Somewhere on a snowbank in Russia, a handful of snowboarders are kicking back, smoking weed, and talking about jumping out of helicopters to board some pure white. I’m supposed to care about this and them as part of my patriotic responsibility. I’m supposed to clap for Ashley Wagner and cheer on the tandem of Meryl Davis and Charlie White as they blaze across the ice at Sochi. The only problem is I don’t care. I don’t think I was meant to care either.
I was raised in Harlem, NY. I’m fortunate enough to have a mother who thought beyond the ghetto. She made sure I was educated. She introduced me to chess and tennis. She took me to swimming pools. She tossed me on the ice on more than one occasion, just to give me the experience of doing these activities that a lot of inner city kids never connect with. Like I posted earlier, I didn’t play basketball. I had to find football on my own. She did everything she could to give me an experience that was antithetical to what many (often falsely) associate with as the traditional black experience. Even still, we never skied. The thought of such things didn’t even come up in our house. As a grown man I’ve only snowbarded a handful of times and still have never skied. It cost too much money and was too alien to me.
Skiing–winter sports in general–is something that doesn’t exist in the realms of inner city America. There is a reason why you can count the number of black and hispanic Ice Hockey players on one hand. Unlike soccer, basketball, football, and baseball, inner city youth were not traditionally targeted for hockey or figure skating, or many other of the Winter Olympic sports. I’ve always felt this social distance from those sports, as if they belong to an entirely separate audience–like backgammon and shuffleboard.
if not for my new hero, Shiva Keshavan, and the miniscule number of American athletes like Shani Davis, my interest in the Winter Olympics would be limited to talking trash about Ice Skaters who fall down and an extremely curious fascination with curling. I’m watching because my kids find the flips amazing and maybe out of some residual social programming to connect with my patriotic side and cheer on America in this us vs. them extravaganza. So, we do our duty on some nights. We stay up late and go ooh and ahh and my kids, without being told to do so, anxiously wait the scores of the American team. We are far removed from the inner city now, but we are also far removed from the conditions that would allow us to do any of what these athletes do. Unlike the sports we play, the Winter Olympics is an alien life form and we’re peering down the viewport for a glimpse of how the other half lives.