Olympic hockey has been amazing.

But there is no hockey today, at least, hockey games I care about. I don’t watch the women hockey games, because, quite frankly, they remind me of the ‘games’ I desperately try to avoid that go on at Staples Center during intermissions of Kings’ games.

I want to talk about the rest of the Olympic games.

I have been enjoying the Olympics. I try and watch as many events as possible. However, in general, I don’t find myself as riveted as I typically am by the Summer Olympics.

So, I would like to propose some changes of my own to the games at large to spice it up. Bobby already covered women’s curling, so I’ll leave that alone (well, save for one, minor tweak I will get to later).

You might be thinking, “well this sucks, Bobby already did this kind of thing, why should I read more of the same?” Well, I promise you, while Bobby is all wrapped up in skirts and skin and beer, I call for a different kind of vulgarity, the kind all you hockey fans should appreciate:

Violence.

First of all, too many of these events are performed solo. I want more races, I want more direct and immediate competition. Sure watching the slalom or alpine or whatever ski variation or snowboarding is fun, but after 20 minutes of watching virtually the same thing separated by milliseconds over and over, I find myself fast-forwarding through entire events just to see replays of who won.

Put these athletes out there together!

- Let’s start with snowboarding.

I have an image in my head of two half pipes that intersect at the center. 4 snowboarders start simultaneously, one at each end. They make their run, perform two tricks, and then have to safely pass through each other in what I have dubbed ‘the chasm of gnarlitude’. Bonus points are given for taking out another snowboarder, but you get disqualified for stopping your momentum to do so (we have to be fair, right?). Continuous motion is a must. Double bonus points for knocking out a competitor in the middle of a trick.

-The biathlon

It doesn’t need much work. Its tough, its complicated, there are like 700 athletes going at once.

There is one thing it is missing. Wild Animals.

The host country can pick an animal (but Canada has to use a moose), which the athletes must shoot. None of this shooting at targets they never show us jive crap. I want to see what they’re shooting, and I want it to be interesting and make a larger impact than just time wasted on the rest of the course.

There are half as many animals as there are athletes. The athletes must shoot, kill, tie up and drag the animal from the wilderness to the finish line. You don’t bag an animal, sorry. Not everyone can finish. But then again, everyone has to finish. Athletes are allowed to try and steal another athlete’s kill.

There are also bears released to different areas of the course.

Finally, performance enhancing drugs are required for all participating animals.

- Figure Skating.

I really like figure skating. But it does need just a few tweaks.

For the men: stop it. Go do something else.

For the women, well, really, for the judges: Stop scoring so tough. The tough scoring leads to perfectionism which leads to anorexia which leads to smaller breasts. Enough said. Women figure skating + larger tits = winning combination.

I’ll touch on Ice Dancing only briefly. It’s wrong.

You don’t see people Ballroom Dancing at the Summer Olympics, do you? No, you don’t. If Ballroom Dancers don’t get an Olympic medal, neither should Ice Dancers. If Ballroom Dancers don’t get an Olympic medal, but Ice Dancers do, they should be shot. Preferably by the biathlon participants.

- Bobsledding gets an overhaul. It needs it, badly.

Skeleton and Luge dissolve as individual ‘sports’, but those athletes can make a career with their skills in Extreme Team Bobsledding.

8 bobsled courses run parallel for half the track, at which point they merge into a single, slightly larger track. Here’s where the luge and skeleton guys come in. Their respective sleds are lashed together. 2 by 2 they go.

Their tracks start at the point where the bobsled tracks merge. They run next to the other tracks, and just before the end, they too merge with the main, super-track. However, they also end 15 ft above the bobsled course. Lugers and skeletoneriserrrs (huh?) must launch themselves onto the track below in an attempt to take out enemy sleds. Now we are ready for some real fun. I want to see bobsleds jostling for position at 90mph and bodies flying under and over those sleds.

- Alpine, slalom, downhill, moguls, whatever the hell else there is, skiing.

Skiing is pretty cool, but again, outside of the biathlon, cross-country, and the new and exciting ski-cross, skiing suffers from the same problem as bobsledding in that it is technically a race, without the whole racing aspect of it.

So, after watching Lindsey Vonn wipe out in the midst of dense fog, I had an idea.

Skiing events will only be done at night. There will be lights, but they will be positioned so that between the spread of each lights’ beam, there is 20 feet of darkness. Bring in Roger Deakins if you must, since the lighting is imperative.

The skiers all start at once, from an even position. At each dark spot, the track splits. Some paths lead back to the main path. Others go on their own but still end up at the finish line, with longer or shorter routes to get there. Several paths however, dead end. This is up for discussion. I am considering these dead ends leading to giant rubber walls, short cliffs, or just randomly in to the wilderness.

Oh, and there are booby traps. Mostly just nets of thin, white fishing line and trip lines, but occasionally and randomly, some of the polls on the slalom are made of steal. I thought about all the poles being steel, but that’s too easy. Have to keep people guessing. The Olympics are all about the suspense.

- Speed skating.

I love the speed skating. It doesn’t need much. But let’s work Curling back in to the mix, shall we? We shall.

These changes only apply to the gold medal round for either sport. Afterall, we need some athletes to survive.

First of all, the speed racing track needs to be reshaped in a figure 8. In the middle of each oval is one end of the Curling rink. The curlers must time their throws so that the sweepers and the stones miss the speed skaters as they cross the figure 8. The skaters, on the other hand, must try and pick up the curler’s stones. The skaters are actually competing in two events at once, and thus, two sets of medals will be awarded. One for winning the race, the other for knocking out the most curlers by flinging stones at them while they skate. Since fairness is always key, each curling team is allowed, oh, lets say, 13 alternates. Since the speed skaters must keep racing for the entirety of the 3 hour curling match, I’m anticipating a lot of curlers going down.

Just picture the golden moment as the American superstar whizzes by, stone in hand, and the camera cuts to John Shuster, all mic’ed up as usual, just before he is smacked in the head by a flying stone right after he draws, exclaiming “Apolo? OH NO!”

Ok, that was kind of corny. Maybe too corny. But that is why I saved my best idea for last, and also because, this final idea, kind of negates the rest of them.

- A complete overhaul to the winter games.

Forget figure skating, skiing, curling, everything but hockey of course.

Instead, the winter games are exactly the same as the summer games, but with ice and snow instead of dirt, astroturf, sand, gymnastic-mats and water. Let’s see Michael Phelps win a bunch of medals diving into a hole in the ice. Can those lanky African speedsters run so good in the snow? I know gymnastics and bicycling will be awesome on ice. The pole vault? Make sure its thin ice. Curling stones replace the shot put. Fuck everyone in a canoe. The equestrian people can ride the leftover moose from the biathlon. Everything else, Tennis, Boxing, Martial Arts, Weight Lifting, all can stay, so long as they don’t mind slipping all over the place, because there is one final rule for the summer/winter games, no skates or skis of any kind allowed.

And now that I have purged my mind of all things ridiculous for the hour, I’m going to crawl back under my rock until noon tomorrow, at which point I fully expect a thrashing of all things Finnish by our good old (young) boys in red, white and blue.

GO KINGS!… er.. USA USA USA!