Lifestyle
What I learned watching every sport at the Winter Olympics
The Olympics are exhausting. Above, Taiwan’s Li Yu-Hsiang reacts after competing in the figure skating men’s singles free skating final in Milan on Feb. 13.
Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images
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Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images
Let us say up front that watching some of every sport at the Winter Olympics is not as challenging as watching some of every sport at the Summer Olympics. The Summer Olympics are a sprawling collection of activities, where you might see horses or swords or boats or surfboards.
The Winter Olympics still feel very rich, but they’re a bit more focused. My own brain roughly sorts them into team sports like curling and hockey, figure skating, running on snow, going down a hill on snow, sliding down an icy track, and flying through the air in much the way I might if I went skiing or snowboarding, except it’s graceful and on purpose, and you generally do not end up in the hospital.
And I found it all completely captivating.
Franjo Von Allmen of Switzerland in action during the men’s downhill on Feb. 7.
Alexis Boichard/Agence Zoom/Getty Images
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Alexis Boichard/Agence Zoom/Getty Images
Alpine skiing: One of my limitations as a watcher of downhill skiing is that most of the runs look similar to me unless someone crashes or unexpectedly departs the course. You could show me 10 skiers going down a mountain, and without their times showing up in green or red, I would have no idea which ones were good or which ones were bad. I would simply say, “Great job getting to the bottom very quickly.” And yet, through the fantabulous deployment of technique, you can earn edging someone out by a tenth of a second. A tenth of a second! Or less!
The slalom events are delightful, because they progress from slalom … to giant slalom … to super-G, which is super giant slalom. There is only one way for this to go, as we all know, and that is in the direction of mega super giant slalom, or M-S-G (which makes all other skiing more appealing because it adds umami flavor). I could try not to say “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh” out loud while watching the slalom events, but why? In 50 years, when we are all watching jetpack slalom, I will still say “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.”
Biathlon: This is the rare sport that seems to me to be fully wicked, for the simple reason that no one should be asked to hit a tiny target after wearing themselves out. Imagine you run 10 miles and then somebody hands you a slingshot and says, “Lie on the ground and hit that 5-Hour Energy drink bottle way over there.” That is unkind. Biathlon also has a rule where missing shots can require you to ski a “penalty loop,” which is the most “coach gets mad and makes you run laps” thing I have ever seen at the Olympics. I admire and sympathize with everyone involved.
Bobsled: Watching a team smoothly (usually) jump as many as four bodies into a very small vehicle — while running — is such a feat that bobsled would be enjoyable if it were only that. But like all of the sliding sports, it also suggests a willingness and an ability to skirt the line between controlled descent and mad careening. I particularly enjoyed the women’s monobob, both because Team USA athlete Elana Meyers Taylor won her first gold at her fifth Olympics and because the word “monobob” (a one-person sled) is delicious and melodic.
Cross-country skiing: I am exhausted just from typing those words. Where I live, we are just getting rid of snow and ice on the ground that hung around for a month. For the first week or two that we existed in its presence, one of my primary goals on any given day was not to traverse it for any reason. At one point, I picked up a heavy sandbag and walked out into my own backyard, laying down a sand track in front of myself, picking my way across the ice rink and making my way to a piece of trash my dog had found somewhere so I could remove it (in case it was something he should not have, like a chicken bone or an ex-mouse; it was in fact a paper towel). By the time I got back to the house, I certainly felt like I had earned a gold medal. What I’m saying is this: I am in awe of cross-country skiers for their stamina, resilience and balance, even though in fairness, they did not have to carry sand at the Olympics.
Curling: Oh, how I love curling. That anyone can slide a 40-ish-pound rock down the ice something like 150 feet and get it to land on a spot the size of your shoe is astonishing. From time to time, a curler makes a shot that seemingly sorts through a clump of red and yellow stones and knocks out all of one color without disturbing the stones of the other color. From 50 yards away! Moreover, you get to hear the players talking. Everybody has mics on, so they chat about what shot they should try, what shot is too risky, what shot the other team will try to make based on what shot they try to make … like baseball, it is meditative, with long periods of deceptive quiet followed by bursts of excitement. Like baseball, it rules.
Figure skating: The best thing about figure skating is that it is beautiful and graceful and athletic, and the programs have become more creative (to my eye) and less staid since I was a kid. Of course, the most difficult thing about it is that a single fall — truly, a single bad moment — can prevent a skater who has worked toward a goal for 15 or even 20 years from realizing that goal, even if it’s a fluke, a one-off, a thing that never happens. NBC’s coverage this year has really focused on sending the camera practically up into the nostrils of a skater who has just had a bad moment so you can have the most visceral possible look at their pain. That does not prevent post-bad-program interviews in which they are asked to explain their pain 30 seconds after it happens, sometimes at the cost of covering people who did well.
It makes sense that U.S. coverage focused, for instance, on the many problems that befell Ilia Malinin in the men’s free skate (resulting in an 8th-place finish for a heavy gold-medal favorite), but there was also triumph for Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov, who won the gold medal after a free skate during which the commentators were explaining that he was not really a medal contender this year, but might be in another four years. I mean, you’ve gotta love that.
Freestyle skiing: There is much to love about freestyle skiing, which crosses over with some of the things to love about snowboarding. There are aerials, there are tricks, and there is the aptly named discipline “Big Air.” But perhaps my favorite event is moguls, where the competitors go down a course that is intentionally made up entirely of bumps, and one of the tricks is to let your knees absorb all the bumps so that your upper body barely moves at all. I think everyone who has ever so much as sprained an ankle watches moguls with astonishment. If I consistently say “whoosh” while watching slalom, I consistently say “ow ow ow” while watching moguls.
The U.S. women’s ice hockey team huddles prior to a match against Czechia on Feb. 5 in Milan.
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Jamie Squire/Getty Images
Ice hockey: I am not particularly invested in Olympic ice hockey, particularly the men’s, because it involves so many professional players who play each other all the time, and that’s not what I’m watching the Olympics for. But I try to catch some of the women’s tournament every time. (It’s perhaps not surprising, given the fact that trying to follow the puck has always kept me estranged from hockey, that I so dearly love curling, which has all the ice and all the precise shots, except with a “puck” that is huge and slow.)
Luge: What an absolutely terrifying notion. Surely the most terrifying sport the Olympics could possibly come up with. Only the security offered by doubles luge, in which two people lie on top of each other, could possibly make this feel like a good idea. Lying on your back? Without being able to see where you’re going? If your kid wanted to go down the driveway like this on a flattened cardboard box, you would probably ground them.
Einar Lurås Oftebro of Norway’s Nordic combined team competes on Feb. 11.
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Alex Pantling/Getty Images
Nordic combined: This is cross-country skiing plus ski jumping. Two very efficient ways to cross snow, although one of them requires a ramp and a tolerance for risk. Here’s a question: Why isn’t this biathlon? This could be biathlon, and what is now biathlon could be the ski-n-shoot. I’m just throwing ideas out there. Innovating. (In all seriousness, read up on the status of Nordic combined and the athletes, women in particular, who stand to lose out based on International Olympic Committee decisions about the present and future.)
Short track speedskating: This is the speedskating I like the best, because I am unsophisticated and impatient. I don’t want to watch each person methodically lay down a time that other people then try to beat. I want to watch a bunch of fearless adrenaline junkies go fast around a track like it’s roller derby, except (mostly) trying not to knock each other over. I want to watch them hurl themselves across the finish line, sometimes backwards.
Skeleton: What’s this I’m hearing? Oh, never mind, this is the most terrifying sport they could have created. If you think flying down the track not being able to see where you’re going is scary, you’ll love flying down the track being able to see exactly where you’re going, because you are leading with your head. There’s been a lot of chatter this year about the way the Winter Olympics, more than the Summer Olympics, feel like they’re made up of various ways to barely not splatter yourself across the host city, and nothing says that to me like skeleton. They really only give you a helmet, and I wouldn’t do it in a helmet. I would require a helmet and a shark cage. And honestly at that point, I would just close my eyes.
Ski jumping: Ski jumping is very cool, and it’s kind of unfortunate that coverage got distracted this year by a story about … well, about the suits that the men wear, and how they’re fitted, and some other things. The amount of time that ski jumpers spend in the air is unfathomable to me, and the fact that they land on their feet instead of on an enormous inflatable cushion seems impossible, but they do it.
Germany’s Finn Hoesch competes in men’s sprint ski mountaineering on Feb. 19.
Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images
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Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images
Ski mountaineering: I have seen only a bit of this sport, because it’s its first year at the Olympics, and it didn’t really start until Thursday. If you’ve never watched it, here’s what it looked like when I watched it: The athlete runs up the mountain part of the way on skis with “skins” on the bottom for traction. Then the athlete takes off the skis and runs up a set of stairs. Then they put the skis back on, run up the mountain on skis the rest of the way, take the skis off, rip the skins off the skis, put the skis back on, and ski down the mountain. The women’s gold medal was determined not by the speed of running in skis, running out of skis, or skiing, but the speed of changing the gear all those times. (This also can happen in biathlon, where sometimes you ski well and you shoot well, but you spend too much time noodling around with your gun.) It is a truly wild sport, and I loved it instantly. Who hasn’t been foiled on a busy day by the inability to get your shoes on and off quickly?
Snowboard: I love to watch snowboarders, because they are so much less likely to look devastated when something bad happens than, say, figure skaters. This is partly because they often have more than one run, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they are less competitive or work less hard. But the culture of snowboarders seems to be a little different, and from time to time you will see one absolutely wipe out, and then hop up and throw their arms over their head in a combination of “Wooo!” and “I’m fine!” It’s good to have fun.
Speedskating: Speedskating is the sport I admire more than love. As with long-distance running, I am brimming with admiration for the people who do it, but I struggle to be entertained as a spectator. (Other people think this about curling, I realize. Imagine that!)
But this is part of what watching the Olympics is, right? You try out lots of sports. You sample some fast ones, some more slow-paced ones, some with short races and some with long races. And you decide: This one is mine, this is the one I’m going to follow. And it’s great.
Even for those of you who do not choose curling.
Megan Oldham of Team Canada warms up prior to the women’s slopestyle final on Feb. 9.
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Patrick Smith/Getty Images
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The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.
At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.
“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.
Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.
But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”
The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.
Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.
With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.
The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.
When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.
“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.
Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)
In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.
“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.
The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.
These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.
Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”
Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.
It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.
“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”
Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.
Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.
“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.
“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”
Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”
Admission: I suffer from eyestrain. Even right this very second. As a reporter working on a computer more than eight hours most days, my eyes often feel fatigued and itchy by evening.
I’m not alone: More than half of the U.S. population lives with computer vision syndrome, also known as digital eyestrain, and nearly 16.4 million Americans suffer from dry eye syndrome. So I was especially excited to stumble on New Vogue Spa, in the City of Industry, which offers a relaxing, if intriguing, treatment called “Eyeball Care” — something I’d never heard of before at a day spa.
New Vogue Spa is an Asian-style spa with Korean and Chinese influences. The spa’s offerings include massages and body scrubs — I was curious about the “Red Wine Body Scrub” — but I couldn’t help exploring eyeball care, which was much needed after my 50-minute drive from Silver Lake. (The City of Industry is about 30 minutes from downtown L.A. without heavy traffic.)
So it came to be that I found myself lying on a massage table, wearing what looked like protruding diving goggles, with clouds of cool, aromatic steam oozing from both sides of it and engulfing my face. A spindly plastic tube extended from my forehead to the “Eye Spa” machine. Serene spa music, a blend of classical piano and loudly chirping birds, trilled in the background as the machine sloshed and gurgled. It felt like lying, creekside, in a spa robe wrapped in a blanket of chamomile and rosemary-scented fog.
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As my esthetician, Jenny Chen, adjusted the eye mask and added essential oils to the mist, New Vogue manager Lesley Xie explained that the 60-minute, $125 Eyeball Care treatment aims to hydrate and stimulate blood circulation in the eye area, decrease puffiness and dark circles and aid eye fatigue and dry eye syndrome.
“It’s really helpful for overall eye health for people who are on computers for a long time or sleep really late or who are reading a lot,” she said.
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1. The Eyeball Care treatment included a mask filled with cool, aromatic steam to help relieve fatigued eyes. 2. Slippers in the Himalayan Salt Room.
Xie said that eyeball care treatments are common in China. When she was growing up in Guangdong in Southern China, elementary school students were given a break every afternoon to perform “eye exercises,” which involved gently massaging pressure points around their eye areas, for 5-10 minutes.
“It released eye stress because we studied from eight o’clock in the morning until almost noon time,” she said. “It was a break for our eyes to prevent nearsightedness and tired eyes.”
New Vogue Spa’s treatment was supremely relaxing from the onset — part Head Spa, part facial, part eye care. Chen began by massaging my scalp for about 10 minutes, as I tried not to fall asleep.
Next she cleaned my face, applied massage cream and gently massaged my face and eye area, manipulating the outer corners of my eye sockets as well as under my brow bones and on my temples. She was precise and firm but careful — as she pressed on the outside corner of my eye, I felt tension draining down the side of my cheek and neck.
Esthetician Jenny Chen conducts “Golden Eye therapy” on reporter Deborah Vankin.
Xie said the massage is based on traditional Chinese medicine, focusing on stimulating acupressure points around the eyes.
“Gentle massage of these areas is believed to help promote blood circulation, relax the muscles responsible for focusing and relieve visual fatigue,” she said. “While it’s not a medical treatment for vision conditions, it’s widely used as a preventative and restorative method.”
The massage was followed by “Golden Eye therapy,” during which Chen used an electronic device on my face with a metal roller ball on it. It uses “ultrasonic vibration technology,” Xie said, to help the skin absorb the applied moisturizing cream and combat eye puffiness.
The main event was the “cooling steam therapy,” which Xie said was meant to be calming and refreshing and help relieve tired eyes. Chen fitted me with what looked like an enormous diving mask that quickly filled with cool, hydrating mist — I felt droplets of water dripping from my eyes and down my cheeks. The Eye Spa machine uses a “cold mist atomization process,” Xie said, “that disperses micro-particles of moisture combined with soothing essential oils.”
At the end of my treatment, Chen gave me under-eye gel pad masks, for added hydration, while conducting one last head massage. She applied moisturizing eye cream, face cream and sunscreen before sending me off.
Dr. Kristina Voss, an ophthalmologist with Keck Medicine of USC, was enthusiastic about the Eyeball Care treatment.
“It sounds wonderful. Anything that makes you feel good, I generally support,” she said. “It sounds safe because they’re not putting pressure on the eye. Direct pressure on the eyeball [is dangerous]. And I’d be nervous if they were putting something in the eye, but they’re not. Steam, or even cool condensation from a humidifier, is effective for dry eye. Massaging pressure points probably doesn’t treat dry eye, but could potentially treat eyestrain or tension headaches that can be interpreted as eyestrain.”
Los Angeles Times features writer Deborah Vankin inspects her eyeballs after her treatment.
Temporary relief aside, however, Voss warned that the treatment is not a replacement for seeing a doctor if a condition is ongoing.
“It’s relaxing and complementary to a doctor’s dry eye treatments — like medicated drops or in-office treatments — but it’s not a simple fix or cure all,” she said. “Ongoing doctor’s care would be important.”
After my treatment, I was invited to linger in the co-ed Himalayan Salt Room and Red Clay Room or woman-only spa area, complete with a warm soaking tub, lounge area and treatment rooms for body scrubs. (I skipped the adjacent New Vogue MedSpa, where you can get botox, dermal filler or microneedling treatments.)
Guests are also treated to a cup of homemade snow fungus tea (made from tremella mushrooms) with a single jujube, or red, date, floating inside. New Vogue makes a fresh batch every morning for guests, simmering the collagen-rich drink so long it becomes somewhat gelatinous.
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1. The Himalayan Salt Room. 2. The co-ed lounge area. 3. The Red Clay Room.
“Snow fungus focuses on deep hydration and skin plumping, while red dates support circulation and a healthy glow,” Xie said, calling the concoction “a warm bowl of snow fungus and red date soup.”
I can’t speak to the medicinal benefits of snow fungus tea. But after a glass of the warm, woody-tasting drink — together with the hour-long tension-taming eye treatment — I saw the world in a whole new way while walking out the door: clearly, from a relaxed perspective and with the bigger picture in focus.
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