Here, It’s the Weird That’s Wonderful

The axels are spinning, the skeletons are coming out of the closet, and I know what you’re thinking:

The Winter Olympics are a snow job.

True Olympians are runners and jumpers, not schussers and pushers.

Curlers belong in your hair, not on a podium.

You’re thinking these are the Junior Varsity Olympics, the Undercard Olympics, the Scandinavian Dudes Wandering Through the Woods Olympics.

If the Winter Olympics are so important, you wonder, why did they not debut until 28 years after the first modern Summer Olympics? And why was Olympic organizer Baron Pierre de Coubertin so opposed to them? Officials originally were willing to risk a literal meltdown by putting figure skating in the Summer Games.

You’re thinking, snow job.

But I’m thinking, snow globe.

You know, those little glass balls? You shake them and snow covers the little glass houses inside?

Beginning Friday, and for the next couple of weeks from this drab northern Italian city, the most unusual of sporting celebrations will drape your television in white, turn your living room into a winter wonderland, and it will be way cool for reasons other than the weather.

The Winter Olympics are, indeed, about the unexpected magic of snow globes.

They are the best Olympics because they don’t just entertain us, they decorate us, in strange shades and odd textures, a 17-day blizzard resulting in foot-deep piles of the strange.

They challenge, broaden, fascinate, while doing what every great sporting event should do -- take us to places we have never been.

Most of us have been on a track or in a swimming pool. But how many of us have ever leaped off a mountain on skis, risking either death or, worse, becoming the lead video on “Wide World of Sports”?

Many of us have played basketball. But how many of us have ever twisted down a mountain on a torpedo sled that would kick the living snow day out of a Flexible Flyer?

We’ve all heard from Carl Lewis, but how many of us have ever listened to a curler?

Four years ago in Salt Lake City, for the first time, I spoke to a member of the U.S. women’s curling team. What struck me were her strength and determination, and the fact that she cut the interview short because she really, really, really needed to step outside and have a cigarette.

The Winter Olympics are the greatest Olympics because they are consistently the weirdest Olympics.

This is the only competition in the world where a gold-medal winner will be a kid who has spent the last year walking around with his underwear sticking out of his pants.

Yeah, snowboarders.

This is the only competition in the world where a gold-medal winner will be a grown man dressed as a swan.

Yeah, figure skaters.

You can enjoy a Dinner Roll by simply looking up, inhale a McTwist with no calories, and fly Big Air with no ticket.

Is there any single performance in the Summer Games that can bring people to tears? In Salt Lake City, after watching Sarah Hughes steal the gold medal in figure skating, the fans behind me were crying.

Is there any Summer Games relay where you can cheer a team trying to bring America its first medal in 78 years? It happened in Salt Lake City, where Todd Lodwick faltered in the final hills of the Nordic combined relay, preventing the U.S. team’s finishing in the top three.

He collapsed on the finish line and tearfully said, as his predecessors have said for nearly eight decades, “I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it.”

The Winter Olympics are more fun because Americans are usually the underdogs, and in what other field of endeavor does that happen?

Just look at the next two weeks, during which U.S. officials ask only that Bode Miller can ski crooked, snowboarders can stay straight and NBC can stay interested.

Our best hope for a figure-skating medal comes from Canada. Ice dancing’s Tanith Belbin was stolen from there when her U.S. citizenship was granted on New Year’s Eve.

Our best hopes in speedskating, on the other blade, were training in Canada, after a disagreement with the U.S. officials that was based on -- surprise -- money.

Then there is our best hope in skeleton, a dude named Zach Lund, not the brightest of bulbs.

He spends his entire life wearing a helmet, then, when he’s busted for a steroid, he claims it was his anti-balding medication?

But at least, for now, he’ll be there. The same cannot be said for the skeleton coach, Tim Nardiello, who was just fired amid sexual harassment allegations.

The Winter Olympics are as seamy and scandalous as any other major sporting event, only everything happens from behind a scarf.

One of America’s two most celebrated athletes, skier Miller, says he has competed drunk.

The other, Michelle Kwan, qualified only because her competitors skated as if they had been hanging out with Bode Miller.

In other U.S. happenings, there will be controversial speedskating launches from Apolo, a cute sleigh driven by somebody named Mean Jean, and, maybe even, for the first time in two years, you will watch a hockey game.

It’s all occurring in a place that, at least for now, seems stranger than all of that.

Driving through grime-stained Turin streets Tuesday, it was easier to find a garbage truck than an Olympics buzz. There were few signs, scant banners, no pulse, and one question.

Why?

Why on earth, other than for the obvious reason of a giant-slalom-sized bribe, would the Olympics stage a winter celebration in a place that looks like Cleveland and feels like yawning?

Why take this quaint sporting quilt and drape it across an unwashed, unshaven, uninterested guy who never even said he was cold?

Who knows? Who cares? Sometime during the next two weeks, chances are, that guy will be howling, and that quilt will be flying, and, when you least expect it, an ordinary February night will be covered in flakes.

Figuratively, and literally.

The TV folks will call this place Torino. This newspaper will call it Turin. I call it a snow globe.

Give it a shake.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.