Jack Anderson: Cheating rows, politics and climate change - things hot up at the Winter Olympics
Spain's Maria Costa Diez, right, and China's Yuzhen Cidan compete during a ski mountaineering women's sprint heat in Bormio, Ital. Pic: AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell
It’s hotting up at the Winter Olympics We live in a world of algorithms and advertising. Watching highlights of the Winter Olympics, I flicked to Netflix and was immediately bombarded with their latest in sport; a documentary called Miracle: The Boys of '80. It recounts the tale of the 1980 US Olympic men’s ice hockey team, a collection of students, who miraculously beat the Soviet Union in the eponymous game on their way to eventual gold.
Like Roger Kahn’s book, The Boys of the Summer, on the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s, (still the greatest sports book of all), the documentary focuses on the players and their stories, then and now. Gnarled, stiff, and sun-wrinkled, looking like a men’s shed group from Florida on tour, they gather round the ice rink once more, probably for the last time at the stadium, to reminisce. They retain the camaraderie, giddiness and internal competitiveness of every good team. But the most interesting interview of all is with someone not there, the since deceased coach Herb Brooks, a driven and self-admittedly unlikeable man whose echoey, audio-tape recollections drip with regret at how hard he had whipped his troops to gold.
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