Da don't da I'm Mimi Fox and this is the Olympic edition of Hello from the Van. This last weekend was the beginning of the two-week athletic extravaganza known as the Winter Olympics, sometimes called the Winter Games. I grew up around snow and come from a family of skiers and snowboarders, so I love the Olympics. So let's dive into some history of the Winter Olympics together. You are probably familiar with the Summer Olympic Games. They are much larger and much more popular than the Winter Games. The Winter Games are kind of like the kid sister of the Summer Olympics. See, the Summer Olympics covers 32 different events, while the winter is only 16, which makes sense given the fact that only a third of the Earth gets snow during the winter, and all parts of the Earth get the sun. Also, only 10% of the earth has snow permanently, which only a fraction of that is inhabitable by humans, so I mean the math, it works out. The first Winter Games were held in France in 1924, and this happens to be the 100th-ish year anniversary of the Winter Olympics. If you're an older parent like myself, and you remember vaguely that the Winter Olympics and the Summer Olympics used to happen in the same year, still on the four-year schedule, but in the same year, don't gaslight yourself. You are remembering it correctly. You see, from 1924 to 1992, the summer and winter games were held each year in the same year. So you would have Summer Games, later in the year Winter Games, a four-year stint called an Olympiad, and then you would start the cycle over again. However, in 1986, the IOC or the International Olympic Committee decided to introduce this change. The Summer Games are held during the first year of the Olympiad, and the Winter Games are held in the third. It was basically to give them more time to prepare and to keep the enthusiasm for the Olympics going. But enough about the changes to the Olympics. Let's talk about how it has grown. The 1924 Winter Olympics saw 258 athletes from 16 different nations, and they only competed for 48 different medals. However, in comparison, the 2026 Olympics will host over 3,500 athletes from 93 countries, and they will be competing for 195 medals. So yeah, it's definitely grown since its inception. And if you're wondering about the sports, well, for the first 24 years of the Winter Olympics, women were only allowed to compete in figure skating. That changed in 1948 when the rules were expanded to include women in the downhill skiing events as well. I am happy to report that women can now participate in all sports at the Winter Olympics. And if you're thinking, oh gee, I would love to be an Olympian one day, well let's talk about what it takes. According to the official Olympic website, the list of athletes chosen to participate is not made official until the four weeks leading up to the Olympics. And some sports like hockey, athletes can be replaced right up to the start of competition. And what does it take to be qualified? It differs wildly by sport. The most popular winter sport at the Olympics is by far figure skating, followed closely by skiing, sliding events like bobsled, and then snowboarding. But snowboarding is very quickly gaining in popularity. And I'm sorry to our Canadian friends, but according to a January 2026 survey, hockey ranks fourth in winter sport popularity. But what about sports with power? More power. The fastest sport is skeleton bobsled, in which the athletes will go 140 kilometers an hour or 86 miles per hour. Could you imagine driving down the freeway and all of a sudden what goes past you? Oh, oh, it's a person not a bobsled. Now, if you're thinking maybe I could do both Winter Olympics and Summer Olympics, well, only one person has ever medaled in both the Winter Olympic Games and the Summer Olympic Games. American Eddie Egan grabbed a gold medal in boxing during the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, Germany. Then, more than 10 years later, he scored another in the 1932 Winter Olympics as part of a four-man bobsled team. So getting a medal in both the Winter Olympics and Summer Olympics, that's pretty rare. I also learned that there is a new sport to the Winter Olympic lineup this year, and that sport is ski mountaineering, sometimes called schemo. In my quest for knowledge, I went to the official Winter Olympic website to get the definition and maybe some examples of schemo. It was not helpful. The Olympic website gave me some gobbledygook about ascents and descents and backpacks and skins. It was very confusing. So naturally, I ended up on YouTube looking up what is schemo. A huge shout out to the Bulldog Press for their video, What is Schemo? It was very helpful. So let me explain it to you in layman's terms. Imagine the lift or the rope or the gondola is broken at your favorite ski resort and someone says, Well, guess we're hiking. That's basically what ski mo is. You uh you start at the bottom, you ski up the mountain. At one point, you take off your skis and hike up some steps in your snow boots, then you put the skis back on with a cover called a skin and go up some more, but with the skis on this time. Then you take the skin covers off your skis and you ski back down. The year's 1850, you're in the backwoods and you're just you're just skiing for funsies. That's basically what ski mo is. I do have to say, from all of my research, a huge shout out to all of the ski mountaineering Olympians because it looks exhausting. It's not like ski jumping where you just point your skis down and jump a jump, right? No, no, there's no leisurely I'm sitting on a chairlift and there I go. Oh, it looks exhausting. Anyway, way to go, ski mountaineering Olympians. I could never. I am not built for speed, and I am also not built for ski mountaineering. Speaking of chairlifts, I would like to share with all of you my own Olympic experience. Remember how I mentioned that I come from a large family of skiers and snowboarders? Well, somewhere along the way in the hubbub of life, amongst all my siblings, I was never taught to ski, such as the life of a middle child. But I was determined to learn how to ski. So in my mid-20s, I set out on an adventure. And my friend Alan was an epic skier who was willing to come along for the ride. He volunteered to teach my friend Katie and I how to ski together. So we got in his trusty Jeep one weekend and headed up to a small ski resort that was located north of us. Before we went, Alan made sure to outfit us with shorter skis that belonged to his mom. You might have seen them before. They're sometimes called ski skates or ski blades, and they're about half the size of regular skis. Alan was sure that learning how to ski would be easier on ski skates or ski blades rather than full length skis. It was a good idea, but I think he overestimated my abilities. You see, when we got up onto the mountain, we realized that there weren't a lot of people, which was lovely. And I was like, man, it's not very crowded for a weekend. I very quickly learned why. The mountain was sheer ice. I was not learning to ski in soft, powdery snow. I was learning on a mountain face of sheer ice, and it was trial by icy fire. I barely made it from the parking lot onto the lift. I fell down like three times. I really thought, like, oh, here comes the chair. This is how I died. These are my final moments. But we made it to the top eventually, and before we knew it, I had a false sense of ability. I thought, hey, I'm doing all right. I might not die on this mountain today. It was about this same time that we were coming down our second or third run that Katie needed some help with her skis, and Alan stopped to help her. And before I knew it, I was flying down the icy surface of the mountain with no way to stop. There was a bend in the course to mark the end of the run. It was also where the ski lift stopped. I knew I had to try and stop. And knowing that I needed to stop somehow made it worse. In my haste to make the curve, I was suddenly subjected to Newton's first law of motion, in that an object, me, will stay in motion unless stopped by an external force, the mountain. My lesson in inertia landed me in three full rotations of head over skis. And it sounded something like this. I finally slid to a stop underneath the chairlift, to which I heard the above passerby shout, Is she dead? I lay there, laughing at my predicament, which I would later learn. Laughing to yourself in such a situation when you are not moving sounds like crying to the people on the chairlift. Someone even shouted, Somebody call ski patrol! It was about 30 seconds into laying there and giggling that I figured I better at least move a little and shout, I'm okay, before the snow sleds and paramedics showed up. I was, in fact, okay. Not a scrape or a bruise on me, but those skis, yeah, not so much. I still don't know how, but I fully bent a pair of ski skates in half. I still haven't apologized to Alan's mom about that. Here we are nearly 20 years later, and um, hey Mrs. Moore, sorry I broke your skis. My bad. In the past two decades, I still have not had a ski lesson, and I still have not learned how to properly ski. So if you watch the Olympics with great awe, I'm right there with ya. And to all of you aspiring Olympians out there, may your muscles be strong and your consternation stronger. I'm Mimi Fotz, and this has been an Olympic edition of Hello from the Van. As always, it is now time to cite our sources. Today's sources are Winter Olympics Most Followed Sports by Statatista, January 29th, 2026, National Geographic Kids, General History of the Winter Olympics, the official IOC website, Olympics.com, where I got most of my information. And finally, the 1986 article, Olympics to Hold Events Every Two Years, by the LA Times.