Winter Olympic sports are harder than Summer Olympic sports. Most of us know how to run, jump, throw and swim, but skating, skiing and sledding are foreign to many Olympic viewers. Ahead of the 2014 Games in Sochi, For The Win attempts to determine which Winter Olympic sport is the hardest. We based our rankings of 21 different Olympic events on a single criteria: How difficult would it be for a casual viewer to finish an event?
21. Curling
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Are you capable of standing on ice and yelling at inanimate objects? Congratulations, you too can be a curler. Though it’s one of our favorite sports on the Winter Olympic program, curling is the easiest of any discipline at either Summer or Winter Games. Even the sweepers (the competitors who guide the stone by decreasing friction through vigorous brushing) don’t have much to do. It’s like shoveling the driveway, minus the physical exertion, sense of pride upon completion and ever-present threat of severe back injury.
20. Figure skating
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Being a great figure skater is harder than being a great bobsledder, but that’s a different list. If you’ve ever been on ice skates, you’ll be able to finish a skating routine simply by gliding around the rink. As an added bonus, depending on which French judge is working that day, you may even win a medal.
19. Bobsled
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Bobsled combines the arts of running, steering and squeezing four people into a two-door car.
18. Speed skating
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The hardest part might be avoiding cutting yourself on the blade while lacing up the skates.
17. Ice dancing
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Like with figure skating, you could survive by simply standing on the ice. However, in this discipline, you’d have to do so while appearing in public wearing a matching, sequined outfit.
16. Pairs figure skating
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Like with figure skating, you could survive by simply standing on the ice. However, in this discipline, you’d have to do so while running the risk of either dropping your partner, being dropped by your partner or having your partner throw sequins at you because you stood there while they actually, you know, did stuff.
15. Halfpipe
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This is where the rules of our rankings come into play. Doing tricks like a frontside 1080 rodeo or double McTwist 1260 are some of the most difficult things in the Winter Olympics. But if finishing is the only name of the game, you could theoretically just snowboard down the middle of the halfpipe while wearing your finest flannel.
14. Short track speed skating
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Just tiptoe out of the way and let Apolo Anton Ohno and those South Korean racers have their collisions in peace.
13. Ski Cross/Snowboard Cross
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Ditto, except replace “Apolo Anton Ohno” with “guys named Connor” and “South Korean racers” with “the Swedish equivalent of Connor.”
12. Moguls
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If life were a cartoon, you’d start on a mogul course, fall down, and then get wildly thrown over every subsequent mogul until reaching the bottom of the hill. Then little birds would fly above your head. In real life, I think momentum would slow you down in between each bump for maximum humiliation and those little birds would have already been shooed away from Sochi.
11. Hockey
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If you expected hockey to be higher, I don’t blame you. But the fact that there’s a finite end to games means you can survive by waiting out the clock. The whole “no fighting” thing is both a plus and minus. On one hand, it saves you from having to throw down or, more appropriately, from getting thrown down. On the other, it’s gotta be insanely difficult to play a game without wanting to start something with Sidney Crosby.
10. Cross country skiing
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In our initial rankings, cross country was closer to the top of the list, as this event is the real deal. (The resting heart rates of top cross country skiers is 24 beats per minute, which is more like a hibernating black bear than a human being.) Still, you could eventually make it to the finish line on a cross country course, even if it meant hibernating like a black bear sometime in the middle.
9. Biathlon
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Cross country with the added stress of firing a loaded weapon.
8. Luge
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Head first > feet first.
6. Slalom skiing
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Swimming or running for recreation is, at its core, just like swimming or running in the Olympics. (Minus the speed, of course.) Skiing for recreation and skiing in the Olympics are completely different things. Also, if my recent efforts are any indication, it’s really hard to spell “slalom.”
5. Slopestyle
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“I think the president of the IOC should be Johnny Knoxville. Because basically this stuff is just Jackass stuff they invented and called an Olympic sport.”
All true. But those Jackass stunts ain’t easy.
4. Aerials
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The last few feet of the aerials ramps are basically like skiing uphill. On the off chance you’re able to defy two of Newton’s laws of motion and make it airborne, the best case scenario is only breaking two ribs on the landing.
3. Downhill skiing
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Pizza and snowplow methods don’t work when you’re hurtling down the side of an icy mountain at 80 mph.
2. Ski jumping
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The most impressive thing about Vinko Bogataj, the guy from the famous Wide World of Sports ”agony of defeat” clip, is that he made it 90% of the way down the take-off ramp.
We’d all be lucky not to do a header within the first 25 meters.
1. Nordic combined
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Cross country skiing and ski jumping, combined into one discipline. Exhaustion + sheer terror = the hardest of any Olympic sport.
