ENJOY THE GAME

WHITE NOISE ON ICE

FELIX ORMAN

October 30, 2025

Every four years, humanity straps on skis, sharpens skates, and reenters its favorite philosophical experiment: how to flirt with death on live television. “White Noise on Ice” is a cold-weather chronicle of Olympic absurdities—from horses towing skiers and soldiers racing with rifles to Eddie the Eagle’s doomed flight and Jamaica’s bobsled miracle. Beneath the snow and the ceremony, it finds something deeper: a comedy of human optimism disguised as sport. The Winter Games, it turns out, are less about winning than about surviving beauty, gravity, and our own belief in control.

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Even with the next Winter Olympics still three months away, the machinery is already humming: the propaganda videos, the pre-Games scandals, the slogans about courage and unity that sound like ad copy for a Nordic brand of bottled water. The Winter Games are the Summer Olympics’ eccentric cousin—colder, riskier, and often unintentionally comic. For all the choreography and ceremony, they remain a theater of the surreal: men and women flinging themselves off mountains, skiing behind horses, or testing the elasticity of human optimism against snow and gravity.

It’s easy to forget that the Winter Olympics are comparatively young. The first official edition took place in 1924, in Chamonix, back when the modern world still believed progress had a clean, geometric shape. The athletes wore wool, carried rifles, and often doubled as soldiers. The snow was real, the cigarettes plentiful, and the entire enterprise felt like a weekend experiment rather than a global event.

The early Games had a charming incoherence. One of the inaugural sports was called “military patrol”—a cross between skiing, shooting, and a scouting expedition. Teams of four trudged through the mountains with rifles and twenty-four-pound packs, stopping to fire at targets mid-route. It was not so much sport as military exercise—part biathlon, part war cosplay. Switzerland won, naturally. The event then vanished, resurfacing occasionally as a “demonstration” until it evolved into the more domesticated “biathlon” we know today. The Olympics’ founding paradox was already visible: an insistence on universal peace expressed through militarized competition.

Skijoring, St. Moritz, 1928: When skiing met horsepower. An aristocratic sport of snow, danger, and the illusion of control.

By 1928, the surrealism had grown bolder. The St. Moritz Games introduced skijoring, a sport in which skiers were towed by horses galloping down a snow track. No riders were allowed; the horses ran wild and unaccompanied, as if performing an avant-garde ballet of chaos. The skiers clung to ropes, bouncing like marionettes in the blizzard. It was thrilling, dangerous, and over in a matter of minutes. Switzerland again took the gold—perhaps because their horses understood the language. The event was never repeated, but it remains one of those Olympic episodes that feels less like sport and more like a Dada performance piece titled Man Confronts Beast in Snow.

The interwar years carried their own peculiar melancholy. Many athletes were still soldiers or had fought in the Great War; some would soon fight in the next. The 1932 Games in Lake Placid offered the kind of bureaucratic absurdity that only sports can produce: Norway’s Johan Grøttumsbråten won two gold medals—one in cross-country skiing and one in the “Nordic combined”—but completed the ski race just once. The cross-country results were simply reused for the combined event, a clerical miracle of efficiency that would make any modern athlete’s publicist faint.

After the war, the Games returned with a certain amnesia. The 1948 edition in St. Moritz ran out of proper medals; some winners were handed engraved pewter coins or, in a few cases, certificates promising future metal. (The postal service was tasked with “delivering victory” months later.) If it all sounds amateurish, that’s because it was. The postwar Olympics were patched together like everything else—half ceremony, half ration card.

Skeleton, St. Moritz, 1928: Headfirst into history. Gentlemen on tea trays hurtling through ice tunnels, chasing elegance at terminal speed.

Meanwhile, entire sports disappeared and reappeared like vanishing acts in a magician’s routine. “Skeleton,” the face-first sledding discipline invented by lunatics in St. Moritz, was staged in 1928 and again in 1948, then went into hibernation for fifty-four years. When it returned in 2002, commentators spoke of it as a venerable Olympic tradition, as if the missing half-century were a minor oversight rather than the Games quietly saying: “This is too dangerous; let’s never do that again.”

Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, Calgary, 1988: For a brief, weightless second, disbelief left the ground—and England learned that falling could also be a kind of grace.

But the greatest period of strangeness came not from the early amateurs but from the era of television, when self-mythology met global broadcast. The 1988 Calgary Games stand as the apotheosis of Olympic eccentricity. There was Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, a nearsighted British plasterer who financed his ski-jumping dream with savings and borrowed gear. He was so endearingly incompetent that he finished last by a comical margin. Viewers loved him precisely for his lack of qualifications and his sheer, stubborn belief in participation. The IOC, horrified, immediately introduced stricter entry requirements—informally dubbed the “Eddie the Eagle Rule.” It was the rare moment when the Olympics’ bureaucratic heart was briefly exposed: They would rather host superhumans than human beings.

Jamaica bobsled team, Calgary, 1988: A tropical act of defiance on ice. Rhythm meets physics at 90 miles per hour.

That same year, another fairy tale unfolded: the Jamaican bobsled team. Four sprinters from a tropical island arrived in Calgary having never seen snow. They crashed spectacularly but pushed their sled across the finish line, turning failure into folk legend. Later, Disney scrubbed the story into Cool Runnings. But the truth was funnier and braver: an act of global absurdity that doubled as commentary on colonial geography. The empire had come home to play in the snow.

The Winter Olympics, more than the Summer, seem to attract people whose ambitions teeter on the edge of delusion. The stakes are smaller, the visibility lower, the equipment stranger. To hurl yourself off a ski jump or down an ice track requires not just training but a particular intimacy with risk—an understanding that the body is, in some sense, a disposable medium for transcendence. Every four years, a new generation of hopefuls reenact this ritual, filmed in slow motion, set to orchestral music, packaged as inspiration. Yet beneath the spectacle runs a vein of the absurd.

Consider the Austrian skiers of the early 2000s, whose commitment to performance enhancement bordered on performance art. During the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, police discovered a fully equipped blood-doping lab hidden in a rented house—needles, transfusion kits, bags of blood. The scene resembled a vampire den set up by a Swiss pharmacologist. No athlete was formally banned, of course; the Games simply moved on, disinfecting the memory. The incident joined the long Olympic tradition of pretending scandal is just another discipline.

There is something beautifully ironic about a competition designed to celebrate purity being continually haunted by human mess. The Winter Olympics in particular have always been about control: the control of speed, of balance, of the elements themselves. But the best stories come when control fails—when skiers crash, horses bolt, medals go missing, or the rules reveal themselves to be arbitrary. The Games, at their strangest, mirror the fragility of the systems that create them.

Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, Calgary, 1988: The man who soared without winning, proof that flight, not victory, is what endures.

Even the bureaucratic side of Olympic history has its own poetry. Curling, now a gentle late-night television sport in northern Europe, was actually an Olympic orphan for most of the twentieth century. It appeared in 1924, then was quietly erased—considered too parochial, too Scottish, too dull. Only in the 1990s did historians discover that the 1924 event had been officially sanctioned, forcing the IOC to retroactively declare it legitimate. Several long-dead Scotsmen were thus posthumously made Olympic champions. Their descendants learned of their family glory decades later—proof that time moves slower in Lausanne, where Olympic recognition is an afterthought.

Equally haunting are the gender tests of the Cold War years, those frozen rituals of suspicion that blurred sport and surveillance. Female athletes were subjected to humiliating “verification” processes, often in freezing medical tents, because the political paranoia of the time demanded certainty about chromosomes. The tests said less about biology than about ideology: a fear that somewhere, somehow, the enemy might sneak in under a false gender. The Olympics’ obsession with purity had metastasized into absurd theater.

Franz Klammer, Innsbruck, 1976: The descent that redefined courage. Austria held its breath as gravity briefly found its hero.

And then there is the case of Franz Klammer, the Austrian downhill skier whose 1976 run in Innsbruck became both triumph and existential parable. Klammer was under crushing national pressure. He was racing not merely for gold but for Austria’s entire self-image: A small alpine nation whose identity depended on the illusion that it could out-ski history itself. His run was reckless, borderline suicidal. Commentators gasped; coaches looked away. At one point, he nearly lost control, only to recover through sheer instinct and terror. He crossed the finish line first. It remains, decades later, one of the greatest downhill runs ever recorded. Watching it now, you realize it’s not the victory that matters—it’s the surrender. Klammer didn’t defeat the mountain; he barely survived it. The crowd cheered anyway, mistaking survival for mastery.

Perhaps that is the real language of the Winter Olympics: a grammar of near misses and narrow escapes. The athletes pretend to control nature, but nature always has the final line.

The Games’ absurdity has never been a flaw—it’s their truest form of beauty. Every Winter Olympics is a brief, televised allegory about the human desire to make meaning out of chaos. The snow is a blank page, the athletes its calligraphers, carving temporary hieroglyphs of effort before the surface resets overnight. What could be more poetic than that?

When the Games open again next February in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, there will be talk of sustainability, technology, and legacy. The venues will sparkle with Italian precision. The athletes will glide, leap, and tumble in choreographed grace. But somewhere—inevitably—something will go wrong. A gate misplaced, a timer misfiring, a costume malfunction during a triple axel. And that will be the true continuation of Olympic history: not the triumphs, but the small absurdities that remind us that the entire enterprise is held together by enthusiasm and duct tape.

Eddie the Eagle’s flight, the Jamaican sled crash, Klammer’s impossible descent, the forgotten Skeleton racers, the missing medals—these are not embarrassments. They are the Winter Games’ conscience, proof that behind the rhetoric of perfection stands a stubborn human comedy. The cold makes us honest. When the wind cuts through the ceremony, when the ice buckles, when the TV commentators run out of adjectives, what remains is the naked fact that we keep doing this—hurtling into the void, hoping for a medal, accepting a certificate instead.

If you stay with it long enough, the Winter Olympics start to look less like a competition and more like a meditation on existence itself. The same geometry of fear, grace, and failure governs every life: how to move through danger, how to recover balance, how to land without breaking. The skiers, the jumpers, the riders—they’re all performing the same metaphysical trick, showing that beauty can emerge from risk, and that control, however brief, is the most fragile and noble illusion of all.

In the end, that’s the real sport. Not skiing or skating, but the eternal attempt to keep our footing on the ice of being—to remain upright, however briefly, before we fall.

Felix Orman (b. 1988 in Zurich) is a sports psychologist who once attempted to cure a curling team’s performance anxiety by teaching them existentialism. He lectures on “the metaphysics of momentum” and claims his PhD thesis was disqualified for excessive irony. Between consulting for ski jumpers and studying fear as a performance enhancer, he collects broken stopwatches “to remind athletes that time is subjective.”

Cover image: Great Britain curling team, Chamonix, 1924: Wool, mustaches, and quiet precision. The sport of sweeping ice into submission made its Olympic debut with impeccable tailoring.