I mused here in 2012 about the Summer Olympics as to how I was addicted to the coverage. I am no better with the Winter Games. You want an Olympic experience; try binge watching all of NBC’s projected 1,529 broadcast hours. For comparison’s sake, consider that in 1976, when the Winter Olympics were held in Innsbruck, Austria, ABC produced 43.5 hours of coverage over 12 days. Wimps.

If you do the math, and who really wants to, it averages out to more than 85 hours a day for 18 days. With the broadcast channel, three cable channels, television, and cell phone apps, along with live streaming over the internet, I can watch events around the clock. How did I ever think I wouldn’t be?

The Winter Olympic broadcast figure is down from the summer coverage of 3,500 hours, so it should be easier, but that is not the case. Winter Olympics have curling.

How can this be a sport? A bunch of pot bellied men dressed in outrageous pants who couldn’t do 10 pushups without having a coronary slide a “stone,” which is a carved piece of granite weighing between 38-44 pounds with a handle attached, down the ice and try to land in a target area. This is shuffleboard on ice. I wonder if they break a sweat working with those little brooms.

The Admiral played hockey for Team Canada in the Arctic Winter Games years ago, so I am a women’s hockey fan. I like women, but that is not the reason I watch. The men are all professionals, and are brutes, which describes men in general. Where men muscle the puck along the ice, the women use fundamentals and speed to finesse it. The game is easier to follow, and the women are much easier on the eyes.

Whoever has ridden a sled down a too steep hill successfully, has to love it, but is that a sport? What is so hard about jumping into, or onto a sled and letting gravity do its thing? You only have to look at the bellies of some of the bobsledders to wonder about this.

I watch figure skating, and they are genuine athletes, but like gymnastics, I can’t get into it. The judging system bugs me. I prefer objective scoring such as the team or individual, which scores the most points, wins, as opposed to the subjective system of a bunch of judges doing complicated math to determine the winner.

I watched ice dancing, and I could not tell a spits worth of difference between any of the pairs. They are all great compared to me. I can skate as long as I am with the Admiral. She holds me up, which she does in most aspects of my life.

There was a time when I cross-country skied a lot, and I loved it, but I have to admit, it is agonizingly boring as a spectator sport. These Olympics have a beautiful stadium to watch it in, and the course is accessible to fans, and cameras on cables make it interesting to TV watchers, but it is so boring. The announcers are screaming as if it was the end of the world, and I am saying, “Don’t wake me up.”

I guess if they had vegetable eating in the Olympics, I’d watch. I don’t care what the sport is, I want team USA to win, and when we don’t, I hurt. I feel it my patriotic duty to cheer our country in every sport, even those that do not make any sense to me. When I make the sacrifice to watch and cheer, and not work, or stay up too late to work the next day, and get up before dawn to watch more games on four channels, my computer, and my phone, the US had better be winning.

I am addicted. I admit it. Oh ... excuse me; I must stop. I am writing this during commercials, and another is almost over. Happy obsessive watching to all y’all.

David Wilson Atwood is a local writer whose human-interest columns offer a unique perspective. He may be contacted at: www.starchasers.us.