One possibility is the simple answer - the sports played in the summer go to the summer games. Easy, right? The challenge for me is that simple examples such as basketball, a winter sport played in the summer games, suggest it's not so simple. Also, what about the ones that sit comfortably in two minds, played in either spring or fall, where the distinction could be almost arbitrary? It seems easy enough to say "summer sports in the summer", but there could be challenges to this method once we get into the details. I suppose an alternate version of this idea would suggest that climate plays the key role, with events that could reasonably be held outdoors on a warm day falling under the jurisdiction of the summer games. I mean, this is what basketball is, right, an asphalt court down at the park? But what do we do for sports such as volleyball or ping-pong (excuse me, table tennis), which basically could happen at any time thanks to their indoor venues? This climate-based thinking could also lead to a potential (eventual?) problem when global warming gets to the point that ALL sports are summer sports, since it'll always be summer (but let's ignore this angle, at least today).
A deeper dive into the event list suggests some other shared characteristics that could determine these distinctions. For example, I notice an odd feature of many winter sports - you start at the top, then race to the bottom. This is bobsled, this is skiing, this is most of the games! It makes me wonder if the Winter Olympics started when some drunk bloke fell on his ass and slid down a hill. But if I'm honest with myself, this is just a cheap joke, a cute suggestion at best, my hypothesis refuted with easy examples like curling or figure skating, which could take place in my flat if the building froze. In fact, this really represents an example of a special type of remark: the kind of thing you say when you feel like you should say something, maybe at some sort of meet and greet type of deal, but you have nothing to say. What do you do in these moments? I usually go for a quick laugh premised more on everyone being able to explain the joke rather than anyone finding it funny, just so they all know that I fit in, that I belong, that I get it. This might sound sad, but it's the exact feeling I have at the moment, where we are wrapping up the third paragraph of a post I'm writing solely because there is nothing on TV (except, well, the Winter Olympics).
Anyway, having ruled out all my brilliant ideas and given that I have nothing to say, I guess I'm left with the usual explanation - this is all, most likely, a problem of admin, specifically the problem of admin enthusiastically yet poorly executed. One thing I learned "researching" this post (in other words, five minutes ago on Wikipedia) was that ice hockey and figure skating were first contested at a Summer Olympics (Antwerp 1920). They invented the Winter Olympics four years later, so off went those two events to the new games. And did basketball go with them? No, basketball actually wasn't officially contested until 1936, and it happened outdoors (should I revisit my earlier point?). It implies that moving the sport indoors would have seen it given the same shift to the Winter Olympics as hockey, but the next games in 1948 just saw it return as an indoor summer event, where it has remained for the next seventy-plus years. I guess they just didn't think moving basketball would make either Olympics better, so they kept it in the summer.
I'm not going to detail the history of how each event ended up in its respective Olympics. And honestly, it's probably just whether the event is on snow or ice, right? So if that settles it for you, go ahead and leave now - go watch the snow games, before the ice melts! But for those still unconvinced, I offer a final suggestion - maybe each event, through some combination of accidents, opportunities, and arbitrary decisions, just ended up where it is now, so that's where it is, and that's the story. The fact that ice or snow happens to demarcate the two versions is nothing more than a happy coincidence, or an invented standard applied in hindsight to fit a neat narrative onto the mess of process, the mess of life. It may seem odd that this could explain the organizing principle for one of the most logistically complex events in human history, but I feel this isn't strange at all. A set of happy coincidences resulting from trying to make things better... isn't this, really, what life is? The only thing we really do is, having accepted the situation, we just try to make things a little better, whether it means dividing events in the games, making choices about our paths, or dealing with the biggest feelings. If we (or someone) knew what was best for us, there would be instructions written on the back of every birth certificate, but I don't plan to check mine. It's not so much that I had no idea I would be writing this sentence two paragraphs ago, it's more that if I did know, it wouldn't be worth writing it at all.
I think this thought that maybe, just maybe, the Olympics are organized the same way we organize most of our lives, well, maybe this explains the popularity of these games. What's more interesting than seeing ourselves? There are so many situations where, if you think more than ten seconds about it, suddenly seem full of impossible contradictions, but I think we forget how little control we have over our outcomes. Don't we all know the nature lover who lives in the middle of a city? You would never suspect such a person planned for life to work out that way, but I think a lot of us do end up just like this in a certain respect, and to be honest I don't think it's necessarily a bad result. The problem with life stories is that events always happen in order, so it seems implausible that the order had no bearing on events. I can look back on my years and tell you exactly how each moment led to the next. But what can I say now, about how this moment will lead to tomorrow? I don't even know how this paragraph will flow into the next one, but there's really only one way to find out.
So, you've suddenly looked around, and it didn't work out - you are the proverbial mountain man in the city jungle. What next? I don't know, just try something? You don't win the gold every time, so maybe aim for the silver and settle for the bronze, just to get going. How about putting a few plants in the window, finding a smelly pet or two, and looking at that gravelly park as you drive past it on weekends? These might seem like poor substitutes for an alternate lifetime surrounded by blues and greens, but maybe in the outdoors you'll never find out that your true calling was meant to be among people. So what would be the point of planning out every step, days and months and years in advance, with so much of us unknown even to ourselves? No, a lot of us know a better way, and by observation it seems that we all at least try to do it. We go here, we go there, stopping to say a thing or two and maybe have a laugh, all the while hoping for a sign every so often that validates our methods.
Then one day, we realize four years are gone, wasted even, and our resolve disappears under the cloak of bitter disappointment. We feel like we should have something for all that effort, that we should at least be able to say something, so we look to say something that everyone else can explain to others, and we try to fit in, try to belong, trying because if we get it then we can ignore what was lost. We decide to start planning so we can leave it behind. We pick our mountain, then start to climb. At first, the ground seems to pull us upward like destiny itself, gravity inverted, is the force at the summit. But I think at the end of the day a destiny of reality reveals itself - there is a slip, a fall, and then we are just another bloke sliding away from that promised land, full of fear and despair and that feeling, again, that we'll have to say something, should say something. We are ignorant in such moments, at least at first, but at the bottom once again we might finally understand why we are always being pulled here, when we look around and see all the things we can't leave behind, and realize the only way is to just try to make things better.
