Well it's once again that magical time of year where all the nations of the world get together to best each other in single combat, sixteen year old physical specimens get two minutes to display the results of a lifetime of training before falling into interminable obscurity and the entire population of the United States can unite to wave flags, chant "U-S-A" and bask in the glory of a three hundred and thirty-six hour long Bob Costas mega-marathon.

"But Amazing Ben," I can hear you saying, "who gives a shit about the Olympics, except for those tiny countries that have nothing better to do than heap praise upon some idiot villager who proved he's the best in the world when it comes to sliding down a pile of snow really really fast with a couple of plastic things strapped to his feet?" and the answer is me, bitches.  I love watching all kinds of ridiculous sports that you don't normally get the chance to watch, and I especially like watching people cry when they realize that they've spent fifteen years perfecting their ability in a particular sport only to fall and bust ass as soon as they set foot out on the track.  Plus, when the bobsled flips over it's pretty cool.

Anyways, since not too many Americans out there are interested/educated in the majesty of the Olympic Games, this week I'm going to do my best to explain the rules of the various events our countrymen will be competing in and failing miserably at over the next two weeks (or however long the Olympics are).  Not only will I give you the rules for the various sports, but I'll also tell you what's awesome about them and how I would make them more Xtreme if I were the head of the International Olympic Badassery Committee.

The Biathlon

Despite the fact that "Biathlon" sounds like the "Decathlon" for low-endurance loser rejects, it's actually a pretty badass concept for a professional sport.  You see, in Biathlon the goal is to ski from one spot to another, pull out a rifle, shoot a target and then ski to the next target with the rifle slung over your back.  You're graded on your speed and accuracy.

How to Improve It: 

Instead of skiing around shooting some pussy .22 rifle BB gun shit, all the Biathletes should just get helicoptered to some remote ice-covered island equipped only with hunting knives, skis, pistols and a rifle of their choosing.  Then, instead of measuring victory by some stupid stopwatch, they can all just battle it out on the island for the gold medal.  I mean, I would watch that.  They could set up remote-controlled cameras on the island ahead of time to catch all the action as it's going on.  Sure there's the whole thing about anything short of the gold medal results in death, but even without that part the Olympics are the pinnacle of most Biathletes' lives anyways so you might as well go down in a blaze of glory instead of fading into irrelevance like an old issue of People magazine.

Bobsled

The bobsled is a big tube with skis on it that four dudes cram into and then go down a gigantic twisting crazy ass frozen waterslide at roughly the speed of sound.  The goal is to get to the bottom of the track in the fastest time without taking one of the turns too high and flipping the sled over, potentially killing everyone inside it in a tangled mass of metal, snow and limbs.

How to Improve It: 

Bobsled is like NASCAR in the sense that the only reason anybody watches it is for the crashes.  It's freaking hilarious when the sled flips over and all the leotard/wetsuit-wearing helmeted foreigners go flying all over the place like a helium submarine in a Marx Brothers movie and trying not to go out of the track where they can potentially plummet to their deaths.  Knowing that this is one of the coolest parts of the sport (besides the freezing temperature -- ZING!) the IOC should tweak the rules a little bit to give the spectators what they want.  I propose widening the track a couple of feet, adding a lot more turns and then having two sleds take the track at the same time.  They could even put cool Ben Hur-style rotating spikes on the side and try to run each other off the track at two hundred miles per hour or the guys in one sled could try to hit the other guys with wrenches or something during the descent.  First team down wins and goes on to the next round.

Violence rules.

Ice Hockey

I would hope that pretty much everybody knows what Ice Hockey is, so I won't get into the rules.  Basically, it's just a bunch of guys with sticks skating around on ice and crashing into each other like bumper cars on acid while some other guys try to move a puck around for some reason and avoid getting their teeth knocked out by gigantic Canadians.  Usually hockey is pretty cool, but the Olympics usually find a way to take something cool and make it sucky and boring.

How to Improve It: 

First off, in the Olympics you get ejected for fighting, which is bullshit.  I think that the IOC should actually encourage fighting.  They could do it like in Blades of Steel where whoever loses the fight has to go to the penalty box and the guy who wins the fight gets to go on the Power Play.  Then the different countries could stop inviting only the pretty-boy "goal scorers" (read: "losers") and invite badasses like Darcy Hordichuk, P.J. Stock and Peter Worrell to display bad sportsmanship and assbeatery in the name of their country.  I'd watch Olympic hockey if there were kickass bench-clearing brawls instead of crap like "fundamentals" and "passing".

Bonus Idea:  Everyone knows that Olympic hockey has sucked since 1991.  My other proposal is that we let the best players from all the Eastern Bloc countries compete under the "USSR" banner to try and capitalize on that rivalry we feel increasingly more nostalgic about.  Nothing inspired patriotism and Olympic pride like battling the Soviets in team sports.  Sure, we've got the whole "war on terror" thing going on now, but things aren't the same as they were back in the Cold War and since I don't see Al-Qaeda fielding a hockey team any time soon, we should just go with the good ole' Russkies to get our red, white and blue blood flowing again about the Olympics.

Skating

OK.  There are a couple different types of skating, but I usually lump them all together in the same way that I lump all Track-and-Field shit together in the same category when speaking about the Summer Games.  I guess the two main types are speed skating and figure skating.  Speed skating is pretty simple;  you get dressed up in a skin-tight getup, put on a swimming cap and try to skate from one point to another as quickly as possible.  In figure skating you dance around like a freak on ice skates for a while, some asshole judges give you a score depending on how awesome your routine was and then everybody in your home country gets pissed off and claims that there's some bullshit Jewish world conspiracy that unfairly sabotaged their skater's scores.

How to Improve It: 

Speed skating should be more like Roller Derby, where you're allowed to grab the other skaters and pull them back or knock them down.  I'll admit I don't really know a whole lot about roller derby, but when Hot Andrea was watching Rollergirls on A&E the other day it pretty much just looked like a bunch of hot chicks skating around in a circle pulling each others' hair and fighting.  It was strangely arousing in a "slumber party pillow fight" way.  I don't know how you score points or whatever, but the point is that I'd watch speed skating more often if it involved babes pulling other babes' shirts off and maybe making out a little.

Figure skating is a tricky thing to try and improve on.  Obviously, the most difficult thing to deal with is the lack of any quantifiable data from which to gauge a winner, giving you the judges' objective "style" and "technical" scores as the only units of measurement.  Ergo, it is near impossible to devise truly fair way to determine a winner.  I am at a loss as to how to improve this aspect of the event.  It would probably help the sport though if their outfits were a little less fruity and their female competitors were a little less flat-chested.  At least, that would improve MY appreciation of the sport.

Curling is some crazy team sport that involves a large stone and a couple people with brooms.  My knowledge of the sport is more or less on par with my knowledge of quantum physics, and I can speak about as intelligently on the topic as a laboratory rat testing copious amounts of medicinal marijuana and bathing in a tub of acid can speak about the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation to the Union war effort in the American Civil War.

How to Improve It: 

More hot babes carrying brooms, because that's just the way I like 'em.  Other than that, who knows.

Skiing

Skiing is usually the sort of thing that your friend's rich uncle and aunt do over Winter Break in Aspen to get away from their asshole pretentious self-important kids and is rarely something that I would consider hardcore to anyone other than somebody named Chester Worthington the Third or something like that.  However, the freaking Olympics seems to love this shit because there are more skiing events than you can shake a dead bison at.  There's downhill (where you ski downhill), slalom (where you ski side-to-side), cross country (where you ski in a straight line), nordic combined (where you do one or more of the above probably), freestyle (where you do whatever the fuck you want), and probably like eighty other different kinds of skiing events that nobody really cares about, except for Bode Miller and then usually just because he's so wasted all the time that he could be a Professional Street Urinator and he'd still have fun with it.  Usually the rule of skiing is to get to wherever you're going faster than the other jerks.

How to Improve It: 

Three words for the IOC:  Quality over quantity.  Let's cut out some of these goddamned skiing events already, because seriously nobody this side of Switzerland and Norway gives a shit about skiing.  Ooooh, let's strap plastic bars to our feet and slide down a hill really fast!  Please.  I'd be impressed if there were races where guys just threw themselves down a mountain like Buttercup in The Princess Bride, busting ass the entire way down the slope and receiving points for speed and style.  Or if everyone raced at the same time and were allowed to hit each other with their ski poles to knock them off the course like in that Bond movie where he's fighting the guys on snowmobiles or helicopters and punching terrorist skiers in the face with his British fists of espionage.  I'd watch that.  But regular skiing is pretty boring unless someone beefs it down the hill.

Snowboarding

Snowboarding is like skiing for self-aggrandizing punks.  A bunch of self-absorbed fifteen year old poseurs strap a REALLY BIG piece of plastic to their feet and pretend that they're really shitty skateboarders.  Only Americans give a shit about snowboarding, and even then it's only American snowboarders and the retards who enjoy crap like the Winter X-Games.

How to Improve It: 

Bar snowboards from the Olympic games because snowboarding is about as seriously legitimate a Winter Olympics sport as Competitive Ice Pissing is.  Seriously.  I'd rather watch Eskimos go ice fishing or watch Orcas eat Harp Seals than see some punk-ass wannabe tough-guy teenager act like he's hard shit just because he can jump really high on a snowboard and impress a bunch of preteen girls.  MAN I hate those little fuckers.  Either buy a skateboard and learn some real tricks or get a pair of skis and a winter lodge in the Pretentious Quarter of the French Alps because whatever the shit you're trying to do here isn't working for either of us.  The next person who tells me that Shaun White (or whatever the fuck his name is) is a real athlete gets smacked in the head with a filing cabinet.

Awesome, dude!

I separated the ski jump from the other skiing events because it's probably one of the most Xtreme balls-out-to-the-wall-in-sub-zero-temperatures events the Winter Games have to offer.  What you do is ski down this HUGE fucking ramp and see how far through the air you can fly.  It sounds like the sort of thing that started as a fun game in some middle schoolers' backyard and ended up getting blown way out of proportions, doesn't it?  "Dude, I'm going to build an EVEN BIGGER ramp and see how far I can jump off that!", "No way dude, mine's going to be the biggest ramp you've ever seen!  I'll fly like two miles off it!".

How to Improve It: 

By this point in the update, you should have picked up on the trend that improving all these sports relies largely on either making them more violent, more dangerous or adding babes.  Well the ski jump should be no exception to this time-honored rule.

My suggestion for the ski jump is like what they do at those monster truck rallies they show at midnight on ESPN 15 or whatever, where those crazy assholes jump over like fifteen flaming cars through some fiery hoops and shit.  If they added some style and danger points to the ski jump, it would probably be the best sport ever invented.  Make the guys continually one-up each other.  "The Italian vaulted fifteen monster trucks, but now the Dane will attempt to leap SIXTEEN monster trucks!  Now he is calling for them to be lit on fire!"

Man the Winter Games would kick ass if I were in charge.

"Shiiiiiiiiit!"