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The Winter Olympic Games are a winter multi-sport event held every four years. They feature winter sports held on ice or snow, such as ice skating and skiing.

Each National Olympic Committee (NOC), as with the Summer Olympics, enters athletes to compete against other NOC's athletes for gold, silver, and bronze medals. Fewer nations participate in the Winter Olympics than the Summer Olympics; the most obvious reason for this is sheer geography, as most of the countries near the equator have no access to winter sport training facilities.

Like the Summer Olympics, the United States has hosted the most times, four, most recently in Salt Lake City, Utah in 2002. France has hosted the Winter Olympics three times. Austria, Italy, Japan, Norway, and Switzerland have all hosted the games twice. Canada will have hosted twice after the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Germany and Yugoslavia have hosted the games once and Russia will host the Winter Olympics for the first time in 2014. Three cities have hosted twice; Lake Placid, United States, St. Moritz, Switzerland, and Innsbruck, Austria

The most recent games were held in Turin, Italy in 2006, and the next games will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 2010. On July 4, 2007, the Russian resort of Sochi was chosen to host the 2014 Winter Olympics. (Credit: Wikipedia).

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Skating on thin ice, by Paul Connolly - 19th February 2006
(Credit: The Age)

Like most Australians without the telltale roof racks on their Subaru Influenzas or Nissan Pejoratives, the only winter sport I regularly engage in is fighting for my life under the crushing weight of quilts and blankets my beloved likes to cover us with on any given night between April and September. Thus, when the Winter Olympics come around, I struggle to confidently tell the difference between a lutz and a putz, or a mogul and Richard Branson.

This, naturally, doesn't stop me being an armchair expert and there I was the other night tut-tutting and scoffing: "You call that a triple-toeloop!" during the pairs figure skating short program. My beloved, whose appreciation of figure skating is, like most women's, hardwired into her DNA, could only shoot me dirties from time to time as if to say, "There's an ice pick in the kitchen and it has your name all over it if this becomes a habit."

Ordinarily, given the choice, I'd have watched the cricket but the ridiculous number of one-day matches these days has devalued the product in my eyes and I just couldn't muster any enthusiasm beyond an occasional score check.

Besides, I realised that in a week's time I'd have forgotten the result anyway, just as I've forgotten the result and teams from every tri-series final ever played in Australia. So to the quadrennial ice-follies it was and why not?

Channel Seven has gone to a lot of trouble and expense to bring us these Games (not to mention kitting out Bruce, Jo, Sandy and Matty in those swanky parkas) so I figured the least I could do was show my support.

While my night's viewing would end with the knee-assailing women's moguls and the impenetrable, jargon-dense commentary of former

Australian snowboard champion Jayson Onley ("She pumps down the bumps with a heli, a double daffy, and, I do believe, a flux capacitor double dibble spank bottom," or something along those lines), it began, as I said, with the pairs figure skating.

And first up was the US pair of Rena Inoue and John Baldwin, who were skating to Albinoni's Adagio for strings; the kind of piece filmmakers use to score images of troops kissing photos of their loved ones before, in slow motion, pouring over the lip of a trench and right into the heavy machinegun fire of the better-positioned enemy.

Oh the humanity! We never got a shot of them but I could only presume that under such a heart-rending dirge the judges were wailing which, I don't expect, is the frame of mind you want judges to be in when they're marking your score card.

If you ask me, it was a major boo-boo on Rena and Stimpy's part. They should have picked something upbeat. Like Queen's We Are The Champions. A bit presumptuous, perhaps, but a darn sight more encouraging.

Next up were the Chinese, Pang Qing and Tong Jian, who were in matching black sequined jumpsuits that could well have been on loan from the Liberace Museum.

Showing how little I know about figure skating couture, Belinda Noonan, Seven's expert commentator, remarked how much she loved the outfits.

Curiously, Sandy Roberts kept his mouth shut, which shouldn't necessarily be taken as consent. He may have been playing with the zipper on his parka.

Like all female figure skaters, Pang was tiny and she had great legs.

"Woops! Did I say that aloud, my beloved?" Murray, our lab-kelpie cross, groaned at that point, perhaps sensing trouble. Anyway, Tong, a comparative giant, scooped her up and hoisted her above his head like a stick of licorice as he one-legged it before flipping her and gently bringing her to earth.

It was a scene of power, grace and beauty and one not lost on me, particularly, since over on the other couch, my beloved was by now ankle deep in a basin of steaming water and sloughing dead skin off her feet.

Pang and Tong certainly gave the judges something to think about before China's Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo took their place.

Unfortunately, while their outfits were equally camp, their double act came unstuck early on. After tossing her in a triple-loop with olives and don't hold the dressing, Shen failed to stick the landing and went over onto the ice.

Showing she has a lot more heart than me, my beloved actually cried out with empathy, "Oh no! That's soooo sad!" I examined my soul for any like-minded sentiment but, I'm sad to say, I couldn't find it. I don't mind telling you, it made me feel like a complete double lutz.

Media Man Australia does not represent Winter Olympics