Barry Tompkins: The then and now of the Winter Games

Have you been watching the Winter Olympics? Yeah, me too.

But, not very much.

My reason is that — by its nature — it is an event best pre-packaged into a prime time entertainment show that is extremely entertaining if you care only about the smiling American faces on the podium.

It’s good television — it’s just not a sports event. The ultimate moment is surely coming after the last commercial break and before the cloying interview that ends the show. Despite the fact that it happened 10 hours earlier and social media has already devoured it and moved on to the four-man bobsled.

I’ve been fortunate enough to broadcast six winter games and they are one of the few events that are better seen and experienced by being there and not curled up by a fire with a cat on your lap, wearing a sweater with a moose on it and swilling a long-necked Bud.

The reason is that most of the memorable experiences of the Winter Olympics involve knocking back a Slivovitz or twelve in front of a raging fire while the icicles on your nose melt ever so slowly into your fondue.

Generally, the winter games are held in bergs rather than cities and immediately become a mini-United Nations in every bar or food grotto.

Ask a question in English, and you might get an answer in Norwegian.

It’s changed a lot since I did my last Winter Olympics. Any thought of amateurism is met with enough guffaws to upgrade the libations from the Slivovitz to Dom Perignon.

The International Olympic Organization used to rule you ineligible if your mom gave you more than $20 to buy a pair of skates. The only people who could possibly be a true amateur were the zillionaires who ran the IOC. That created Winter Olympic idols, like the Jamaican bobsled team in 1988. They showed up with a bobsled made largely of duct tape and bailing wire. And captivated the world.

Remember Eddie the Eagle? That same year, 1988 in Calgary. If anything could steal the thunder from the Jamaican bobsled team, it was Eddie the Eagle — a ski jumper from England who finished last. Way last. Some 80 points behind the second-to-last place jumper. Both the bobsled team and Eddie had feature films made about them. The winner of the event is running a bratwurst stand in Lapland. I don’t remember his name.

Olympic athletes, like college athletes in those days, were handed under-the-table money that meant they didn’t have to flip burgers at McDonald’s and that they might be able to afford to bring mom back an engraved set of chopsticks from Sapporo, or an entire smoked salmon from Lillehammer. But they weren’t Lear-jetting back home or hoping to score a ski-wax endorsement that almost covered the rent.

Cut to 2026 and enter Eileen Gu, a San Franciscan by birth who attends Stanford and competes for China. She was a silver medalist in the free style big air competition with one event left to compete in. Eileen could afford to give the ski-wax endorsement to her podiatrist.

She may be a part-time student, and part-time American, but she’s a full blown 100% capitalist. She’s got 2.3-million Instagram followers and last year pulled down a handsome $23 million dollars in various endorsements in the U.S. and China.

Just a guess here, but I’m thinking she might not be trading scrunchies with her teammates in the Athlete’s Village.

I do feel bad for Lindsey Vonn, but there’s a side of me that says “why?” Why compete with a torn ACL, knowing there was no chance of winning, and then crashing so dramatically that her teammate Breezy Johnson who won the gold medal, wound up in paragraph four of the story.

An Olympic medal is not always the most prestigious of honors in some sports. In alpine skiing a win in a World Cup race is the most coveted prize. In figure skating, the World Championships are more internally valuable.

Mikaela Shiffrin won Olympic gold in slalom on Monday. It was her fourth. She’s won over 100 World Cup races.

Figure skater Ilia Malinin is considered without peer in the World Championships. In the Olympic free skate, he turned a certain gold medal into an eighth-place finish, falling so many times that even the most forgiving judges in any sport in the world couldn’t save him.

Sadly the Winter Olympics, like the Super Bowl, and the U.S. Open Tennis tournament, has become corporate. It’s gone from almost being a cultist event to something detrimentally bland. It’s slick where it used to be kind of folksy. It’s a bit more about the riches the game’s bring to the winners, and a bit less about the legend they used to create.

I feel blessed to have seen Franz Klammer win the downhill in his home country in a performance that defied both description and danger.

I remember when Alberto Tomba — aka Tomba la Bomba — turned a slalom course into a destruction derby.

I saw Eddie the Eagle and the Jamaican bobsled team charm the whole of Calgary.

I climbed to the top of the ski jump in Innsbruck and discovered the only thing you can see from the start was a graveyard just beyond the finish.

I got to know the meaning of “cool under pressure” when walking behind the warm-up area of the figure skating arena in Sarajevo. Scott Hamilton called me over and said, “Hey Barry, can you score me Super Bowl tickets?” Then, one minute later, he went out and won the figure skating gold medal.

I have it etched in my mind that at every Olympics — winter or summer — the Aussies, Norwegians and Poles have more fun than anybody else.

If you can get past the commerce, the television packaging of the event, the seat shortage, the branding, the takes, the hits, and the influencers, there’s a whole lot of fun to be had at the winter games.

Provided, of course, you’re amply fueled with Slivovitz.

Barry Tompkins is a 40-year network television sportscaster and a San Francisco native. Email him at barrytompkins1@gmail.com.