The Better Blade Angels Of Our Nature: A Quick Winter Olympics Post-Mortem

I find the Olympics fairly overwhelming.

Part of it is their relative scarcity.  They only come along every four years (or, I guess, two years if you consider the Winter and Summer iterations to be the same), which gives each new Olympiad an increase in meaning the longer you go in life.  I’m currently a couple of weeks away from turning 38, which means I only have 16 more Summer Games for me to enjoy, and this math is under the charitable assumption that I make it to 100 years of age.  I find this a fairly humbling statistic.  You only get so many.

I also get overwhelmed by just how much goddamn Olympics they manage to pack into a just-over-two-week span.  Just take the recently-concluded 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina.  There were technically sixteen sports that various countries competed in, but most of them have singles, teams, and pair variants, leading to a grand total of 116 events through eighteen days.  Even if you wanted to, you wouldn’t be able to take in the entire Olympiad, unless you just quit your job and stood in front of the TV with Peacock blaring around the clock.  Too many humans, too many stories, too little time.  It’s like if the first round of March Madness lasted for almost three weeks.

I think the combination of these two factors (the sheer volume, and the immense time that elapses between them) has inadvertently caused me to pull away from the Olympics over the past decade, plus.  I think the last time I truly got invested in the Olympics was probably 2012.  That was the year of the “Fierce Five”, the women’s gymnastics team that gave us the emergence of Gabby Douglas and both a vault and a meme for the ages from McKayla Maroney.  It was thrilling, compelling television, made all the more absorbing by the fact that I knew nothing about gymnastics before or after, and truly hadn’t heard of any of the members of the team until ten minutes prior to watching their first event.

But, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020 (er, 2021), 2022….I didn’t really keep tabs on any of it, outside of the major high-level stories (Simone Biles’ rise and sort-of fall, followed by her mental health struggles; Katy Ledecky’s dominance; Raygun).  It was only at the very tail end of the 2024 Paris Games where I started feeling that tug again.  I think that tug probably came from my realization that, oh fuck, the next Summer Games will be when I’m 40.  Not that I’m going to turn into a pile of dust at 40 or anything, but it kicked this belated drive in me to not take these things for granted any longer.  

So, this month, I made a concerted effort to watch and enjoy the final Winter Olympics of my thirties.  First overwhelming factor conquered.  However, this didn’t solve the other problem…where to start?  Luge?  Skiing?  Curling?  Am I going to be watching curling?  Ultimately, though, I think one has to approach the Olympics the same way one approaches tackling the decades of superhero comic book publications and canons; you just gotta flip around, see what interests you, then pick your characters and follow them through.  

This brings me to the Blade Angels.

First note about “The Blade Angels”, the phrase used to refer to the female figure skating team for the United States: in my opinion, the nickname needed just a little longer in the oven.  It’s okay.  All the information it’s trying to communicate is present.  But it’s a tad boring, sounding less like a figure skating squad and more like a Marvel comics spinoff you’ve never heard of.  I’ve always preferred the accidental nickname my wife came up with earlier last week when trying to remember the phrase “The Blade Angels”: “The Twirly Girlies”.  A note for 2030, Team USA!  You’re welcome.

Second note about the “Blade Angels”, consisting of Isabeau Levito, Amber Glenn and Alysa Liu: I got a lot of joy out of watching them the past week or so.  I suppose they weren’t a hard group to discover: it felt like NBC/Peacock was pushing the Team USA figure skating squad hard this year, sometimes to their detriment.  But, as always with the Olympics, there were a lot of potential “figures of destiny” to choose from.  I didn’t have time to really keep tabs on the men’s and women’s hockey teams, nor Breezy Johnson, or Mikaela Shiffrin, nor whatever the fuck was going on between the Canadians and the Swedes, nor something called “Penisgate”.  The Blade Angels were simply the characters we happened to latch onto, and we followed them through.

It was a thrilling experience, although not without its heartbreaks.  For what it’s worth, I found Amber Glenn* immediately compelling, probably due to the personality segment where she gushed about her love for Magic: The Gathering.  Although she’s a stranger that I have absolutely nothing in common with, I found her propensity to thrive under pressure, until suddenly she isn’t, to be weirdly relatable.  In my brief period as a stage actor, I pretty much always left a show focused on some imperceptible line flub, rather than the fact that the audience had a great time. So, yes, it felt a little crummy to see Amber constantly focus on a mistake, even in the afterglow of a terrific skate, but also…I get it.

 *A Team USA athlete who, like others, continues to catch a lot of online crap for comments made at the Olympics regarding dissatisfaction with the current U.S. government.  Just FYI, I’m not planning to litigate in this space what kind of statements qualify as “representing your country” or not, nor what types of opinions people need to feel obligated to support.  That said, in my opinion, Glenn’s comments contextually feel pretty benign, especially considering it was in response to a direct question.  I’ve heard a lot worse lobbied at this administration. As always, your mileage may vary.

We often point to Olympians as athletes at the pinnacle of their careers climbing their way up the mountain to glory, not ever really absorbing the fact that most don’t reach the peak.  It’s the nature of competition that a large number of competitors have to fail in order for an award to be worth anything.  So, it can be easy to dismiss someone finishing fifth rather than third in an event as a “choker” without considering the fact that the Olympics are basically the only environment where being the fifth best at a certain athletic skill somehow isn’t an achievement.  I don’t blame people for occasionally collapsing under the pressure.  This doesn’t make me like them less.  It usually makes me like them more.  It’s human.

Of course, every once in a while, you see someone who truly doesn’t seem to feel pressure at all.

This leads me to Alysa Liu’s famous free skate that clinched the first gold for Team USA in women’s single figure skating in decades (and led to her instantly iconic post-skate reaction “that’s what i’m fuckin’ talking about!”), whose routine stood out from pretty much everybody else by being so free, energetic, and light.  This has basically been her mantra since returning to the sport after previously retiring at the age of 16 (what a weird, nasty sport, lol).  If she was going to skate again, it would be on her terms, and unencumbered from what points she would get from judges.  It would be to express art and nothing else.

And, look, you hear over and over and over from competitors and artists that they “don’t care what critics think” and are only focused on “telling a story” or “expressing their art” and doing it for themselves.  And I’m telling you that, pretty much every single time you hear someone say that, they’re lying.  It’s perhaps an unintentional lie, but I know a lot of artists (when I’m feeling really good, I even consider myself one) and they all want to be liked.  Self-expression is an intensely scary and intimate thing, and doing it without the assurance that the expression will, at the very least, be accepted is almost too heavy a thought to bear.  So, “I don’t care how I’m judged” is a nice thought, but it’s a really difficult thing to back up.

Alysa Liu is essentially the only person I can think of who backed it up.  Yes, her victory came off the back of a lifetime of hard work and a sacrificed childhood.  But, somehow, none of that weight shows up in her art anymore.

And now she’s a gold medalist.  Pretty cool.

Also pretty cool: the intense sportsmanship all the women in basically every competing country showed each other throughout an intense couple of days of figure skating.  NBC has a habit of zooming all the way the fuck in, Sergio Leone-style, on weeping women awaiting judgment, and there was a lot to cry over last week.  As an example, Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto, a stunning, elegant and joyful soon-to-retire figure skater who fell just short of gold, couldn’t help but feel emotional over her last competitive skate.  You could see the broadcast wanting to make a big meal out of this, so I loved seeing Amber (a victim of the “crying mess” zoom herself) step up and redirect the camera crew, a small act of dignity that nevertheless felt humongous.  

A lot of the competition felt like this, these constant acts of kindness that were done for the sake of doing them.  I loved the little jazz-hands wave every girl at the scoring table did to the skater in the leader’s chair.  I loved how supportive everybody remained as the medal podium began to set, and competitors began to fall in and out of the top three.  For those who were there for the shitshow that was the 2022 women’s figure skating podium, this was a remarkable turn-around in vibes.

And…not to become yet another “our current times” guy, but…if I may.

It’s been interesting being an American lately, to say the least.  I love the country that I live in (I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t), and I’ve never really felt shame towards it*, even through eight years of Bush foreign policy, drone strikes, and, uh, whatever the fuck has been happening the past ten years.  But I’m always hyper-vigilant towards how Americans are perceived as individuals, because, frankly, oftentimes we step in it.  When traveling abroad, I never like coming off like the typical “ugly American”, sometimes to the point of being a tad antisocial.  It’s not out of shame.  I just want our country to be represented in the best way possible!  If people are going to hate us, it won’t be because I said something stupid!

*Although I also am acutely aware that I’m not a member of a particular out-group, which undoubtedly positively affects my experience.

And given that the United States has made democratic decisions over the past decade that have been, um, somewhat globally controversial, I want us to represent the best of ourselves more than ever.  Because America has never been one person, and it never will be.  Whatever your perception of us, good or bad, we’re never quite that.  Like any group of people, we’re a bevy of contradictions.  We’re both elegant and clumsy.  We’re both rigorous and improvisational.  We can be both amazing and terrifying.  At our best, we’re some of the nicest people you’re ever going to meet (sincerely, I have witnessed altruism within these borders that would make your jaw drop).  At our worst, we can choose to be hideously, arbitrarily cruel.  Anything’s possible.

So, to see an arm of Team USA being part of a global squad that chose to support and love one another, even as they competed against each other?  Who felt the freedom to be themselves at the highest level, whether that meant speaking up for themselves, or by just letting their art do the talking?

Well, to quote a certain recent gold medalist….

….that’s what I’m fuckin’ talking about.