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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6576 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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The Winter Olympics is happening right now. Is it just me, or do the Olympics feel like they are far less culturally relevant than they used to be?

My impression is that the IOC burned a lot of social capital over the last decade pushing "the message" and as a result normies have largely tuned out.

I had the same thought when things were starting out this year and then realized that I have very few Winter Olympics memories. I think 2010 was the apex for me as a Sabres fan with a Korean girlfriend at the time - Ryan Miller carrying the US Hockey team and Yuna Kim dominating skating were pretty awesome. The only thing I remember about 2022 is the Wisconsin mustache dude rocking curling. I just mostly don't care about the winter events much. The United States isn't great at them, many of them are totally uninteresting to me, and Norway winning all the time marks it as large regional competition rather than the global spectacle of summer.

Perhaps I'm wrong though. I don't think I'll know until we get back around to 2028 and the Olympics feels big or it doesn't. As a track and field fan, I probably will once again be highly engaged though. For my money, Cole Hocker's gold was the best sports moment of 2024 overall, not just the Olympics or track.

To some extent I feel like all big cultural events are getting less relevant. Modern terminally online people are increasingly isolated from a shared culture and live in their own little bubbles. Of course random online niches can have some sort of culture, but traditional national or international massive cultural events which pretty much everyone is exposed to, are increasingly a thing of the past.

That being said, that process is of course far from finished and there are plenty of big relevant cultural events left and in the Netherlands that definitely includes the winter Olympics. At least if you correct for the general trend I mentioned above, I don't feel like it has decreased in significance over here at all. A quick check of the all-time medal table for speed skating at the Olympics will reveal why it is a big event in the Netherlands. Or well, the causality presumably runs the other way with speedskating always having been a massive sport in the Netherlands. Speed skating gets prominent coverage in the Netherlands outside of the Olympics as well and successful speed skaters are massive mainstream celebrities over here.

This belongs in the small scale question thread, not the culture war thread.

I agree that the Olympics don't have the cachet or cultural influence they used to, and the underlying reason is the same as everything else: the demise of the monoculture.

I can't comment for the US, but in the UK the Winter Olympics never had any real cultural relevance except during the era when Torville and Dean were competitive in ice dance.

Don't forget Eddie the Eagle!

Is it just me, or do the Olympics feel like they are far less culturally relevant than they used to be?

At least seems to be true in Korea:

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/society/20260209/why-south-koreans-are-tuning-out-2026-winter-olympics

The Milan Cortina Winter Olympic Games, which officially opened with preliminary events on Wednesday (local time) before the formal opening ceremony on Friday, have drawn the lowest level of Korean public interest ever recorded for a Winter Olympics. Google Trends data shows domestic searches for "Olympics" have fallen below 10 on a 100-point scale — down from 30 during the 2022 Beijing Games and a peak of 100 when Korea hosted the PyeongChang Games in 2018.

The disengagement is not uniquely Korean. U.S. broadcaster NBC's prime-time viewership for the Beijing Olympics averaged just 11.4 million — a 42 percent drop from PyeongChang. Ticket sales for Milan Cortina reached about 75 percent of capacity by early February, with nearly 1.2 million of roughly 1.5 million tickets sold, though organizers had relied on late surges and NHL star power to close the gap after a sluggish start that saw only 613,000 tickets sold through October.

"There was a time when families sat together in the living room to watch, even during hard economic times. That era is over," Yu said. "Everyone now consumes whatever content they want on their own smartphones."

Yu added that Koreans' emotional investment in national representation has weakened. "People are less inclined to feel that someone else's achievement on the international stage is somehow their own. Korea already has so much cultural content representing the nation globally that the Olympics no longer hold that singular status."

Downvoting because this should be in the small question thread.

I think numbers show it has been dropping. One as noted by others I don't think anything can meet the almost universal cultural phenomenon's of the past for myriad reasons because of modernity.

Two, demographic change. As the country gets browner we have less cold weather culture. My Scandinavian ancestors came here, settled in cold parts of the country. I love the cold and snow, the physical thing I'm the best at is snowboarding. I've got my toddler watching the Olympics and we'll be teaching him how to ski next year, but there will be proportionally less of us.

When were they culturally relevant?

I mean it might be different if you live in Canada. But I can't remember anyone caring very much about the winter olympics. Summer, yeah.

I think there used to be some level of cultural relevance for female figure skating and Ice Hockey.

The 1980 Miracle On Ice was a huge deal. My Dad can tell you what he had for breakfast that day and the day Kennedy was shot in 1963. It's that level of "seared into memory."

Figure skating, aside from the whole Tanya Harding nonsense, has been important because it holds female emotional valence and America wants to ensure that our ice dancing barbie dolls are the best ice dancing barbie dolls on earth.

I think both of these have declined in recent years because America fundamentally won hockey by having the NHL. When Aleksander Ovechkin, arguably the GOAT or Vice Goat after Gretzky, plays 20+ years in Washington and not Moscow, the jig is up. The "pro" leagues in Sweden, Finland, Czechia are all just AAAA farm leagues for the NHL.

For figuring skating, the Chinese got really fucking good and our own skaters turned, literally, fake and gay. I think the last superstar was Tara Lapinski? Or maybe that Sasha girl from like 2004 or so.

it holds female emotional valence

?

AO would maybe be the 4th best player in Pittsburgh history if he played there. Lemieux is the only one besides Gretzky with management on GOAT probably had a better peak but cancer and his back hurt his career stats. Crosby is definitely better. Jagr probably too. AO probably has the best shot of all time but not enough assists.

USA seems to be doing quite well at figure skating this year. It helps when you can poach the best figure skaters from USSR and Japan. However, that also diminishes the nationalistic hype of the Olympics... it feels like these are just globalistic sports dynasty families, spending their whole lives travelling around the world, not attached to any country in particular.

But also the death of network television, and NBC does a shitty job streaming it on the internet.

Poaching Soviet talent has been a thing forever. The Karolyis defected in 1981. I can see getting bent out of shape about someone like Gu, but Ilia was born in Virginia. Kam and O'Shea are not even in medal contention and were the weakest in the team competition. Kam being the weaker of the two.

And how we supposed to feel about that, as Americans? So we're too fat and lazy and stupid to actually get good at sports, but at least we're rich enough to buy up talent from other, more sporting countries? Are we going to win the world cup by taking advantage of anyone worldwide with a vague connection to America and bribing them to play for America? Is there even a point to having a nation-based sports competition when there's increasingly large numbers of global elites that can pick and choose which nation they play for, and their family background + big money training since youth gives them an immense advantage?

So we're too fat and lazy and stupid to actually get good at sports, but at least we're rich enough to buy up talent from other, more sporting countries?

Getting talent from everywhere else is 100% American. Even a lot of our multi-generational American sports talent is derived from stock originally bought from Africa.

Are we going to win the world cup by taking advantage of anyone worldwide with a vague connection to America and bribing them to play for America?

Eh, if we ever give enough of a shit about men's professional soccer we might do that. Seems unlikely; like cricket, men's professional soccer is just somehow un-American. Maybe if the rest of the world were to stop calling it "football"

Maybe if the rest of the world were to stop calling it "football"

I didn't care about Greenland, but them's fightin' words.

Kam was born on 20 December 2004 in Yokota Air Base, Japan, to a Japanese mother, Mako, and an American father, Benjamin. She also has two older brothers, Zane and Kai. At the time of Kam's birth, her father had been stationed in Japan due to his work as an Air Force surgeon. Following his assignment's completion, the family moved to Alaska before eventually settling in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Sounds American to me. Born on a military base, grew up in the US, not counting early childhood.

Aren't the Japanese somewhat famous for ambivalent feelings on mixed-race children? How strongly would a Japanese audience see her as their athlete?

Benjamin Kam’s ancestors come from both Japan and China. He was born and raised in Hawaii.

Mixed-race, from the mainland, not hapa. Which makes sense because Ellie doesn't look white at all.

AO isn’t even the GOAT of his generation. Crosby is better. Neither come close to the Great One or Mario. Crosby might work his way past Mr Hockey and Orr. McDavid may pass Crosby in the end.

AO was great but pretty one dimensional with limited playoff success. He is more Jagr tier.

I'll acquiesce as I am not that big of a hockey fan.

Female figure skating is irrelevent now because the Russians are essentially banned.

This is what they took from you

I love a woman who will literally just kill me, then dance on my corpse.

Good lord, she's built like a steakhouse but handles like a bistro.

I haven't actually checked but I have a sneaky suspicion a bunch of the Georgians are Russian.

Edit: Lol at a using a song in English from an American band at a 100% Russian event

Random story, I arm wrestled Tanya Harding when I was a kid. It's not like I ran into her in a restaurant, she - for some reason - was hanging out with my family for a whole weekend. I don't know why.

Well, did you win?

I did not, but my 10 y/o sister did...

Smarter to take a dive, I'd think?

It might literally be climate change. Snow and ice aren't omnipresent in most of the country during the winter months anymore.

Snow and Ice aren't omnipresent in winter because people moved south. Houston never had a snowy winter, there's just more people living there now.

  1. The Olympics viewership relies on some degree of nationalism. Nobody watches bobsledding outside of the Olympics. People only care insofar as they’re pulling for Team USA to win as many as possible. Less nationalism=less care
  2. Social media and infinite entertainment options means nothing can ever achieve the cultural omnipresence of things before social media’s explosion. I don’t think there will ever be another Harry Potter.
  3. The athletes are too transparently mercenary. Why was Joel Embiid, a Cameroonian guy playing for Team USA basketball in the Olympics? Because the NBA is in the USA so he lives here for work and would never get a gold solo-carrying Cameroon. Hard to have national pride when Team USA is just a collection of international athletes we paid for.

Because the NBA is in the USA so he lives here for work and would never get a gold solo-carrying Cameroon.

For individual sports, this sometimes goes the other way: many sports cap athletes per country, so you sometimes see athletes that would miss a big national team fly the flag of an alternate citizenship despite training elsewhere just to make it to the competition.

Social media and infinite entertainment options means nothing can ever achieve the cultural omnipresence of things before social media’s explosion. I don’t think there will ever be another Harry Potter.

Correct, and I unapologetically, nostalgically miss this.

I remember how universal things like the Super Bowl, New Year's Eve Ball Drop, State of the Union Address, certain movies (Titanic), and even big T.V. show events (Friends finale) were. It didn't matter if they were high art or "actually good" or not, it was that they acted as a sort of social-cultural barometric calibration. If you weren't talking about Britney Spear's 2001 Superbowl half time show at the water cooler (or in homeroom at school) the next day, you were an out of touch loser. You could shit on it, that was fine, but strolling in and going "Did you see that the Mongolian congress had a meeting while sitting on horses?" was a hanging offense.

Again, I'll admit nostalgia. It just seemed like for these short moments a few times a year, there was a big pause on the randomness of individual hive life and a singular orientation to whatever the "thing" was. People also consumed it fully in real time. No one would watch the State of The Union via live tweets, they'd just watch the damn speech. No live blogging, streaming, or video of people watching what everyone else was watching (watch parties).

I remember how universal things like the Super Bowl, New Year's Eve Ball Drop, State of the Union Address, certain movies (Titanic), and even big T.V. show events (Friends finale) were. It didn't matter if they were high art or "actually good" or not, it was that they acted as a sort of social-cultural barometric calibration. If you weren't talking about Britney Spear's 2001 Superbowl half time show at the water cooler (or in homeroom at school) the next day, you were an out of touch loser. You could shit on it, that was fine, but strolling in and going "Did you see that the Mongolian congress had a meeting while sitting on horses?" was a hanging offense.

Yeah, it used to be that television sets had 2 dials - the upper dial with 3-5 main channels; and the lower dial which was a sort of ghetto of alternative programming. With a setup like that it's easy to see how there were a lot of programs watched by (seemingly) nearly everyone.

From "The Refragmentation" by Paul Graham:

The consolidation that began in the late 19th century continued for most of the 20th. By the end of World War II, as Michael Lind writes, "the major sectors of the economy were either organized as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few oligopolistic corporations."

For consumers this new world meant the same choices everywhere, but only a few of them. When I grew up there were only 2 or 3 of most things, and since they were all aiming at the middle of the market there wasn't much to differentiate them.

One of the most important instances of this phenomenon was in TV. Here there were 3 choices: NBC, CBS, and ABC. Plus public TV for eggheads and communists. The programs that the 3 networks offered were indistinguishable. In fact, here there was a triple pressure toward the center. If one show did try something daring, local affiliates in conservative markets would make them stop. Plus since TVs were expensive, whole families watched the same shows together, so they had to be suitable for everyone.

And not only did everyone get the same thing, they got it at the same time. It's difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. We were literally in sync. [6]

In a way mid-century TV culture was good. The view it gave of the world was like you'd find in a children's book, and it probably had something of the effect that (parents hope) children's books have in making people behave better. But, like children's books, TV was also misleading. Dangerously misleading, for adults. In his autobiography, Robert MacNeil talks of seeing gruesome images that had just come in from Vietnam and thinking, we can't show these to families while they're having dinner.

I know how pervasive the common culture was, because I tried to opt out of it, and it was practically impossible to find alternatives. When I was 13 I realized, more from internal evidence than any outside source, that the ideas we were being fed on TV were crap, and I stopped watching it. [7] But it wasn't just TV. It seemed like everything around me was crap. The politicians all saying the same things, the consumer brands making almost identical products with different labels stuck on to indicate how prestigious they were meant to be, the balloon-frame houses with fake "colonial" skins, the cars with several feet of gratuitous metal on each end that started to fall apart after a couple years, the "red delicious" apples that were red but only nominally apples. And in retrospect, it was crap. [8]

But when I went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found practically nothing. There was no Internet then. The only place to look was in the chain bookstore in our local shopping mall. [9] There I found a copy of The Atlantic. I wish I could say it became a gateway into a wider world, but in fact I found it boring and incomprehensible. Like a kid tasting whisky for the first time and pretending to like it, I preserved that magazine as carefully as if it had been a book. I'm sure I still have it somewhere. But though it was evidence that there was, somewhere, a world that wasn't red delicious, I didn't find it till college.

[6] I wonder how much of the decline in families eating together was due to the decline in families watching TV together afterward.

[7] I know when this happened because it was the season Dallas premiered. Everyone else was talking about what was happening on Dallas, and I had no idea what they meant.

[8] I didn't realize it till I started doing research for this essay, but the meretriciousness of the products I grew up with is a well-known byproduct of oligopoly. When companies can't compete on price, they compete on tailfins.

[9] Monroeville Mall was at the time of its completion in 1969 the largest in the country. In the late 1970s the movie Dawn of the Dead was shot there. Apparently the mall was not just the location of the movie, but its inspiration; the crowds of shoppers drifting through this huge mall reminded George Romero of zombies. My first job was scooping ice cream in the Baskin-Robbins.

Embiid was certainly aggressively recruited by USA Basketball, and likely also by other stars and coaches, to play for the US. USA Basketball was badly embarrassed by the failure of the 2004 team, which lacked star wattage and was badly constructed, and it has since prioritizes having a truly elite team, which is honestly needed amid improving international competition.

On Embiid's end, I mean, he came to the US in like 2012 at around age 18 and was drafted one year later. I dunno if he goes back to Cameroon in the offseason, but the reality of his life for a long time has been being a US NBA player. Are you mad about Hakeem Olajuwon's Dream Team medal too?

Maybe it's different in countries with much richer traditions of winter or snow sports, but from my perspective, at least, the Winter Olympics were never culturally relevant. There is usually a cursory attempt to pretend they matter, but we all know that the real Olympics are the summer games.

Again, might be different in countries that have snow, but here, you will have a very hard time finding people who care, and it has always been that way to my recollection.

I think this is the real answer. The Winter Olympics are fun; skiing and skating and sledding are fun, even transcendent events. But the Summer Olympics has football, running, swimming, gymnastics, fighting, wrestling, is synonymous with sport itself. The Winter Olympics are the off-year minor cycle.

I think most of the hype was always somewhat overblown, but the media got to force feed the plebs sports culture by airing sports nobody really cared about in prime time. The era is passing mostly because with infinite choices, no one is forced to watch anymore.

These sports, such as they are, were available via streaming services at any point. Europe has her own skating championships, America has skating competitions. What ratings do they get outside of the Olympics? It’s not high enough to warrent prime viewing on any major sports network. The same for skiing and curling and snowboarding. No one watches them the 3.5 years between Games. It’s just that for this one 2-week period, the mainstream TV networks are obliged by tradition to air and cover these events as if anyone was breathlessly watching for the results of Team Figure Skating or slope-style snowboarding. Not many people really do, but it was a tradition.

Who watches track and field between Olympics? But Olympic track and field is the centre of the sporting universe for two weeks every four years. The Summer Olympics have a cultural cachet that can make obscure sports matter.

I think it's more that they're the kind of sports that the average person can stomach watching for a few hours once every four years. I'm watching luge right now, but I wouldn't want to watch it every week.

I’m not saying the sports aren’t tolerable to watch, mostly that if the networks were not hyping and force feeding the public on these events, very few people would seek them out. Most colleges have swimming, diving, and gymnastics. Some have fencing. But other than participants and their social groups, no one seems interested. There’s no sell out fencing bouts. Fencers are not hounded for interviews after a match. It’s not a sport most people care about.

I come from a country that's never exactly dominating the Winter Olympics but I always felt they get a tiny fraction of the coverage of Summer.

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