SOCHI: NOW IS THE WINNER OF OUR DISCO TENSE

There's no business like snow business. Oh shut up, this is serious. It's almost all over at the Winter Olympics and all Australia has won is a tin of biscuits in the Demonstration Curling. It's a disgrace. It's an outrage. But is it a surprise ? Well hardly. Australia is crap at this sort of thing. I blame the government. The government blames the unions, and the unions are busy looking for misplaced credit cards but they're pretty sure the whole debacle can be sledded home to smarmy ski-instructor  Raoul Sleaze who failed to sleep with any members of either sex of the Winter Olympic team thus causing a massive wave of shattered self-esteem, & considerable surprise from casual observers. Raoul could not be reached for comment.

Now I'd love to be able to accept bizarre and simple-minded thinking like this, and if I can't do better in the next four or five hundred words I'll certainly be coming back to it, don't you worry about that, but I think we can do better. We may not be able to win medals in that going-downhill-really-fast-on-a-tiny-bit-of-sheet-metal kind of thing, but our excuses are world class.

I don't know if you've noticed but Australia is really flat. I mean really really flat. It's wide and it's brown. Okay, there's a couple of hills in New South Wales which get a bit of snow for a couple of weeks in late July but that's about it. The only ice you're ever going to see is a few cubes melting quickly in a glass of Bundy & Coke. This is not the natural breeding ground of a Winter Olympian. Canada on the other hand is nothing but ice and snow. Millions of square miles of it. And from the moment the little kiddies can walk they have the ice skates strapped on & they're given a hockey stick so they can beat baby seals to death. Toughens them up.

And am I the only one who thinks it's just a little underhanded to train more, try harder, and just be all round better ? I mean quite apart from their natural (and totally unfair) proximity to ice and snow the lengths those Canadians Americans Russians Koreans Japanese Scandinavians and assorted Europeans have go to just to beat us, it beggars belief. Members of the Dutch team even tested positive for innate ability. I don't want to call these people cheats, but, well, you know what I'm saying. We should be looking for a level playing field on those Russian ski-slopes (a direct quote from our Minister of Sport)

What we need is events which are a bit more favourable to natural Australian ability. Something where  you yell "Fuck I'm pissed" and slide down the luge course on your bum without spilling a drop of your bundy & coke would see us bringing home gold. Shitloads of it.

Which brings us back to Raoul. I understand Mr Sleaze has recently been appointed to chair a Royal Commission into Sport and Why We're Not Better at Some of  It, so there should be some answers there.

Or, and I don't want to get to radical here, we could just give the whole thing away. I remember when I was a mere boy my mother would always say to me "Jeff, if at first you don't succeed, fuck it"