Every four years, the Olympic Winter Games captures the public’s sporting imagination as Team GB’s finest ski, skate and slide in pursuit of sporting immortality.
Perhaps even more than their summer counterparts, the sports of the Winter Games are endlessly fascinating, maybe because most of us have never tried a lot of them first-hand – after all, how often do you go for a recreational weekend luge?
With the start of Beijing 2022 less than a month away, it’s almost time to once again become well-versed in the language of curling and experts in the nuances of skeleton.
So we’d thought we’d help you out by telling you one thing you didn’t know about each of the 13 sports in which Team GB could have Olympic representation in Beijing.
Alpine Skiing
Downhill is the alpine skiing discipline where skiers reach the highest speeds, with the 100-mph (161 km/h) barrier being broken for the first time in 2013 by France’s Johan Clarey at the World Cup event on the Lauberhorn in Wengen. By contrast, slalom is the most technical and therefore slowest discipline as skiers generally average around 25 mph (40 km/h).
Biathlon
The combination of skiing and shooting – which is rooted in the skiing traditions of Scandinavia, where natives worshipped the Norse god Ullr as both the ski god and hunting god – was part of the first Olympic Winter Games in 1924 but under the name 'military patrol'. It was then a demonstration sport in 1928, 1936 and 1948 before being re-admitted as a medal event in its new guise of biathlon at Squaw Valley 1960.
Bobsleigh
Bobsleigh has been contested at every edition of the Olympic Winter Games apart from Squaw Valley 1960, when organisers opted not to contest the event due to the prohibitive cost of building a track. However, women’s bobsleigh was only added to the Olympic programme at Salt Lake City 2002.
Cross-country Skiing
As a competitive sport, cross-country skiing dates back to the 18th century, although in the 1800s racers used a single, wooden pole that could be used for braking downhill, rather than a pair of poles. In Norway, racing with two poles – known as "Finland style" – met with resistance for a variety of reasons including aesthetics as double poling apparently made skiers “waddle like geese”.
Curling
Team GB were the first nation to win an Olympic curling gold when they took the men’s title at Chamonix 1924 ahead of Sweden, although the results weren’t considered official at the time. It was only in 2006, after an investigative campaign led by the Glasgow-based newspaper The Herald, that the IOC ruled the curling medals were definitively part of the official Olympic programme in 1924, and not just a demonstration event as some sources had previously claimed.
Figure Skating
For a long time, figure skaters were restricted to instrumental music – and vocals were allowed only if they contained no lyrics or words – but from the 1997-98 season, the ISU decided to allow lyrics or words in ice dance music, which was then extended to all disciplines from 2014-15.
Freestyle Skiing
Freestyle skiing started when 'moguls', large snow bumps, formed on pistes due to the number of people using ski slopes when the popularity of the sport exploded in the USA in the 1960s. It would be known as ‘hot dogging’ in its earliest days and traditionalists initially looked askance at races that often involved competitors tumbling down the hill head-first
Luge
The first recorded use of the term "luge" dates to 1905 and derives from the Savoy/Swiss dialect of the French word luge, meaning "small coasting sled". Athletes slide face-up and feet-first on a sled down an ice track and Austrian Manuel Pfister holds the record for top speed reached on a luge when he clocked 154 km/h (96 mph) on a track in Whistler, Canada, prior to the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.
Nordic Combined
Nordic Combined sees athletes first compete in ski jumping to determine positions for the subsequent cross-country skiing race, although until the 1950s, the order of events was held in reverse, with the cross-country coming first. However, this was switched to the current format to make the competition more dramatic as the gaps established during the cross-country race tended to be too big to overcome in ski jumping.
Short Track Speed Skating
The oval ice track on which short track speed skating takes place is exactly 111.12 metres long and the sport developed in North America during the early 20th century when competitions would take place indoors, therefore on shorter tracks than those used for traditional outdoor skating.
Skeleton
Skeleton is actually the slowest of the sliding sports, chiefly due to its face-down approach. Sleds travel at between 80 and 90 mph and riders experience five times normal g-force but it is slower than its cousins, bobsleigh and luge.
Snowboarding
Snowboarding originated in the 1960s when engineer Sherman Poppen fastened two skis together so his young daughters could safely glide downhill on snow. Dubbed ‘the snurfer’ (combining the words snow and surfer) by his wife Nancy, the creation was so popular with his daughters’ friends that Poppen licensed the idea to a manufacturer, who sold around a million snurfers in the next decade
Speed Skating
Speed skating dates back over a millennium to when Northern European natives, especially in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, strapped bones to their feet and used them to travel on frozen waterways such as lakes, canals and rivers.