The All-Mess Olympics are finally concluded, to my chagrin. I don’t know why this seemed like so much fun – perhaps because we were finally back in a Winter Olympics area instead of trying to cram it into the same totalitarian capital that hosted the Summer Olympics 14 years earlier, perhaps because it was finally possible to watch everything on the global feed if you didn’t need to be live, perhaps because I just needed a little more light in the darkness.
The last Winter Olympics wrapped up just as I was about to turn 50, and then we had the invasion of Ukraine, and there we were in London for three weeks. And in so many ways it felt like a high point, in retrospect. It felt just fine to be 50, it felt alive, it felt like maybe we had made it through the dark of the last three or six or ten years and come to a new equilibrium we could live with. And then we got home and things started to decay within months.
The winter games always resonate more with me than the summer games. It’s that glimpse into another world of ice and snow and speed and grace that we wish we could live in, the same way it’s special to disappear to Tahoe every year (when we aren’t snowed out of being able to get there). I have the markers of memory in 1980, 1988, 1994 and almost every Winter Olympics thereafter. I don’t know what I’ll look back and remember from this middle fortnight of February 2026, but I’ll remember it as light enough to push back the dark for a little while, and as always, I’m grateful for the opportunity to escape again.