso painting all those eyes in the middle of models’ foreheads.

Oh, well. Live and learn. Or die and learn, in my case. They tell me this mogul skiing is an offshoot of something Americans called “hotdog skiing” back in the ‘70s. (The 1970s, I mean.)

Howard Peterson, the gentleman in charge of the United States ski team here, referred to those people as the “Go-For-It Generation.” (I believe Howard also says groovy and far out. )

Later, hotdogging evolved into mogul, which has now become an Olympic medal sport for the first time, and the Americans who do it or view it usually say awesome lot.

I keep thinking awesome is a word one should use to describe the mountains, not the skiers. But they keep telling me: “Pierre, you’re dead, dude. Get a life!”

Donna Weinbrecht, who hails from New Jersey, wherever that is (I don’t even remember where Old Jersey was), had already won the 1990 and 1991 World Cups in women’s mogul before her victory here Thursday in a heavy snowfall that gave her golden dandruff.

She was cheered by about 100 relations and fans who kept encouraging her to “bang those bumps” and either encouraging or discouraging her (I couldn’t be sure) to “shred the gnarl,” which I presume she did.

I did ask somebody where and what exactly this gnarl of hers was, but all he said was: “Beaucoup cool, Pierre! Party on!”

Ah, I remember when the Winter Olympic Games were so simple--ski down a hill, skate on a pond, slide on a sled.

These modern Games are wearing me out. I’d better go lie down now.