RICHARD ORD: Forget manic ice polishing, snow cricket is a nailed on Winter Olympic gold for Team GB

BEIJING, CHINA - FEBRUARY 20: (L-R) Hailey Duff, Eve Muirhead and Jennifer Dodds of Team Great Britain compete during the Women's Gold Medal match between Team Japan and Team Great Britain at National Aquatics Centre on February 20, 2022 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

Okay, so it’s called curling, but by far the most interesting part is the frantic floor brushing undertaken to smooth the path of the bin lids they slide down the ice.

One commentator described curling as ‘chess on ice.’ Except, it wasn’t really chess on ice. More like draughts. Well, draughty … it looked a bit nippy.

Any sport which gives you time to stop, furrow your brow and scratch your chin between the action is likened to chess. You never hear of rugby or darts being likened to chess. Or taekwondo.

Chess commentators, all too aware of how visually boring their game is, go the other way. “This chess final is like international tag team wrestling on a square wooden board!” Nice try.

As the humourist Jack Handey once said: ‘To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there’s no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.’

In other words, boxing is nothing like ballet.

For me, however, the champagne moment of the Olympics was not Team GB’s gold medal, but news that a Finnish competitor suffered a frozen penis in the long distance skiing race. He had to thaw his manhood out with a heat pack!

A frost-bitten todger is not a sporting injury you hear much about these days. A cold snap takes on a whole new meaning when frozen appendages come into play!

One gold medal in the Winter Olympics may be a cause for concern to sporting authorities, but it’s no surprise. We don’t really have the weather for winter sports, or summer ones for that matter. Now if we organised an Overcast, Slightly Drizzly Olympics we’d be in with a shout.

I reckon we should try to adapt our traditional summer sports into winter ones. Just like curling is really bowls on ice, how about cricket on ice? A kind of minusTwenty20. It’d be goer, wouldn’t it? We’d just need to rename a few of the fielding positions. Instead of third man, it’d be third snowman, stuff like that, though, given it would be played on ice, the slips could stay!

But after revealing the intimate part the Finnish skier nearly lost to the big freeze, perhaps the cricket tradition of calling ‘no balls’ may have to be reconsidered...