Joanne Sherman’s column: Winter sports … and brave attempts

I was glued to the Winter Olympics, which I like more than the summer games.

That’s probably because I was raised in Ohio where it’s winter most of the year. No exaggeration. Somewhere in a cardboard box are black-and-white photos of 9-year-old me in my harem girl Halloween costume worn over a brown wool snowsuit, which ruined the entire politically incorrect look.

In that same box are mid-April photos of little me in my pastel car coat, white hat and that damn wool snowsuit digging for Easter eggs … in the snow. 

Winter starts early and goes on forever in Ohio. But regardless of the weather, kids who grew up during the Wonder Years spent all day, every day outside. That’s how we Midwestern Baby Boomers learned to enjoy many of the outdoor winter sports in the Winter Olympics and why we think we can do what the star athletes are doing.

One Olympic activity I’ve dabbled in was bobsledding. It nearly killed me. I was the squeezed-in middle passenger on a sled with two other helmeted people as the sled hurtled down the icy chute at Lake Placid. My head was machine-gun battered, front and back, for the nearly mile-long downhill ride. I screamed and cried and may have even passed out. My delicate brain was concussed so severely, I can still feel loose pieces of it rattling around when I tilt my head a certain way.

Because of recurring flash-backs, I’m not a big fan of bobsledding. And I don’t particularly care for skiing, either. Oh, I pretended I was having fun on family vacations to Okemo, Whiteface and Killington. Truthfully, I hated every minute I wasn’t inside the lodge. My family rated ski resorts on the various difficulty levels of the ski trails. I rated them by the food, quality of hot chocolate and size of the fireplace.

Sadly, I could never enjoy skiing after an unfortunate incident that happened in the early 70s, the first time I ever ventured onto the slopes at Mt. Nikko, when we lived in Japan.

I was sure skiing would be easy, because up until that point in my life, everything had been. The problem I had was not on the skis but with the rope-tow that was supposed to pull me and about three dozen nursery-school skiers to the top of the bunny slope, which had the same degree of incline as the IGA parking lot.

When I grabbed hold of the rope, it pulled me forward but my skis stuck. I went down, creating a domino effect involving all the pre-school skiers behind me. Little pink, yellow, and green snowsuits piled up on top of my back.

Unaware that the accident was an omen, I let myself be fooled into riding a chairlift, high above the bunny slope where tiny skiers demonstrated their rope-tow skills. The little show-offs.

Because I got off the chairlift with ease, I thought, “Okay, I got this.” 

But I did not.

The moment gravity found me, I was out of control. Hurtling down Mt. Nikko on a trail one level up from the bunny slope, I did shout warnings to skiers below. Sadly for me and the skiers in my path, I hadn’t gotten far in my Japanese phrase book. All that came out was, “Kore wa kaban desu!” which translates to: “This is a briefcase!”

I screamed it over and over, all the way down. It didn’t matter that it made no sense; it made people look up and get out of the way. Most of them.

So even though Olympic skiing isn’t my “thing,” I watch it to kill time, waiting for the ice skating competitions. Ice skating was a big part of the winters of my youth. We had indoor rinks, professional outdoor rinks and flooded tennis courts.

Sometimes our dads — the good ones, like mine — flooded the back yard for us. That process didn’t make for a smooth surface, but I appreciated the effort and skated in tight, bumpy circles until he went inside to watch The Ed Sullivan Show; then, I walked a block to the smoothly-flooded tennis courts.

I skated daily and became fairly proficient, able to spin, do figure-eights and stop hard enough to spray ice.

It made me reminisce about those days as I watched Olympic skaters knock off double salchows and triple Lutzes. I yearned to lace up my own skates hanging from a rafter in the basement. With enough practice, I might be able to glide across the ice backwards, or maybe even pull off a single Lutz. It sure would be fun to twirl again — but as I got up from my chair to get the skates, I felt those loose pieces of my brain rattling inside my head.

So, I got hot chocolate instead.